izigame.me

The source of my earliest childhood trauma.
They mostly brought over improvements from the Special Edition and helped streamline the "life" aspect of A Wonderful Life. It isn't nearly as memorable or eventful as, say, Friends of Mineral Town, but they tried so many weird concepts that I want them to continue trying to iterate upon. Your life in general is the focus, and they change the dynamic on you with every successive year.
However, there are only 10 days in a season, as opposed to the normal 28. This means that A Wonderful Life is not only much shorter, but paced in a way that you have to keep up with more routines. AWL is more grounded than the usual expected formula, similar to Save the Homeland, and some of these aspects are what Stardew Valley wound up remixing in lieu of a more cutesy fairy-tale story that games like Magical Melody or Tree of Tranquility tended to hard-focus on.
The Story of Seasons version of AWL does cute-ify the original experience quite a lot. I don't exactly mesh with the oversaturated look, same with Stardew, but SoS: AWL has the unfortunate issue of having this annoying green filter over everything. Many of the animations from the original AWL were removed or truncated for ease of access, which is a welcome change, although I wish they just made the original animations faster instead.
I love the character re-designs, and I love the way they improved upon the original, taking ideas from every previous version of AWL and modernizing it. You can romance any partner regardless of gender identity, the ability to decide your child's gender was also simplified from the original. Instead of the original GameCube game having 10 years, this version takes the Special Edition's approach and truncates it to 6 years with an endless mode at the end of the main storyline. You can obtain a handful of additional outfits throughout the game, and if you're ever stuck, they explain about 90% of the game verbosely through an in-game guide. The last 10% were fairly obtuse mechanics that required Google to solve, but could ultimately be discovered organically by the remainder of individuals who still take notes.
Most importantly, while this version is basically a port of the Switch release, it runs significantly better than the Special Edition while keeping the quality of life, which makes this arguably the best version to play. If you really want to stick to tradition, the original GameCube game is never far away, but this is a welcome (see: stable) substitute for one of the most notorious versions of the game, which is the PS2 Special Edition.
I hope they continue to try out this "life" style of Story of Seasons, or at least remix them in ways that work with their new style, because AWL left a huge impression on me as a kid that no other farm life RPG has done since. Every new game tries something new, but sometimes it's good to go back to what was done before and find out what would work for future games.