Rune Factory 3: A Fantasy Harvest Moon Review

I think the team behind Rune Factory 3: A Fantasy Harvest Moon believes that you, like the lead hero, have amnesia. It does little to change the franchise, but the open-ended, always-just-one-more-thing-to-do nature of Rune Factory 3 made me, a newcomer, an addict. If the last two games didn't leave you feeling burnt out, or if you've never played a Rune Factory title and enjoy some mindless repetition, the third iteration might be your ticket to farm toiling paradise.

Like the other Rune Factory games, your hero wakes up in an unfamiliar village, is taken in by the town, and is given a place to live and a farm to tend. Slowly over time the character builds relationships with the townsfolk by doing simple quests for them, using the money and objects he acquires to build up his farm, go hunt monsters in the wilds, and slowly trigger events to regain his memories. Of course the higher you level and find out about your past, the more the world opens up for you to explore. You can also do a wide array of tasks on the side, such as foraging for raw materials, fishing, cooking, and forging.

Rune Factory 3 has a lot of skills to learn and activities to do, but it can easily become tedious since you have no one telling you how to spend your days. Sure, you can toil away on your farm, but you can also spend your time gathering supplies, cooking, fishing, befriending monsters, exploring the countryside, or even just talking to the people in the town (or any combination thereof). Every second of real time is a minute in the day, so you have to manage your time wisely to get the most done. Farming is the main activity you'll be doing though, and is strangely engaging. It might sound ridiculous, but it's satisfying to till the soil, plant the seed, water the plant and then reap the rewards. It's easy to lose hours just maintaining your farm, and it's gratifying to take an unruly patch of land and turn it into something profitable.

Unless you're doing a request for a person, you generally have no goals in place save what you set for yourself. This left me with an almost overwhelming amount of options about what to do, but in general I ended up doing a lot of the same tasks day after day in order to level up my character's stats. The farm requires a lot of work and supervision, and if you want to build up any skill (pretty much every activity has its own leveling up system, right down to swinging a hoe or using a water can), you have to spend a lot of time repeating that same activity. Your character's energy is only finite, though, meaning that you'll only be able to pack so much work into a day before it's time to rest. Much like an MMO it's strangely engrossing for much longer than I expected, but can become tedious after an untold number of hours.

Even when my time with Rune Factory 3 became stagnant and boring, though, I always found myself coming back for more after a short break. The truth is that the array of activities you can do are just enough to make sure that it's rare you feel like you've accomplished all you've meant to, or that you don't have something you could be working on. You get bored of farming, you go slay monsters or develop your spell casting abilities. You get bored of that? Well, you just go make friends with someone in town or do some fishing. The constant leveling of specific skills keeps giving you just enough of a carrot on a stick to keep you playing and feeling rewarded for the most part. Sure, parts of me would have loved a more concise, story-driven experience, but the repetitious, choose-your-own-adventure nature of Rune Factory has drawn me in and made me burn out my real thumbs to develop my virtual green ones.

The only thing about Rune Factory that could really help out the franchise is to take some of the core mechanics a little deeper. Every activity comes down to simple, repeated action: combat is usually just mashing a single button, farming a repetitious series of button inputs that involves little to no skill, etc. I don't think the franchise needs to get so deep that it's not easily approachable, but a more complex battle system that involves skilled button combos, or maybe the ability to raise and slaughter livestock, could add another dimension to the formulaic gameplay.

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