Erasing all the miss-doings that were Harvest Moon DS, Rune Factory is a proper HM game for the DS with some new twists.
The story of Rune Factory is you’re a lost, amnesic guy who stumbles into town only to collapse outside the young lady, Mist’s house. She eventually gives you a hoe and watering can only to realize that you need food and water. After talking she offers to give you her far that she doesn’t use so you can live there and take care of it. While being shown around the farm, a monster pops up and attacks. After you defeat it with your hoe, Mist informs you that while people use monsters to help them farm, this is the first time she’s seen monsters attack, and so starts the story.
The game play of Rune Factory is half standard Harvest Moon, half dungeon crawler. While you’re not tending to your garden, making money, and socializing with the townsfolk, you’ll be in a cave battling monsters with swords and shields. The fights are standard, swing a sword, drink a potion, cure some status effects, kill some more. The only thing you need to make sure of is to destroy the spawning machine, if you don’t monsters will keep coming at you. You also need to watch your “Rune Points” which is this game’s stamina. If you rune of Rune Points, your health will start to decrease when you swing a sword, hammer, axe, ect. The way to replenish these Rune Points is to go into a cave before hand and plant some seeds. A fully grown 3x3 square of vegetables will have a little glowing ball over it, this is a rune, by running into it, and it replenishes your RP. So basically you will need to tend to a few patches of vegetables in a cave before you can fully run through without compromising all your RP. The new game play additions to this Harvest Moon game, definitely creates a fresh experience in order to compliment the classic Harvest Moon game play.
On a technical side, this is possibly one of the best looking DS games I’ve played. The colors are vivid and the settings are imaginative. The only problem I have with the settings is when it rains, the sky is still blue as if it wasn’t actually raining.
Not all is good in this game though, but the positive thing about that is they’re not big issues. Interaction with the townsfolk is very minimal. There aren’t a whole lot of gifts you can give them early on being that most of their “liked” gifts are made by cooking. This makes it sort of hard to woo a potential wife early in the game which some Harvest Moon players are pretty used to. When you do have a wife, a year later you will get a child which is another Harvest Moon staple. The bad thing about your kid is the fact that he doesn’t grow at all. He will never crawl, he will never walk, and he just stays in his mother’s arms the entire game. Some festivals also suffer from lack of interaction being that you can’t do a whole lot of stuff at them. The soundtrack isn’t up to par in my book, which is Harvest Moon 64’s soundtrack, but we’ll let that one slide.
Overall, Rune Factory is a great game which should be played by all Harvest Moon fans and all RPG fans.