You awaken to find yourself in an unfamiliar village with no memory of who you are or how you arrived. Mist, a beautiful young woman comes to your aid and helps you start to build a life for yourself on a farm. Till the land, grow crops, raise animals, catch fish and battle monsters!
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Oh Rune Factory, my darling, my dearest
You gave little 9 y/o me the biggest headache
I don't know what made this game so tough for me but I never managed to make it past the very beginning of the dungeon and thus barely made any progress overall
It was still fun though and I fondly remember the beautiful background and sprite art that gave this game its charm
You gave little 9 y/o me the biggest headache
I don't know what made this game so tough for me but I never managed to make it past the very beginning of the dungeon and thus barely made any progress overall
It was still fun though and I fondly remember the beautiful background and sprite art that gave this game its charm
Way better than Stardew Valley in every way
i appreciate this game a lot for what it is, but at the end of the day it isn't a very enjoyable experience in my opinion beyond checking out how the rune factory series got started
I don't know how people here specifically feel about this, but I saw it compared to Rune Factory 3-5 a lot. As if a game with different structure and gameplay loops is objectively worse when it's like comparing oranges with apples. It's another farming-social sim with a focus on dungeons but it plays very differently.
It's really rough, but it has a lot of charm and the "finish dungeons in one go or redo them" design and fields in dungeons being literal "rune factories" so you don't run out of energy and needing to plan around planting and harvesting crops in dungeons to finish them is great.
The only bad thing in this game to me is that farming is too simplistic and the villagers don't have enough unique dialogue. If you liked the newer Rune Factory games, I urge you to give this a go also. As long as you go into it not expecting it to be rune factory 4, it can be a lot of fun.
It's really rough, but it has a lot of charm and the "finish dungeons in one go or redo them" design and fields in dungeons being literal "rune factories" so you don't run out of energy and needing to plan around planting and harvesting crops in dungeons to finish them is great.
The only bad thing in this game to me is that farming is too simplistic and the villagers don't have enough unique dialogue. If you liked the newer Rune Factory games, I urge you to give this a go also. As long as you go into it not expecting it to be rune factory 4, it can be a lot of fun.
It's very obvious that this was the first game in the formula and that they didn't really have much of an idea how to design this
But even then, how does this game make you wait for winter to enter dungeon 5. Like seriously this is so obviously a terrible idea I don't know how it got through. Dungeons 6 and 7 also have this really bad room in both of them where you have to fully grow a crop in them lmao, have fun going back and forth in the dungeon for days instead of exploring further. It's obvious they did this because they wanted to implement the farm part further but it backfired hard
You also can't forge until you upgrade your house, which takes a crazy amount of grinding for the necessary wood. The best strategy for this is to not clean up your field on purpose to let garbage pile up in it even though the game tells you to keep it clean (cleaning it all is even the requirement to marry Mist!). And if you used the dungeon 5 winter wait time to grind this out (not like there's anything else to do) and forge weapons and especially armor with what you have available at this point, it turns the 4 remaining dungeons into complete jokes. And that's a shame because something I will give this game is it had a really interesting dungeon formula, basically scouting out all of it and then destroying all the monster spawners in the same run. It even has an upgradable sleeping bag so you can sleep in the dungeon to do that, but it's never necessary even when the game isn't a joke. Thet said, the combat is really barebones and one-handed swords are pretty much the only viable weapon type (due to shields, every defense point matters a ton) but hey
Characters have way, way too few lines that they repeat every time you talk to them, which makes it pretty hard to really care about them and go through the effort of raising friendship sadly, that was a big problem in this game, 2 and Frontier
With all that said I still do have respect for what this game started and experimented, but it's hard to really recommend it unless you want to experience every game in the series
But even then, how does this game make you wait for winter to enter dungeon 5. Like seriously this is so obviously a terrible idea I don't know how it got through. Dungeons 6 and 7 also have this really bad room in both of them where you have to fully grow a crop in them lmao, have fun going back and forth in the dungeon for days instead of exploring further. It's obvious they did this because they wanted to implement the farm part further but it backfired hard
You also can't forge until you upgrade your house, which takes a crazy amount of grinding for the necessary wood. The best strategy for this is to not clean up your field on purpose to let garbage pile up in it even though the game tells you to keep it clean (cleaning it all is even the requirement to marry Mist!). And if you used the dungeon 5 winter wait time to grind this out (not like there's anything else to do) and forge weapons and especially armor with what you have available at this point, it turns the 4 remaining dungeons into complete jokes. And that's a shame because something I will give this game is it had a really interesting dungeon formula, basically scouting out all of it and then destroying all the monster spawners in the same run. It even has an upgradable sleeping bag so you can sleep in the dungeon to do that, but it's never necessary even when the game isn't a joke. Thet said, the combat is really barebones and one-handed swords are pretty much the only viable weapon type (due to shields, every defense point matters a ton) but hey
Characters have way, way too few lines that they repeat every time you talk to them, which makes it pretty hard to really care about them and go through the effort of raising friendship sadly, that was a big problem in this game, 2 and Frontier
With all that said I still do have respect for what this game started and experimented, but it's hard to really recommend it unless you want to experience every game in the series
Fuck Misty Bloom cave. Outside of that a very competent game, most NPCs are pretty grounded and the combat-farming gameplay is well done.