Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon is a spin-off for the DS that lives up to it's prior releases. It contains many bea

User Rating: 6.5 | Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon DS
Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon is a spin-off for the DS that lives up to it's prior releases. It contains many beautiful women each, ironically, of marrying age. And you, the newly come to town bachelor and gentleman-farmer. You awake at the doorstep of one of these young brides to be, and she worries over your health and unfortunate amnesiac condition. Her kindness peaks when she offers you the title of Master of her over run farm, a generous but double-edged offer, for the farm will take most of the remaining year and some after to efficiently clean. From then on, the care of this farm is your foremost duty, at least, until you get the pass to your first cave. The pitying townspeople will donate items to aid you as you continue on your way including: axes, hammers, and fishing rods for your pleasure and disposal, which can later be upgraded. Farming is made essential to the game whether you'd rather mine or fish or not, since the mayor will only grant you passes to the landscapes many caves if you have plowed x-amount of your farm. These caves become the link to the main plot line of the game. Once granted your first pass, the game play truly begins.

The Battle System: While the Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon has the new and well raved about battle system, it is a lack luster smash and run type of game play. Even in boss battles you get two strategies , hit and run, or if you can take it, smash and bash. They say they incorporate magic? But by the time you get to the boss battles your certain to be out of rune points (the magic points - MP - equivalent) unless you truly have the patience to rerun the cave everyday to water the crops your planted in the lower floors of the dungeon until their prime, to create your acclaimed "rune factories", which consists of the power of your planting. The Graphics: The beautiful backgrounds and animation live up to expectations... but the CG loses where the anime gains. Many of the miniature CG people look like apes when you don't talk to them up close. This quite takes away from the beauty of your chosen wife. But as much as there is lost in the CG, the animation is beautiful and makes up for what the pixelated screen shots cannot provide.

Monster- Farming System: You can finally get cheap labor forces, monsters, to water, harvest, and condition your crops! But then... what is there left to do in Harvest Moon...? You still must personally tend to your crops planted in caves, but after that you'll find the townspeople have lacking conversational skills as it seems. Most are only programmed for 2 or maybe 3 different lines which they will repeat almost everyday without fail. You'll find that you bed early, when you are out of caves for exploring.

And that covers the points of the game which most people are looking out for the most. This game nearly deserved a seven, but after so much anticipation one is left to a monotonous world that cannot be cured.