Well it is a shame this thread has been neglected for so long. But no longer!
Today's Review: A Video Game! (I know, it is amazing that I'd review something people might care about)
Type: Video Game
Name: Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon
System: Nintendo DS
Genre: Farm and Combat Simulator
Score: 6.5/10
IntroFor those who have never played a
Harvest Moon video game, I know what you are probably thinking; "What the freak? A Farming video game? Damn it, Thought, you tricked me! I thought you might review something interesting." Well I assure you, the Harvest Moon series may well have one of the stupidest gaming concepts ever, but the implementation is utterly wonderful and addictive.
The series has now split into two basic forms: classical
Harvest Moon games, which are pure farming oriented, and
Rune Factory games, which add in monsters and fighting. I may well review one of the fine fine classic Harvest Moon games, but today Rune Factory is in my spotlight.
For those of you who know nothing about the series, I'd recommend taking a look at the Wikipedia article for it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_Moon_(series)
To sum that up, the premise is that the PC must manage a farm life. Tend to the field and animals, befriend villagers, and eventually get married. Sound exciting? It is, actually.
But Rune Factory tries to spice things up; Caves have been added (not to be confused with mines in the rest of the series) as have monsters. In addition to growing crops and talking to villagers, you can now explore caves and battle nasty monsters, which give various rewards, so you aren't doing this just because.
For one, crops can be grown in caves (yeah, the game doesn't really get the whole "plants need sunlight" thing) year-round. Each cave has its own season-like weather, so spring crops can still be grown even in the winter (if it is in the right cave).
For another, Monsters serve as more than just punching bags. If you befriend them they can either fight with you, help you out on the farm, or give you produce. Befriend a chicken-like monster and you can get eggs from them; befriend a cow-like monster and milk is your for the... um... milking. Certain "magic" using enemies will water your crops, others will harvest those crops. And so on, and so forth.
GameplayThis game tries, it really does. The designers broke with the theme of the series to add Monster fighting, which is a nice touch and as presented adds flavor to the game. They also gave the player more things to do; now the player can
forge their own tools, brew up their own medicine, craft fancy trinkets that provide various benefits, cook up a storm, gather lumber, tend to crops, fish, mine, tend to animals,
hunt for treasure, battle monsters, explore caves, make friends, and eventually get married. The red type activities are introduced (to my knowledge for the first time) to the series in Rune Factory.
As I said, the game tries... but it doesn't quite make it as a great game.
A primary problem is in the game’s economics. Too much investment (time, money, lumber) in this or that for too little return, and those investments/rewards aren’t well spaced. For huge portions of the game, the player really has no goal to work towards.
For one, the villagers are painfully static. They have around 5 or 10 lines in the entire game, but the only way to build friendship with most of them is by talking to them. Thus, the player gets to see the same lines over and over and over and over and over and kill me please and over and over and over. This is a large step down from the "Heart Events" of earlier Harvest Moon games, such as
Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town, where every character had at least a few special interactions with the PC as they got to be better friends (and a larger, but still limited, repertoire of things to say). Really, text doesn't take up that much room on a cartridge. Not having more dialogue variety is a crime.
This flows over into when the PC gets married (if he gets married, of course). All the potential ladies in the game are static as well. There is little difference in their behavior as their relationship with the PC develops and once they become his wife they are further reduced. Marriage is a goal in the game with no reward (and punishment instead)! The two can have a child that is also utterly personality-less. Woo wee, a craptacular sprite wandering about with no purpose whatsoever.
Farming is alright, but oddly not as interesting as older iterations of the series. All crops are available at the start of the game and can be planted in any season (through use of caves). Unlocking crops in other games was fun, and limiting each crop to one season helped make each season seem special (with the possibility of growing them in additional seasons being restricted, in those iterations that allowed it, to a late-game ability). Now the only thing that feels like it changes between the seasons is the music and how often lumber appears on a field (lumber including stumps... which can so obviously appear overnight ... ). It is nice to be able to walk over crops (in past versions the PC could never step over sprouts or weasel between corn stalks), but the images for crops are amazingly uninteresting as well. Everything is friggenly huge (a single strawberry is about half the size of the PC), which only helps the player see how dull those graphics are. And grass can no longer regrow. Because apparently the PC cuts it, then pulls out the roots. Or something like that.
Farm animals are a little more interesting, as they have to be befriended from caves, but this also means that classics like Chickens and Cows can't be obtained till around a season or two into the game. They can't be sold and never produce offspring. One doesn't need to feed them, one just has to make sure that there is food in stock. The monsters get it themselves, apparently. Most monsters will never see the light of day again, as well. They stay in their barns (known as "Monster Huts") unless they are specifically accompanying the PC or helping out on the farm by watering or harvesting (and even then only for a few hours). On the plus side, there are 7 barns total with about 4 levels total, each level being able to hold 4 monsters. A Player can have 112 farm animals then... with nothing to do but brush them (but once they are happy with the PC, brushing has no effect) and collect goods from them (once every 4 days). They never get sick, they never die; in the end they are little more than machines.
Unfortunately, a lot of the added activities are reserved for fairly late in the game as well (presumably to pick up player interest after farming and monster cave exploration have begun to grate). This is because it requires the player to expand the PC's house... using 200,000 gold and 2,000 Lumber. In past games, the cost to expand a might have been 100 or 200 lumber and maybe 10,000 gold. Which points to a problem of this game; inflation. Crops bring in more money, but everything costs more too. No worries, mining can bring in 10,000+ gold in a single day (because, for some reason, silver is more common than anything else).
Mining is more interesting because it is in caves, but less interesting because it is too rewarding. After a little mining, one never needs to worry about money again (rather than being a supplement to farming, it replaces it).
Forging weapons and tools is a nice idea, but it requires that expanded house so by the time the player can forge tools, many of them aren't really all that important anymore. Forging weapons is nice, but it requires killing countless enemies in order to gather items that rarely drop from them. Thus a player might spend an entire game day in a cave killing monster after monster to get the item that they need to forge a new sword... which helps kill monsters easier. woo. Crafting and Brewing things are in the same situation. Thus the time that had been spent farming (or mining) suddenly goes to killing monsters.
That wouldn't be too bad, if the monsters were interesting. Most of them spawn 1 at a time, so the PC can never be swamped, and they are so easy to take down that the PC will usually not even be hit once. Even at that, if the treasures were easier to find (especially for the number of items one often needs from a single enemy), it wouldn't be so bad. But if one wants to do most of the new activities, one has to grind monsters like some bad MMORPG.
ConclusionReally, I've just covered what is wrong with Rune Factory. All in all, it is still a very fun game and can easily net 10-20+ hours of fun before the flaws become truly annoying. Part of the annoyance, however, is that it all could have been done much better; we've seen better from the Harvest Moon series. This game tried to be innovative, and it was to an extent, but it kicked its own potential in the nuts and called it a day.
I would highly recommend it to a fan of the series, or to someone who tried a Harvest Moon game before but was bored by day 2. But if you want to be introduced to this wonderful series, you are better off with an older game (
Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town probably being the best so far, but I have high hopes for
Rune Factory 2 and
Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness).
Rune Factory still has one of gaming’s stupidest concepts (farming), it seems to contradict this concept by adding in fighting, but true to the Harvest Moon series, it pulls it off in such a way that it is still fun (for quite some time, at least).
I highly recommend at least trying it. Meanwhile, I will dream of a day when they make a Harvest Moon game that fulfills its potential.
