Product Description

Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon you'll help a young man with amnesia build a new life. Laguna doesn't know who he is or where he comes from, so he goes looking for answers. He meets & befriends a young woman named Mist, who puts you to work on her farm. As you help her tend to the crops, you'll try and build a life for yourself in the Harvest Moon world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1939 in Video Games
• Brand: Natsume, Inc.
• Released on: 2007-08-14
• ESRB Rating: Everyone
• Platform: Nintendo DS
• Dimensions: .65" h x 4.97" w x 5.72" l, .25 pounds

Features

• Simulate the simple life as you harvest crops, buy supplies and try to find Laguna a nice girlfriend
• Choose the life you wish to live - Be a farmer planting crops, fish in the bay or forge weapons as a blacksmith
• Explore dungeons to capture and tame various monsters - capture a wolf to ride on, or a bee to make honey

Customer Reviews

A New Harvest Moon
Rune Factory is one of the best versions of Harvest Moon to come out in a while. This review, I should warn you, is targeted at those individuals who have played previous installments in the series. If you are an experienced player of the Harvest Moon franchise, like I am, then you will find much that is new in this experience.

Graphically, this game is impressive. The environments, although 2-D, look beautiful in their hand-drawn style. The characters are 3-D, and it gives the game an interesting look.

The farming aspects of this harvest moon game are probably the best they have ever been. There is a huge variety of crops you can grow. You are also given a good size field to farm. Not only can you farm your own land, but you can also farm in caves where seasons never change. This allows for extended growing periods. In addition to this, livestock in Rune Factory are monsters you befriend in the caves. These monsters can help on your farm, give eggs, give milk, or give wool, just like traditional farm livestock.

In addition to this, you can forge weapons and tools, cook foods, and enhance other items in your inventory. However, these aspects don't come into the game until later on when you make improvements to your home.

The combat system in the game is handled much like the farming system. You press the same buttons and can even use your farm tools in combat. In fact, they are so integrated that you can use your sword to cut weeds and you can water your enemies to death. However, for best results, you should cut weeds with the sickle and defeat your enemies with a weapon of some sort. Farming and fighting both drain the same stamina meter. Once your stamina is depleted, fighting/farming depletes your health. This is both good and bad. It is good because it adds challenge and tension to the dungeon battles, but it is bad because it limits the amount of work and battle you can do in a day. There are in-game remedies to this, but I will not discuss these in much detail. I will just say they add to the overall challenge and only work to make the game even better.

Other aspects that have made past Harvest Moon games great are also present here. Some of them are even better. There are ten women in the game that you can marry. Those familiar with past Harvest Moon games know how this system works.

There are also a number of different shops that you can visit in the town. The library, for the first time ever I believe, is actually useful. Not only can you go to the library to read hints on how to play the game, but you can actually buy books at the library now. These books actually contribute to improved gameplay. For example, you can buy spellbooks that will allow you to perform magic of various sorts. There are also cookbooks, forging handbooks, and other books that come in handy once you expand your home and also purchase a kitchen.

The other major addition to the gameplay within the town is that you can sell items directly to stores. You can use the shipping bin on your farm, but then you would need to wait until 5PM for the profits to roll in. If you go to a store to sell items, you can get the profits quickly and see exactly how much you are making on each item you sell.

In conclusion, this is an awesome game. It is one of the best Harvest Moon games ever, and one of the greatest games on the Nintendo DS. I have only touched the surface of the game in this review. There is much more to see and do. Buy the game, play the game, and have a great time farming and fighting in Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon.

Great, open-ended RPG for "checklisters"
I'm a middle-aged man with plenty of game-playing experience of all types of games, but, I've never played a Harvest Moon game before. I review from this perspective.

This is an excellent, highly addictive RPG/farming simulation. If you like RPGs but are dubious that a "farming simulation" could be fun -- get this game. Your only regret will be that you spend way too much time playing it! It's a cross between Dark Cloud and Animal Crossing.

I've been waiting for a good RPG on the DS for some time now. I did not feel that Etrian Odyssey was very good but played it anyway for lack of a more compelling alternative. Now there are 2 excellent RPGs for the DS (Rune Factory + Zelda: Phantom Hourglass). I know that Z:PH will be a breakaway hit and a much better game, but RF is so fun and so addictive that I simply can't put it down until I've achieved all that I want to achieve in it.

I won't go into detail to describe Rune Factory, as you can no doubt get that information in many reviews and other sources. Suffice it to say that there's a wealth of things to do: explore caves, mine minerals, smith weapons, court young women, tame monsters, fish, cook, upgrade your house, etc. etc.. And, of course, there's lots of farming. It's very compelling to have so many different avenues for growth and improvement. I suppose I have a mildly compulsive personality, and games like this certainly bring it out. I want to do it all, so my games tend to last 2-10 times longer than those of other players. You can do all the parts you want to do and skip the parts you don't like.

Rune Factory is a (mostly) non-linear game without a lot of hints or required goals. Of course, there is a concept of "winning" the game, but if you're like me, most of the goals you'll achieve in this game are the ones you've set for yourself. I do wish there were some sort of checklist, though. Most games with "gotta have 'em all" aspects provide a checklist of difficult goals to achieve -- e.g. get all the heart pieces in Zelda or unlock all the characters in a fighting game. Rune Factory does provide you with some lists, but many of the goals I'm pursuing aren't tracked by the game (e.g. tame one of each type of monster, and max out all seed levels without using the wireless connection). But this is a minor quibble.

The game is hardly perfect, and I considered rating it only 4 stars. In particular, I'm frustrated by the inconsistent use of inventory management. Some inventory screens are arranged horizontally, others are arranged vertically, which makes it very hard to find your items. Some inventory panels show you details of selected items, some don't. Some close with the B button, others close with the start button. I really wish the game would segregate dispensable goods from indispensable tools -- why are they stored together? And there are many other annoyances (e.g. the game allows you to commit very serious mistakes like dropping important items, but, on the flip side, you can't sell or even drop lame spell books) and a few noticeable bugs.

But, bottom line, I enjoy this game far, far too much to consider rating it less than the full 5 stars. It's one of the best DS titles I've ever played. If you can only buy one RPG for the DS, based on past performance of other Zelda games, I'd reluctantly steer you to Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. But if you like RPGs and can handle getting two, get Rune Factory, you won't be disappointed.

Best in series!
For those who don't know, the Harvest Moon series is an Animal Crossing-like farming sim game. You raise crops and animals to get money, build up your house, make friends, and even date/marry one of townspeople. Rune Factory adds in dungeon style caves, complete with monsters! You have to fight them Zelda/Secret of Mana style, though admittedly the combat in this game is a tad rough but still quite passable. You can even tame some monsters and have them work on your farm!

Besides the adventure/combat abilities, they really improved the controls over previous versions. The inventory is much easier to cycle through now, and you can use the touch screen to tap on your crops to water or harvest them, which is much quicker than the old-school method.

Even without the adventure elements, the controls are so well polished that this game would be superior to previous Harvest Moon games on the farming aspect alone, at least in my opinion.