Rune Factory 3

Harvest Moon was one of those games I actually got to play as a kid. It's really silly on reflection to like a game about farming. Which is all it is. A game about farming. That's it. Nothing else. You farm. Oh, and in the new ones you can marry someone and have babies.

So I guess it was really logical that they tried to make farming a little more exciting by making Rune Factory. Which is basically Harvest Moon, plus monsters and dungeons. And Rune Factory is great, it has a story somewhere buried within it. But the problem which Harvest Moon and Rune Factory had was well... the other characters were bland, the stories weren't too interesting, there was nothing really driving the plot on but yourself. And it is still farming. Not that I hate that, I love the farming.

But Rune Factory 3.... is possibly the best Harvest Moon type game I have played yet. Now not to say I don't like the other Harvest Moon's. I love them all. Even if the possible husbands or wives are bland, and after a while it gets repetitive and boring. They're all good games, except maybe Rune Factory 2. I never got far in Rune Factory 2, mainly because you couldn't pick up things and put them back on the ground. (like logs and stones. not fruit and veg in your hands.) That never rubbed the right way with me, when no other Harvest Moon game does that.

Two of these games came out in the last year, (perhaps longer, release dates for these games take an age to get to the UK, I had to get an early copy off eBay for Rune Factory 3.) But these two games are really different. Now maybe Rune factory 3 is better because it was developed by Natsume, and the newest Harvest Moon: Sunshine Islands, was made by Rising Star games.(I guess Natsume sold it off after Island of Happiness?) But I don't think that matters. Sunshine Islands is good in its old schoolness, plus something a little new and different, but ultimately it's just Island of Happiness again, but with islands instead of new bits of the land being unlocked (plus you can't develop the islands... okay... maybe Island of Happiness is the superior...)While Rune Factory 3 is trying to be a lot more different.

First, it is actually trying more in this game to move the plot a long. There is no running around trying to find it. You have a goal, you reach that goal, you are given a new goal. Plus you now can do missions. Which really is more fun, and also drives on the story. The characters have more than 2 lines per season. so they actually seem like proper characters. And you have a better reason to go around town talking to them all, because you're not getting the same repeated line every single day. If you do the side missions you can actually end up developing the characters. So there is more than a point to doing them than just getting the rewards. The whole game just seems so much better because the amount of detail which seems to have gone into the other characters in the game. Plus the festivals are just so cute. They're more like mini-games than anything. The fishing is more challenging. You don't have to spend so long in the morning farming, so you can actually spend a good deal of time in the dungeons rather than wasting your time everyday watering your field.

I'm always saying to people who are new to these games "If you can make it through the first month, you'll really get the game." because generally it can take that long to really get into it, because you spend so much time trying to make money. While it's the same, you have so much more to do, that the first month is fun. It's genuinely fun. And maybe that is because all the characters in it are fun to talk to, the missions add more to the game. Farming doesn't dominate your time.Of course, I might play through to winter and find that their talk does eventually get repetitive. But so far there is enough variation of things the characters say that you don't notice so much, and it doesn't become grating. I did find it annoying at first that the clock still runs while you're in buildings. But, really, it doesn't matter. It's probably there to balance things out considering how quick you can get farming done. If you play this game and are wondering what I'm talking about because watering your crops takes you half a day. Then I say you should experiment with your watering technique. ;)