Cozy games have been infiltrated for awhile now and it sucks. Woke people saw Harvest Moon and were triggered to find out that A Wonderful Life was about being straight, getting married, and having a family.

The only franchise I care to support going forward is Story of Seasons, made by the original Harvest Moon creators and developers Marvelous. They've kept DEI relatively low key and seem to have had their hand forced to include it since it isn't just a localizer issue as their most recent game has DEI in all versions, including the Japanese version.

The DEI in question is pronouns in character creator, same sex marriage, and the ability to wear clothes made for either gender. So you as a guy can wear a dress as an example. All of these are optional and thankfully none of that carries over into the story. The new Grand Bazaar Remake has an incredibly well written Farm Board director that is a Black woman and she has a Black brother that looks after her and worries that she works too hard. Both are amazing characters that I really like.

I'm hoping that DEI is phased out and these options follow it cause from what I've seen, Marvelous are not keen to adopt the annoying Western style Dei where they hamfist it everywhere like in Veilguard