Another in my continuing series of unedited, stream of consciousness, awful game reviews. Do enjoy.
Harvest Moon: Rune Factory starts off as another iteration of take-it-or-leave-it franchise. You show up on a farm, memory-less, and start farming to make some cash. Plow enough plots and you'll get an invite to a nearby cave, where the game reveals itself to be a Rogue-like in Harvest Moon clothing. The farming aspects are robust enough and they're well integrated into the gameplay; In the dungeons, you're required to cultivate plots of crops to generate rune points, a kind of stamina/MP surrogate. Even at the highest level you'll rarely have enough RP to conquer an entire dungeon without cultivating crops, so the game requires you to dive further and further into the dungeon, creating your own checkpoints as you go along. This is where things get a little wonky.
It would be unfair to say that the dungeon elements are tacked-on. They're necessary and they move the plot along well. But they introduce several orders of complexity that make the game either too difficult, too confusing or both. Consider: In the first cave, you're given a glove that can train monsters. In order to train monsters, you need a monster hut. To build a monster hut, you need 1000 gold (Easy) and 100 wood (I can't even find my wood count in the menus, but I've been chopping twigs since day one (I'm on Day 32) and I still don't have 100). The quickest way to get wood is to chop tree stumps. To chop tree stumps, you need a level 3 axe. A level 3 axe requires 4 pieces of iron, 4 pieces of silver, 1500 G and 4 days. To get the metals, you need a hammer. Smashing rocks for minerals costs RP, RP I need to water the crops in the dungeon and chop wood for the Monster Hut. There's a web of interdependence here that makes it impossible to have it all and that's great, but it can also make progress incredibly slow, especially without convenient menus.
Weapon balance is also way off. I recently sold a 2 handed sword to buy a 2 handed axe, roughly 4 times as expensive. Not only is it not 4 times as good, it consumes more RP and makes my decent into the dungeon that much more difficult. Why is a weapon 1/4 of the price twice as good?
Maybe the game streamlines a bit as I go on, but it's been frusturating so far. There are just a lot of little things that slow down progress- a good thing- too much. Previous Harvest Moon games have suffered from a dearth of content- By the 2nd or 3rd season, you've seen it all and it just becomes a race to streamline your routine. Rune Factory has an opposite problem. Too much content unveiled too slowly. It begs for multiple save slots (It has 2). In the first month alone there are 3 competitions, none of which you could hope to win if you focused on the dungeon stuff.
In short, if you like Harvest Moon, this one has a lot to offer you. If you like Rogue-likes, you may be put off by the Zelda-lite combat and lack of combat options. But if you were looking for more to do than just water crops, this might be it. I'll update more when I finally train some monsters. I'm getting an Azure Dreams vibe and that makes me giggly inside.
