
There are a lot of gameplay aspects to Rune Factory 4, and it handles them all surprisingly well.

Over days and weeks you’ll watch the fruit of your labors. You’ll utilize standard tools to churn the earth and care for your crops. Soil can fetter and typhoons will wreak havoc. Rune Factory 4 gives a cohesive farming experience with four seasons, storms and the ability to level up crops. Sure, this is a port of an older 3DS game, but I was surprised nonetheless that the option was unavailable.Īs for the meat and potatoes, or rather the turnips and potatoes of the gameplay is the farming. Freedom of choice is pretty prevalent in these types of games today. Hearts and Smiley faces are depicted next to each resident and the selection was somewhat limited and didn’t allow for same sex relationships. From everything I could see, you can only become intimate with those of the opposite gender. You can befriend the people of Selphia and work up to dating someone and eventually marrying. Rune Factory wouldn’t be a decent slice of life sim without courting. Rune Factory takes a unique approach in that you have to eat special bread in order to learn new crafting recipes. In addition to the combat, you’ll be able to tame the wild life and recruit them to ride, battle and do chores at the farm. You can use various weapons, and a combination of spells and skills to conquer the land. The battle system is real time, making it an action RPG. Rune Factory 4 is indeed special as it places more emphasis on combat than other farming sims I’ve played. This was a great way to allow for pacing that ensured I didn’t get bored of doing any one thing for too long. Tidbits are shared off and on by towns folk and I could tend to my daily chores and farming as I saw fit. The thing I enjoyed about the story in Rune Factory 4 is that it let me syphon off parts of it at my own pace. With guidance from Ventuswill, the dragon, you’ll soon start to unravel the mysteries of Selphia and the importance of the mission you embarked on in the first place. The dragon is housed within a castle in the land of Selphia. Like getting amnesia from your fight and being tossed overboard yourself.įortunately your fall is broken by landing atop none other than a powerful dragon. These fragments are scattered across the land but you hardly trouble yourself with that. Holding a mysterious object in your hands, you’re soon ambushed and the object is broken into pieces which fall overboard. After selecting between a male of female avatar, you find yourself on an fast flying airship. Only this time you get to see how this ailment is brought about. You once again control an amnesiac protagonist. I was excited to join the people of Selphia, and I hope you enjoy my review. That is until it was ported to the Switch, which has been consuming all of my gaming time for the last few years.

Needless to say, I never got around to playing Rune Factory 4. As the Switch library continued to grow, I spent less and less time with my 3DS. To avoid adding it to my ever growing backlog of games, I decided to wait for the right time. Rune Factory 4 is a game I always wanted to play on my 3DS.
