The RPG trappings extend far beyond just a few dungeons-in fact, effectively everything you can do will boost at least one obscure stat to some degree. Then materials and goods you obtain from your raids can be sold off back in the village and you can use the proceeds to build another barn if you want. Plus, you can eventually bring villagers and befriended monsters with you into combat, giving you some backup for the tougher sections while also offering up some bonding opportunities. Combat in the dungeons follows a relatively basic hack ‘n’ slash formula, but there’s a nice variety of weapon types and spells you can utilize that can mix up your approach. So, if you want to put down the hoe for a day, you can instead pick up your battle axe and run out into a nearby dungeon for some good ol’ fashioned monster hunting and swashbuckling. This farming gameplay is far from all that Rune Factory 3 has to offer, however, as the whole gimmick here is that Rune Factory is also a proper RPG. As you’d expect of a game directly descended from the famed Harvest Moon series (the real one, that is), these farming mechanics are quite satisfying to engage with and provide an enjoyable gameplay loop that encourages you to play at your own pace. The proceeds from your sales enable you to slowly start upgrading your tools and farm size, offering a rewarding payoff for all your hard work day after day. Different crops are sold from the general store according to the seasons, and though you can plant and grow anything at any time, the in-season crops will always do much better than the out-of-season ones. Every day typically begins, of course, with the loop of tending to your basic farm tasks like tilling soil, harvesting ripe crops, and collecting resources from the various animals under your care. Gameplay follows typical farm sim rules on the surface, though there are a lot more activities to engage in beyond the sedate pace of farm life. The diverse cast is a delight to interact with and each character is memorable in their own way, which infuses each day with a lot more meaning as you greet people and come to better understand their various interpersonal connections. Luckily, what Rune Factory 3 loses in its premise it more than makes up for in its characters. The whole ‘mysterious protagonist with amnesia’ thing was a played-out trope even when this game originally launched on DS in 2009. Skip to the following paragraph now if you're sensitive to spoilers, but you can probably guess why Micah and that strange monster from the beginning are never spotted in the same room together. It's a fine enough story for a farm sim, but by traditional JRPG standards Rune Factory 3 feels pretty weak. Micah is given a spare home built right into the trunk of the great Sharance tree just outside town and his relaxing new life as a resident there begins while he slowly puts together the pieces of his past.Ĭaptured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked) A girl quickly takes pity on the monster and brings it into her house, giving it a room to stay in and a bed to recover in, yet the monster is nowhere to be found the following morning and has instead been replaced by a mysterious boy (named Micah by default) who has a bad, convenient case of amnesia. Rune Factory 3’s narrative opens on a rainy night with a monster falling from the sky and crashing to the earth below, alarming the residents of the town of Sharance. Rune Factory 3 Special shows its age here and there, but this is overall a strong entry in the long-running farm sim series-we just wish that more was done to take advantage of the opportunity to bring it to new hardware. Despite the middling reaction, the developers evidently saw good enough sales numbers that they could justify greenlighting Rune Factory 6, and while we wait for them to finish that up, the team saw fit to re-release Rune Factory 3 to fill the gap. Against all odds, and after a change in development teams and rights holders, Rune Factory 5 finally saw a release last year and… well, it had its issues. After Rune Factory 4 launched in 2013, the games went on hiatus for nearly a decade, with the fate of the series itself being pretty up in the air for most of that wait. Being a Rune Factory fan has been a bit of a rollercoaster ride for the past several years.
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