A new take on Harvest Moon with a more defined, albeit contrived, story.
Now, years later, I find Rune Factory for the DS. It's a new take on Harvest Moon. The game starts off with your character wandering towards a small town when he passes out next to a house. The girl from the house comes out and helps you, though in ways one would never expect. First she hands you a hoe, then a watering can, and then she finally gives you some bread and water to revive you. The beginning is strange, there's no doubt about it, but I'm not sure how else they could have gotten you to become a farmer without a long opening cutscene.
In addition to your normal farming, you can enter caves around the area where you can fight monsters and do additional farming. Each cave has a season that it is like and there you can grow crops year-round. Eventually you also receive a glove for taming monsters, as they are the new livestock in the game, so to speak.
I admit that towards the end of the first year I had progressed far enough through the caves that mining was a much better source of income and I easily made several million in the game without doing any more farming. I would perform the requirements for getting into the next cave, but that was it. Many of my crops were left untouched once they had sprouted to provide me with additional Rune Points while I cleared the caves.
Though the game has an end to the story, you can continue to play the game to do more farming, forging, and foraging (amongst several other things) and get every item in the game. You also gain one other female to court and a few more crops to grow once the story is finished.
It was a bit frustrating at the beginning of the game, but eventually it became quite easy. The forging remained challenging to the end trying to get monsters to drop the items you needed, but overall the game was fun. If you aren't a fan of collection, action-RPG, and Harvest Moon games, you may not like it, but I enjoyed my experience and found the ending fairly gratifying. I look forward to the next Rune Factory game.