As much as I try to stay away from the Harvest Moon series, it keeps drawing me back in. Every time I pick up one of these titles, part of me expects something amazing that will renew the series(s). But once again, as if purposely, the newest game in the Harvest Moon series disappoints.
If you have played a Rune Factory game before, you would know that it is basically a Harvest Moon game with the ability to fight monsters. Such is the same in the newest installment, Rune Factory 3: A Fantasy Harvest Moon.
As in previous Rune Factory games, your character wanders into town with amnesia. I wish that they would have changed the story’s premise a little because every main character in the Rune Factory series starts off with amnesia. You also start the game as a male character named Micah. I was disappointed to find that the character’s gender wasn’t changeable as is the case in the main Harvest Moon series.
You are woken up by Shara, the daughter of the mayor, who proceeds to give you a farm that is essentially a tree house in the Sharance tree. This tree is special in that it contains the only field in which crops will grow. She gives you a quick tour of your home which contains the basic setup of a bed, refrigerator, calendar, diary, and storage box.
Essentially the graphics have not changed at all from the first game. The art for the back drop of the town looks nice but is basically the same from the first two games and the characters look the same as well. When you talk to a character, a picture of the character pops up that will change expressions every now and then while talking.
The town is basic, and surrounding it are season themed “battle-grounds” which conveniently have a safe point at the start. Save points are purple pyramids which can also be used for practicing different moves. The main save point is, as in all Harvest Moon games, your dairy in your home. The battlegrounds have different monsters with varying degrees of difficulty and seem to go in order of seasons in the year (i.e. spring is beginner level). Fighting monsters isn’t especially difficult, but the controls are a little slow. Battles are in real time and your character moves pretty slow and misses a lot. Fortunately, it seems the AI for the monsters is equally challenged in that area so they aren’t that difficult to defeat.
Most of what you’ll be doing in the beginning of the game is farming. As in most Harvest Moon games of late, the farming controls leave much to be desired. Using tools with the selected square of a different color is annoying and getting to the spot you usually want involves a lot of turning around. Thankfully, Micah seems to lose stamina a lot slower than previous protagonists, so you can misfire your tools a little more generously.
The interesting part of farming is the weather. In this game, it isn’t just the same weather every day. It can start raining in the middle of the day and stop a few hours later. This only serves to be aggravating when it rains in the morning and you find that you still need to water your plants that day. It also doesn’t make much sense how it rains inside a tree where your fields are in.
When you’re not farming, you’ll want to get acquainted with the townspeople. None of their personalities are really inspiring, but eventually you’ll have to choose one of the girls in town for the romance aspect. The game dialogue is pretty terrible and definitely lacking in the voice acting area. What’s puzzling is how the dialogue is presented. For some parts of the game, there is full voice acting while other parts just have spoken phrases thrown in.
The in-game time passes by in exactly the same manner as the previous games but does not freeze while you are in buildings. This is extremely frustrating as you have to watch how long you carry on conversations with people. Not that they say all that much because they keep saying the same thing all day. And different characters will often say the same things in different words. It was annoying how many times I got told about the bean-throwing festival.
When you don’t want to farm or chat with people, there are requests in the game that you can complete. Basically, these act as quests and are fairly simple to complete. My first quest from Shara had me greeting all of the people in the town. The quests will yield you items that can be used or sold. There are also the festivals in which you can participate and attend. For example, the bean-throwing festival has you trying to get hit by as many beans as possible while dodging spoiled dishes.
I also found a few annoying bugs in the game. For one, I had to greet several villagers more than once. In each shop’s main greeting sequence I would meet the shopkeeper, but when I went back in later for a second time, they asked me who I was and re-introduced themselves. It happened with every shop I went to and proved to be a real story-killer. Another bug I found was how I would talk to Shara outside of her shop and then walk inside to find that she was already behind the counter ready to sell me things. Normally, a wandering villager would be seen walking in while she just sort of beamed directly inside.
Overall, the game is really just another Rune Factory game with its details changed around slightly. Without any significant graphic, sound, and plot changes, I can say that as a Rune Factory fan you will feel like you have played this game before. Unless you are a hardcore fan of the Harvest Moon/Rune Factory series, I wouldn’t bother picking up this title.
