Note : RF4S is a slightly better version especially because it's not on a 3ds, but if you actually want to play on a 3ds then this version is perfectly playable. If you can, pick a ROM with Japanese dubs.

There are a lot of times I look at farming games and think they look painfully bland. You position yourself in front of a farming tile, you press a button and watch a one second animation during which you do nothing, something happens -either you plant, you till or gather something-, you move forward in a janky manner and do the same thing in the next tile of your grid based farm.

Then you have Rune Factory 4. When you water your plants, you have to move along your land to progressively water it. You can press the tilling button repeatedly to till forward. You can even charge your tools like you would charge weapon. It FEELS like a game, it feels GOOD. Even when you pick up items, there's this positive feedback because there's a weight to the item, it's not just a long animation where your character picks up something and you're stuck watching, unable to move. Hell you can even pick up multiple items at once and stack then on top of your character. All of that is what makes the farming in this game really good to play.

When I first started this game, I thought it would be an average mix of anime tropes, maybe some JRPG elements and farming. I wasn't wrong but the game also delivered so much more. Sure, the story and the characters are very tropey but at the same time, the game makes such a smart use of dialogue that I've never felt like a game was this alive. The amount of dialogue is insane and even after a hundred hours of playing, you'll still have new things to read. Every day, every character says something new. They also talk to each other. There are also random events in town involving them and there are multiple dozens of them! Quantity over quality is not something I usually appreciate but RF4 is perhaps the only game that manages to deliver something out of that. The end result is that the tropey characters have a lot of nuance, personality and that ultimately I learned to love them and to not mind living alongside them. This goes to the point that I just cannot stand most similar games because none of them offers one tenth of RF4's writing. I've really seen no other game with such an organic town and characters and it doesn't help in making me enjoy other farming games.

RF4 is a great farming game, a great slice of life game and it's also a great adventure and RPG. Not only does it combine aspects of management and adventuring rather well, but the game also has a lot to offer. Crafting and cooking are core mechanics and the crafting in this series is perhaps the most in-depth I have ever seen in any game, with an enormous amount of freedom given to the player when it comes to customisation. You can use any item in the game to craft and almost all of them have a specific effect. You want to make a weapon with every single status effect? You can. A giant spear bigger than the screen? You can!!!

The freedom given to the player is a huge part of why this game feels fun. There are tons of ways to break the game, for example you can throw bad food at enemies and it'll affect them the same way it affects you. Have a rotten food which deals -50% HP? Throw it at a boss and see what happens, the developers did not prevent you from doing so! Every time you find such a thing, it feels rewarding and at the same time not out of place. Ultimately the game is a lot about minmaxing, grinding and optimizing things but in a fun and stressless ways. It's not a hard or frustrating game and yet it still is quite fun to break.

Despite its limitations, the game also offer a great amount of exploration in the style of ALTTP dungeons, with every screen usually being a separate map area. The world is huge and there are a lot of dungeons, enemies, items to be collected... Did I mention you can capture every single enemy and use them as fighting pets, mounts or have them work in your farm? And if you don't like them, then bring up to two villagers alongside you in battle, you can even equip them as you wish!

The game has a ton of such systems and you never get bored. Grinding is a core mechanic and everything in the game has stats, from walking to sleeping to taking a bath. Sure they don't amount to much but it's still great hearing the skill up jingle every time you level up your walking.

Perhaps what I like the most about the game is its ergonomics. Teleport home whenever you want. Need something? Press L1/LB to open your quick menu which allows access to your ENTIRE INVENTORY within seconds, seriously no other game can rival this. It feels like you don't waste a single second and everything is as optimized as it can get. It feels... great! Truly, one of my favourite games of all times.

Et si l'attente en valait la peine ? La première fois que mon frère m'a parlé de ce jeu, de son histoire et de son gameplay, je croyais au mieux à une exagération. Mais non, tout était bien là. Une magnifique aventure, niaise comme Inazuma Eleven sait nous les faire, qui m'a franchement bien plus accroché que ce que je n'aurai cru. Je me suis même étonné à vouloir de nouveau optimiser mes joueurs, équipes, techniques et équipements. Reste à tester le post-game. Comme quoi cette licence est vraiment faite pour être jouée pendant les vacances.

This game is on the precipice of greatness, the biggest fault it has is that the game engine is extremely buggy and unpolished. It's understandable why the game had to use a separate engine as opposed to a romhack to support all the new mechanics and the massive number of unique fusions, but knowing that doesn't make things like the non-looping music, awkward and often broken overworld interactions, and just generally crusty gamefeel any more palatable. If it can ever achieve a state of being relatively bug free and having a presentation level on par or even close to the GBA/DS games it stands a very good shot at becoming the best Pokemon game in general. Despite the issues I mention here it does seem to integrate the Pokemon battle mechanics totally faithfully, or so close that any differences will be imperceptible to the average player.

Onto discussing the game itself, the premise is right in the title. The game adds a unique mechanic allowing you to fuse any combination of any two Pokemon (of the 400 or so present within the game currently). You can choose one as the head (which inherits the special and hp stats) and one as the body (which inherits the physical and speed stats) meaning you've actually got two possible fusions for every single combination.

The degree of freedom this gives you with mixing and matching types, stat allocations and movepools (the fusion combines the moveset of both its parents) is staggering. You can created extremely overpowered or hilariously pathetic Pokemon. Of course enemy trainers are packing fused Pokemon as well, so you'll need to put thought into your combinations to compete with their juiced up super-teams. Fusions and de-fusions are performed via an in-game item which costs a small sum of money, about as much as a pokeball. Enough to make them cheap and plentiful, but also to make you consider what you're doing before you go combining willy-nilly, at least until late in the game when you're swimming in cash.

It's really hard to state how much this adds to the play experience, combining one of the best features of Shin Megami Tensei with Pokemon's own roster of cool and unique designs. For the first time in a long time I found myself going out to just catch as many Pokemon as possible in the Safari Zone so I could experiment with all the cool combinations I could make. Now all those box Pokemon aren't just filler destined to waste away collecting space and could easily become a staple of your team by combining them with one of your lead Pokemon.

The game world itself is primarily a recreation of the Kanto story from the original Pokemon games with the new mechanic integrated slightly into the plot. While there are occasional instances of what I would call 'romhacker humor' peppered throughout the game it was thankfully kept to a very minimum amount. No edgy OCs or cursing here, just the basic Gen 1 storyline with a few small adjustments to the story to accommodate the fusion element. This is great since it lets what this fangame does well, the awesome fusion mechanics, shine without distracting from them or bloating its scope with a whole new region. There's also a very healthy postgame that sees you traveling through Johto and the Sevii Islands that's well worth playing. It's a game rich with content.

Speaking of one of the real hidden gems of this game are some of the NG+ features unlocked only after completing it. The player unlocks a whole host of options for customizing their new playthroughs. You can play through a version with remixed or randomized enemy trainers, change the mechanics to exclusively utilize double or even triple battles, carry over your box Pokemon and other cool features. The double battle option is especially welcome from me as someone who vastly prefers that format over singles, though it has an unfortunate bug where it has to be set back to 2v2 in the options again every time you face a trainer who has only a single Pokemon. This is rare enough to not be a major issue, but it's another thing which highlights the game's lack of polish and how it can occasionally hinder the player experience.

The game boasts over 170,000 Pokemon fusions and about 1/3 of them have unique, custom made sprites. These are made from community members and vary in quality, but even the worst of the custom made ones tend to be decent and the best of them are fantastic and inspired designs that wouldn't look out of place in a mainline game. Often times it's worth it to fuse Pokemon just to see the cool combinations you can get, and the game has the decency to highlight which fusions have custom made sprites with a green silhouette when you're mixing them in the menu. Unfortunately the quality of these makes the ugly, auto-generated sprites many of them still use stand out even more. But with more being added every day and close to 60,000 already done it's not unreasonable to think one day we could see the whole Pokedex, from start to finish, all with beautiful custom sprites. It's a really amazing community effort!

I think this game is absolutely worth playing for anyone who likes Pokemon or even just monster collecting rpgs in general. If you can deal with some jank go and play it asap, if not keep a close eye on it as the project has so much love put into it already I can't imagine it won't be getting updated and having its issues ironed out for a long time.

Positives:

- Adorable take on the ARPG genre, making it a very good start for (young) people trying to get into the genre.
- Exploration is highly encouraged, and also very rewarding (as indicated by me accidentally stumbling across the most powerful weapon halfway through the game).
- Good gameplay combining magic and melee, with monsters indicating how they will attack.

Negative:

- Slightly overdoes it with the meta/fourth-wall breaking content, especially to build up a sequel.
- Until learning the ability to fly, getting around takes a bit too long.
- Mew Game, the post-game runs with additional modifiers, could have been made a bit more appealing by removing or allowing the player to skip cutscenes.

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''If someone came up to me and asked to be introduced to the ARPG genre, particularly the ones where looting dungeons for epic gear is involved, Cat Quest would definitely be one of the first games I would recommend, no matter the age of the player. The difficulty and plot are both very appealing for the younger audience, but none the less appealing for veterans like me. Not always the biggest fan of fourth-wall-breaking/meta content though, but it's a nitpick more than anything else. This game does have a big obsession with summoning demons from circles and all that though, not sure what to think of it. Almost feels like I'm playing Fullmetal Catchemist or something.

All joking aside, Cat Quest's more simple approach to the genre works to its advantage. There aren't classes to worry about, no skill trees, and no specific gear attributes aside from their stats--although a shop to randomly gamble for gear is still available. Instead, we're just playing as an adorable cat who has access to a sword and magic, clears every dungeon they can find once for the treasure chest inside, and helps out the inhabitants of this world with quests in each town. All done on a cutesy hand-drawn world that the cat can freely walk around on. It does take slightly long to get around though, specifically until you get an upgrade later on. But it was a really fun- and rewarding world to explore, as indicated by me getting some extremely powerful gear pretty early on that... kind of trivialized a lot of the game but hey, I felt rewarded!

The combat, as mentioned earlier, revolves around a sword and magic. The combat itself is pretty satisfying with the enemies indicating their attack and the cat being able to roll away at all times. While I limited my magic choices to only a few, they made combat a lot more fun as well due to having to balance mana usage. The maximum amount of mana never increases, and you have to physically attack the enemies to get mana back. A pretty good combat system that I feel I had to master for the optional challenge runs, also called Mew Game, where you had to limit yourself by not using gear, permanently being level 1 etcetera. Really enjoyed that mode too, though it would have been even better if it was made a bit more appealing by removing cutscenes and such, because those took up a surprisingly long time of those runs.''

Wanted to like this but it has a ton of issues. The visual clarity is really awful, like the art is nice but there's a ton of spots where it's bad for gameplay, with stuff like instant death spikes that are hard to see. All the platforming feels really bad for the jump height like they just didn't test it or something, lot of stuff just a few pixels out of reach which even if intentional feels bad. The save system is horrible, the save points and item system are obviously dark souls inspired but every single other game like this saves items you pick up or doors you open even if you die, but in this if you don't manually select save at the bonfires it erases all that. I got to a boss and opened a one-way door next to it that led back to the save, and I thought I was still fine but it closed that and took away all the items I got and made me go through the whole area again. Also there's a ton of instant-death spikes and stuff which feels like a terrible fit for this kind of game, especially with the bad platforming and huge knockback when you get hit.