Rune Factory 3: Harvest Moon Reloaded

Rune Factory 3 may have perfected Harvest Moon.

Okay, so it may be a little too early to say that yet - I've only put in about 10 hours or so - but so far I am very happy with what I've played of Rune Factory 3.

The Rune Factory games (all with the subtitle "A Fantasy Harvest Moon") take what you do in the mainline HM games (farm and woo ladies) and add dungeon crawling into the mix. You wouldn't think that would work, would you? And I would argue that it hasn't, at least until now (although I've only played Frontier, the Wii version - not the two previous DS games).

The Wii version had way too much crappy voice acting and loading to be much fun; you see, I'm used to the quick loading of Harvest Moon 64 and Harvest Moon DS, the two HM games I've spent the most time with. When you throw load times in, the game just becomes unbearable. To be fair, the Wii version wasn't too addled with load times, but any at all really kill the experience for me. There was also a heavy emphasis on "Runeys" - I didn't play the game long enough to really tell what they were about, but a cursory search of the internet has shown that they govern how fast your crops will grow - for example if you don't take care of a certain area, the Runeys will die out there, causing your crops to grow much more slowly. Likewise, if you take really good care of an area, more Runeys will come and will cause crops to grow really fast there. A lot of the complaining about the Rune Factory games that I've seen on the internet has focused on the Runeys.

I have not seen one Runey since starting up RF3 - nor have their "effects" ever been mentioned in the game. In Rune Factory: Frontier, the Runey's were explicitly explained in-game; here, they bear no mention.

But the sheer amount of things to do in RF3 boggle the mind. Every day, there are "Requests" posted to the bulletin board in town that you can do to help villagers out, to both get items or gold from them and to raise your relationship with them (there's also requests sent directly to your mailbox, which seems kind of weird to me - why are there two places where you can get jobs?). If you don't feel like helping out villagers, you can go into one of four (that I know of) dungeons to kill stuff and get even more items, such as gems from mining spots or loot drops from your enemies. The fighting is real time, and you have many different weapons to choose from - I am currently using two swords, because you move fast and, as the flavor text so aptly puts it, "overwhelm your foes." You gain experience by fighting, but you don't merely level your character up this way - pretty much everything you do in RF3 will level up.

From what I've seen, you can level up walking/running, fighting (each individual weapon type has it's own level associated with it, i.e. swords, dual swords, spears, etc.), fishing, cooking with hands, cooking with a knife, love (which is leveled up by dealing with villagers of the opposite sex), friendship, sleeping (you level this up by sleeping, and when an enemy puts you to sleep, a higher level of "sleep" skill will wake you up faster), farming skills (such as your skill with a hoe, scythe, watering can, etc.), and so on. I'm positive I haven't even seen everything you can level up in this game yet. Also, another thing to note is that when you level something up, it not only boosts your capability with that skill, but it also usually adds something to your stats - whether its HP, RP (Runey points, which is basically your tolerance for fatigue), Strength, or whatever. This comes in handy, because you typically don't have enough time each day to do a whole lot of farming AND dungeon diving (its typically either dabbling in both, or one or the other). When you farm a lot, for example, your strength and RP will go up, allowing you to both farm better, and last longer in the dungeons.

There's a lot to find in this game, it seems. As for the characters, they are mostly one-note so far - they don't have the depth I'd like to see, but at least they aren't flat out boring like the characters in Frontier seemed to be. Certainly the script in the game is nothing to write home about, but it is passable (it isn't annoying, at least, which is appreciated).

As far as graphics go, I like them, for the most part. There are a lot of villagers, and I kind of wish my choices for chasing ladies weren't so varied. I may change my mind on this later, but there are too many girls to keep track of, and a lot of them look similar (at least they do on the map - their personal portraits that come up when you talk to them look quite different).

The sound isn't as iconic as in Harvest Moon 64, but it isn't bad, either.

One of the things I discovered just before starting this blog is that I apparently can ask anyone in the village to accompany me into the dungeons - if I can get some of the girls in town to come fight things with me, my love for this game will probably skyrocket (assuming they have passable AI, of course). You apparently can turn into a "wooly" too, which is a sheep-looking thing. I just unlocked the ability to do that, and I don't really know what it's for, yet.

I stayed up later than I wanted to the other night playing this game, which historically has been a good sign for me loving a game, because it means the game has its hooks in me. We'll see if they stick...