Innovative, but stays true to Harvest Moon. Definitely one of the best, if not the best of the Harvest Moon series.
Rune Factory is a Harvest Moon game at heart, but with some major changes. The two most significant changes are:
1. A completely new battle system has been implemented. This system allows your character to fight monsters in caves, gaining EXP, unlocking new weapons, new caves, new monsters. To understand this change, you must break down each individual portion. The caves in the game are unique to this game, basically they are equivalent to both your farm land and mine from previous Harvest Moon games. Riddled with monsters, you must fight past them to get to your precious resources, which is absolutely necessary for the game. Although you have a perfectly safe farmland already nearby your house without the need of fighting monsters, farming in caves have several advantages. The most notable one being that caves have a constant temperature, which allows users to farm a single crop for the entire year regardless of the season. The second advantage is that you get a lot more land to farm on if you expand to the caves. Monsters inside these caves are also very crucial. You can obviously fight these monsters and gain experience and gain access to bigger and newer caves. But a core part of Harvest Moon has always been taking care of animals, which has been replaced in Rune Factory to monsters. You can tame monsters inside caves, once tamed they can act as workers, doing simple jobs like harvesting, watering, etc, but they can also act as livestock, such as "sheeps", "cows", "horses", where you can get milk, ride on monsters, etc to make more money and make your life easier.
2. The second change in Rune Factory is the new artwork and design. No longer is the game plagued with the cartoon like graphics featuring cute and fat animals, it seems that they took a somewhat more realistic design. Japanese anime seemed to be the theme of the characters, however the polygons themselves, and the background and the rendering of the atmosphere, it seems as though the core of the game is a whole lot more realistic. It makes this game very different from the other Harvest Moon games, and has altogether a different feel.
Basically the game feels just right. For example, the controls seem to be hit dead on, they ditched the stylus and went all out with the D-Pad. Your character is moved by the D-Pad, while most of the actions can be done with ABXY or a combination of ABXY and L and R. After the first "day" inside the game, most of the controls become second to nature.
The core of the game is still very similar to Harvest Moon, there are still shops, the local church, the girls whom you will marry, etc. Basically you still need to farm, make money, get gifts and befriend everyone in the town and get married. Sounds fairly generic, but it does work amazingly well, there is a reason why Harvest Moon has had so many installments in their series.
Overall, the game is great, it is exactly the change needed to bring Harvest Moon back to life, and put a fresh spin on things. It seemed like an ambitious change, but it was well worth it because they have a great game on their hands.