Rune Factory 3: A Fantasy Harvest Moon

Screenshots

Notes

As a farming game, it's doing the usual harvest moon stuff. It captures that addictive gameplay loop where you want to play one more day. One thing that's weird is that the 4 main dungeons in the game are locked to a specific season each, so you can use the farming patches in them to grow any plant at any time. Your main farm and the passage of the seasons become a lot less relevant as a result.

As an action RPG, it's also fine. Fast paced, can be a little grindy when you enter a new area with a big step up in difficulty but basically good. You do get stunned on hit but don't always get iframes which means you can get wombo comboed to death, which can be frustrating.

Combining them works OK, they do feed into each other reasonably well and it definitely engages me more than a straight farming game usually does.

Shops seem to be open pretty consistently just whenever which makes shopping a lot less annoying than in some farming games.

Decent story about a human village and a monster village reuniting. The game's take on how monsters work is a bit weird, given the main character is half wooly (i.e. a sheep) but can also tame and use woolies to farm wool.

There isn't a lot of feedback when you're running out of RP (basically stamina), especially when you're inside a crafting menu. When you run out of RP, you start draining health instead. This makes it way too easy to accidentally kill yourself by crafting too much. The penalty for dying isn't too step, you lose some money, but it's still annoying.

This game creates some weird incentives. I spent a week doing nothing but taking care of my animals and feeding my chosen love interest sashimi once a day while I waited for the story to advance. I also realised that story progression was gated behind levelling up my chicken so I went grinding for several days to level it up.

When you finally propose to your chosen waifu near the end of the game, there's a nice animated cutscene. It's not quite explicit, but this heavily features one of the possible romance partners, the most "obvious" one but not necessarily the one you actually romanced. Really feels like they didn't have the budget for individual ones.

Overall I had a lot of fun. Might get sick of it with 2 more games in the series but we'll see when we get there.