Reviews > Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon
(DS) 7.5
September 25, 2007
Harvest Moon fans, rejoice. With Rune Factory, Natsume has taken the classic and oft-repeated Harvest Moon gameplay and added on a combat system and dungeon crawling adventure, but the game remains, first and foremost, a Harvest Moon title. You will still find yourself conserving your energy, looking for a wife, and tossing seeds with wild abandon, but with plenty of extra-curricular sword-swinging thrown into the mix for good measure. How does the dungeon-crawling fare in that context? Well, it actually fits quite well.
In Rune Factory, rune points have replaced stamina, and every action you take depletes them. Once you've completely depleted your rune points, you begin to deplete your hp with varying consequences. The rune points can be recovered, however, both through potions and rune pieces that you locate while farming. The rune pieces are intrinsic to combat, refilling your rune points, and you need the money you earn from farming to keep yourself equipped, but the combat also serves to provide new areas to farm and manpower, or monsterpower, rather, in the form of captured enemies that will go to work on your farm for you. Thus, you have your yin and yang of combat and farming, both vital to the game. That being said, the farming goes deep, this time around. Rune Factory pleasantly surprised me with an almost overwhelming set of opportunities to improve my crops, creating ever larger ones, upgrade my weapons, create jewelery, and trade everything over Wi-Fi.
The story of the new game opens somewhat nonsensically, with your main character appearing on the scene of a farm, sans memory. A young girl hands you a tool and you get right to work. In some circles, we call this exploitation. Graphically, the game holds up quite well. The flat backgrounds that you navigate with your 3D character, and the character portraits look quite good. The game is musically impressive, and happens to sport limited voice-overs this time around, usually a welcome addition.
An upgraded but still recognizable Harvest Moon, Rune Factory may not impress or convert those who've shunned the series in the past, but it offers enough new elements on top of the traditional gameplay to recommend itself to the uninitiated and the Harvest Moon fan alike.
Visuals – 8
Audio – 8.5
Control - 8
Story – 5.5
Fun – 7.5
Value – 9
Style – 7.5
*Brian Schulman - Associate Editor, GameWad.com
