This version is pretty much the same as the original, so you can check my review for it here.

Having the game on a bigger screen feels really nice and the game has been adapted well to work without the 3ds touch screen. There are some improvements like a few RNG events not being random any more.

On another hand, the upscaling is pretty disappointing and they did a much better job with RF3S. It's a shame that the best game in the series will not get such a treatment because this remaster came first.

We can also finally use Japanese dubs without hacking a ROM and using a custom 3ds firmware so that was nice.

This game was the biggest surprise ever, a couple of summers ago I was really bored so I started to play lesser known games for the ds (the only console I had at the time), this is how I was introduced to the Rune Factory franchise, and to be honest, I've never been a huge fan, the first two games were alright bordering on boring, and the third was pretty good but still nothing special, when I finally got a working switch system and saw this game on sale I thought it could be a nice couple of hours, something to pass the time even though I didn't expect anything really special.

HOW WRONG I WAS.
This game quickly became on of my favorites ever, the characters are funny and quirky, and their interactions are amazing, but once you get to know them they all have some depth to then, the combat was surprisingly complicated, with all the intricacies of forging and properly equipping your teammates, and the story made me super glad I slugged through the first couple of games since it brings a part of each of their stories into the bigger picture of this world, it's genuinely amazing.

But now that the fangirling is over, this game is far, far from perfect, it suffers of an issue that has plagued the rune factory franchise since the begging, that being that everything is super easy once you get the hang of its mechanics, farming pretty much becomes useless after spring since you'll Ave so much money that you won't know what to spend it all on, and even though combat isn't as easy as previous games, if you have appropriate the appropriate equipment you'll run through dungeons like a breeze, On my replay in the "Hell" difficulty, I was already finishing act 2 by the start of summer.
Another big complain I have is the event system, I don't know who came up with it but they really should have double guessed themselves, locking marriage behind multiple events that appear randomly on random days is devilish, if you want to marry one of the characters that have more than 2 events to their requirements you either have to wait several seasons in game so you can get them or go to sleep for weeks without doing anything and reset when you don't get the event you want.
Anyway, this is a good game, play it if you're into farming Sims and the like.

Huh. Been hearing about this series for many years and I'm surprised to find that it kind of sucks? It has all the trappings that get me addicted and enjoying it, but this is a game that reaches above the sum of its parts, as nearly all of its parts are bad to terrible. This game is just what if Harvest Moon had very mediocre combat and some even more mediocre dungeons and that's really it. It plays more or less exactly like any other Harvest Moon or Story of Seasons game, except everything is cumbersome.

The good part is, well, that it plays exactly like Harvest of Seasons, so you know what you get. Actually, it's an expanded version where everything is an upgradeable skill and you can do everything Harvest Moon can but you can also tame monsters (and bosses) and use them as farmhands. I love that tossing things around is a skill that can level up, which made it fun to drop off every single piece of lumber I chopped, and that you also level up from bathing and that your overall strength and character ability comes from performing various tasks as all the things you can level, which is pretty much every task in the game, gives you a stat buff. Like the most recent Story of Seasons game I played, this title is also quite good at satisfying upgrades that seem to come just at the right time. On top of that, you get your usual relationships and growing crops, plus some dungeon-delving and combat, which should've made this a game for me. It's a game where you make runs in the hostile overworld and some dungeons in order to obtain resources that you then use to craft tools you use to grow better crops. I love that concept and that's what keeps me enjoying the game even though I think the game itself actually kind of sucks.

However, this is the paragraph that I begin with the word "however", and clarify that I think more or less every single individual aspect of this game kind of sucks. It comes together to form an enjoyable whole, but only if you have patience, and lots of it. The big problem is that this game doesn't actually have mechanics for most things you can do, and instead uses a shoehorned version of the dialogue system in place of a customized menu. This means that you give out orders to your farmhands, shop and craft using a dialogue tree, which is as cumbersome and slow as you can possibly get. On top of that, the developers decided on even more cumbersome things like making it so that every single item you can craft gets its own "dialogue tree" so that you can't just quickly and easily check if that new blueprint you got was a short sword or a long sword. Everything you do in the game, except planting crops and bopping enemies on the head with your weapon, is driven by dialogue menus and this game might have the very worst quality of life I've seen in the modern era because of it.

It really doesn't help that the combat is very stiff and simplistic, with lots of annoying choices like allowing you to get fully stunlocked from full health to death with nothing you could do, and that the game is absolutely dripping with horrific anime-style dialogue. From the very first frame, the game is jam-packed with text boxes and anime-style dialogue where characters say inhumanely haughty things in stilted language and where they take like 15 text boxes to explain a very simple concept that most people could've expressed in three words, not three hundred. Thankfully, you can hold square to skip over the inane dialogue that's telling a very shallow and anime-style story, but the unfortunate part about that is that this game is oldschool in that characters will tell you where to go instead of showing you a map marker and so you have to at least half-listen to this moronic chatter. One thing I can say about the dialogue, though, is that if you like this writing style, you will be in heaven, because this game has tons of dialogue and the characters have hundreds of lines. These NPCs do not just say that it's a nice day for fishing, but they have tons of things to say and the character actually grows and expands their dialogue as you keep playing. Probably the best friendship simulator I've ever seen on an ambition level.

I'm going to keep playing to see if I manage to grab some more trophies and to see how this game opens up in the post-game, since the game does seem very focused on just telling a (rather long) story so that it can open itself up. The game does the fake-out ending thing and has already "ended" once for me, and I hear it's going to "end" two more times and then you seem to gain access to some post-game dungeon and such. I've spent like 20 hours on the game but I still can't grow like a fifth of the seemingly available crops, and there are many weapons left to craft, so the game has only begun and I will stick around to see if maybe it gets much better as you unlock more upgrades. If so, maybe this game gets a more positive review. If not, I will have spent 20+ more hours on a game I to be pretty mediocre right from the beginning.

Update: I kept playing and the game does indeed keep growing and change, and I've been bouncing between hating it and being completely in love. I will say that this game really impressed with its hidden content and very much reminded me of how well Symphony of the Night pulled off the same thing. Once you complete "act 2" of this game, the game pretends like it's over and you can just keep tinkering with your farm but, eventually, town events will start happening that seem to indicate a continuation and that's when you unlock two more dungeons, more crops and more gear, and it feels like the game truly opens up. Once you finish the first dungeon, the second bonus dungeon is less pressing and becomes more something you do later on when you know you've crafted enough upgrades, so the game switches from being a dungeon crawler with a little bit of farming to being a farming game with a little bit of dungeon crawling and it finally feels like I'm free to focus on just growing things and getting married and the feeling is more pleasant than I would've anticipated.

I do love and respect all of the ambition that went into making this game a Harvest Moon++++, with added depth in every aspect of the game, but it's hard to get over the fact that the whole game really is built around a dialogue system and how cumbersome everything is. It's not just the dialogue system, but how the coders couldn't figure out how to do things like tooltip overlay info boxes, and for example how you have to equip and use a looking glass to get info about your crops, when a good game released in 2021 would've popped a tooltip as you walked over the crop you need more info about. I'm going to raise this game's score from 2/5 to 3/5 with the comment that, at times, it's a 1.5/5 when you have to deal with the cumbersome menus while crafting 150 swords, but it can be a 5/5 when you're running around and smacking bosses to get their rare drops, tending to your crops or using the impressive crafting system (I haven't even mentioned how the game has a wonderful secret system where you can use an item while forging a new item in order to give the new item the attributes of both and you can also do similar things of finding hidden attributes and features of various materials and plants too). If only the QoL of this game had been higher, with some more modern code designed by programmers younger than 60, this game would've been one of my favorite of all-time.

The story was so barebone it hardly motivate me to grind through all the daily farming and basic ARPG combat after 20 hours of playing (1/3 of the playthrough). I loved RF3 many years ago but perhaps I have outgrown this kind of farming sim. It could have been my favourite game if I were to play it 20 years ago. But now it just feel like a mobile gacha game with more intensive grinding and chores. I felt exhausted. Maybe RF3 was really just better than this sequel, but it was too many years ago so I can't really judge.

Do you want combat with your farming sim? Oh- no? What about a fantastic story and complex characters? Yes? Then what are you waiting for?! Go play this game! You'll live with the combat, I swear you will, just play on easy mode, it's fine, everything's fine--

Okay, the combat is actually a lot of fun. I'm just not an rpg kind of person. But- you know what I am? A farmer! (A virtual one, anyway.) And after a certain point- you kinda want some combat to break up the monotony, y'know? It's actually... really fun! And you really feel a sense of accomplishment like you would upgrading your farm.

But this review isn't going to focus on the combat. Not even the farming. No. Where Rune Factory 4 shines- is its characters. Its story.

This is probably the best farming sim you're ever going to play. And it's because of the characters. The sheer amount of dialogue and events the developers put into this game far exceeds what you'd typically see in a farming sim. Quite literally, years would pass in the game and I always ran into some new event or a new dialogue I'd never seen before. The townspeople of RF4S feel more like actual people rather than NPCs.

I wish more farming sims put as much care and love into their characters as much as RF4S has. This game has spoiled me rotten and I can't help but feel disappointed a little when I'm playing a farming sim that isn't this one.

It's well loved for a reason. If you've never played a Rune Factory game before- this is the one to start with. The best of the best the franchise has offered.

⭐️ Review: B - Tier ”Good”

Not the greatest Rune Factory title but really good regardless. Still the best farming franchise by far (looking at you Stardew Valley 👀).

This game actually inspired me to start reviewing and making tier lists back when I completed it. Wrote an entire 30+ paragraph review back then but now it’s lost to the world. Just know that I really liked the story, the dungeons, the characters, and the music, but at the same time, all these things are just not quite good enough and could use some work and polish.

Completed on hard difficulty and it was kinda fun grinding between each area. The weapon and armor system is too complicated and bizarre though, probably the worst part of the game.

Farming loop / reward system is as perfect as a multi-decade farming sim franchise can be. Furniture, housing, and decorating is a bit bare bones. Marriage is good and I’m glad they have the alternate gender outfits so you can have the
allusion of an LGBT+ relationship.

8/10

100% = ☑️ | Soundtrack: ”not rated”
(good ^ enough) - don’t want to marry every single character and do all the newlywed modes.

I love Rune Factory. Let's put it this way, the first time I tried playing, I didn't pay too much attention nor understand what was going on.
I gave it another shot, a fairer one, and I can say for sure, Rune Factory is amazing. I cried so much, I felt so deeply for all the characters, the mechanics are so fun, the grind doesn't feel too grindy, the dungeons are exciting! The bachelors and bachelorettes are so amazing!

Rune Factory 4 is the best of all rune factories, and it set a precedent for me to play all past (and future) games of the series.