Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon Review
By Jonathan Hunt - Posted Oct 05, 2007Ye Olde Farmers, 'tis time to take to the fields, harvest well and slay ye dangerous cave beasts in Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon for the Nintendo DS. X-Play's got the review as well as some Japanese raddishes for your pleasure.
The Pros
- Quaint 3D graphics
- Solid, yet familiar Harvest Moon gameplay
- Combat works well
- Collecting monsters is fun
The Cons
- If you didn’t like the series before, this won’t help
- Very slow-paced at the start
- Never really speeds up much
It’s hard to believe that a game revolving around farming has managed to become successful beyond a cult following, but the Harvest Moon series has been doling out good clean, farming fun for years now. The latest in the line, Rune Factory: a Fantasy Harvest Moon, gives the series an enjoyable and appreciate minor overhaul on the DS and proves that RPGs about farming can still be cool.
Plow!
Taking the series into a more fantastical setting, Rune Factory offers up a few differences from the past games, yet never loses sight of the heart of the series. The set-up is certainly familiar. Your alter-ego wanders into a strange fantasy town called Kardia, on the verge of exhaustion and with a case of amnesia. You meet a young, eccentric lass named Mist, who offers to give you a place to stay and a plot of land to farm.
The game starts off simply and slowly. You’re given radish seeds to grow, which take five days, after which you sell them to buy more seeds. You’ll have to manually plow the ground, remember to water everyday, and eventually create your own hybrid vegetables, which can earn you big bucks.
The basic structure of the game will be instantly familiar to fans of the other Harvest Moon games, and the pacing is decidedly slow. This isn’t for twitch gamers and seems slow-paced even by normal RPG standards. If the gameplay weren’t so polished, and the world not so rich with things to do, Rune Factory might be nearly unplayable. Yet, it works. It’s fun, casual, innocent, and if you can stick with the gameplay, uniquely interesting.
Attack Spade! Go!
New to the series is combat. As you earn more farming respect, the mayor of Kardia will give you passes to explore the monster-filled caves surrounding the towns. Combat is real-time. You walk up to a monster and bash it with your weapon, usually a farming implement. To keep it all kid-friendly, the monsters are really spirits and defeating them will oddly make them like you. These happy fiends will help out on the farm and can also accompany you in adventuring and combat. Exploring the caves is vital, since these dungeons also contain resources you’ll need to forge new tools and weapons, and even possess specific micro-climates that you can use to plant specific types of crops.
The other big change is the look of the game. Rune Factory trades up to decent looking 3D graphics with excellent landscapes and decently detailed polygonal characters. The game definitely has a more traditional Japanese RPG look, more reminiscent of Final Fantasy-type games.
Dirty Fun
Overall, however, even with the revamped visuals and combat, Rune Factory is still very much a Harvest Moon game. The new elements all mesh perfectly to provide a more well-rounded farming RPG experience, and, as odd as that sounds to non-fans, this is an excellent DS adventure.
Review by: Jason D'Aprile
Video Produced by: Jeanne Goshe
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