3DS Review - 'Rune Factory 4'

• Rune Factory 4 License
• Rune Factory 3 Cooking Recipes

Nov 14, 2013 - Rune Factory 4 blends farming, crop management, harvesting and. You can get licenses to cook, forge, run a shop or drive an airship.

by Chris 'Atom' DeAngelus on Nov. 14, 2013 @ 2:00 a.m. PST

Rune Factory began as a spin-off of the Harvest Moon franchise but has since taken off. At its core, it's still very much a Harvest Moon game and shares many similarities to that long-running franchise. The big difference is Rune Factory has combat. Between bouts of farming cabbage and milking cows, you're sent out to defeat monsters. Rune Factory is a family-friendly game, so every sword swipe sends the monsters home, rather than slaying them, and treasure chests can be full of boiled eggs and plant seeds or gold and ancient swords. Trying to mix the two play styles has led to some quirky titles. Rune Factory 4 is probably the least original of the lot, but it is also the most polished and accessible to date, and that counts for a lot.

In RF4, players take control of either Lest (a boy) or Frey (a girl), a young person on the way to the city of Selphia. Their airship is ambushed by bandits who knock the protagonist on the head and send them off the side of the vessel. Fortunately, this occurs above the home of Ventuswill, the dragon who guards Selphia. The hero wakes up with amnesia and this causes Ventuswill and the townspeople to assume that he or she must be the royal heir who was supposed to take over the town. As the ruler of the town, you must do odd jobs and farm in addition to issuing royal decrees and living in a castle. Even when the actual prince shows up, he cedes the job to your hero since you've been doing such a great job. There's a deeper plot involving the dragons, the gradual decline of magical 'runeys,' and your character's true identity, but it is mostly done in a lighthearted way. It's a fun story with a few dark moments, and things almost always turn out for the best.

Selphia is a thriving city, and there is a ton to do. You begin with a small farm behind the castle, and you can use it to begin a healthy and profitable farming business. As the game advances, you can get additional farms or expand the size of your original farm, get animal-like monsters to give you eggs, milk and honey, or use those animals as farm workers to automate some processes. It's very similar to Rune Factory 3, but it's more polished. Soil quality and fertilizer are a major part of the game, but they're more for die-hard fans than casual players. Everyday players can farm to their heart's content without worrying about soil quality. Serious players will rotate crops to avoid damaging the soil or treat their crops with expensive fertilizer and growth potions to get the highest possible yield. It's nice that both sets of players can play the same game without any issues.

You can also craft by obtaining a forge, a kitchen set, a crafting table, and a chemistry lab, which allow you to create items. More complex items require you to level up skills by creating weaker items first; otherwise, they take an exorbitant amount of Rune Points (stamina) to make. Once you've made items, you can start improving them. Using higher-quality material gives you a higher-quality base item, which has a higher resale value. You can also use materials to upgrade items with new attributes, higher stats, or other cool features. You can spend hours crafting the perfect set of equipment for your character, or you can turn it into a profitable business. Much of my early game money came from buying cheap wool supplies from a shopkeep and converting it into far more profitable yarn.

As always, the townspeople are a big part of the game. You can befriend almost everyone, and that unlocks abilities and side-quests. You can even have your character date and eventually marry one of the townsfolk in true Harvest Moon style. The translation is solid and imbues (almost) every character with a likeable personality. My favorite character was Arthur, the amusingly nerdy prince who would rather spend his days working on the local harvest report than attending to his royal duties.

The biggest new feature in RF4 involves royal duties. For just about every little thing you do, you unlock prince/princess points. If you do big things for townspeople, you'll get a bunch. If you take down monsters, you'll get a few for each defeated monster. These points are a measure of how much the townspeople will tolerate you declaring things on a whim. The more points you have, the more things you can do. You can get licenses to cook, forge, run a shop or drive an airship. You can order shops to sell certain items, that a festival be held, or that your backpack be upgraded. The more significant the order, the more PP it costs. It's a good system to encourage you to vary your mechanics because keeping everyone happy involves not focusing on one thing. You can still do that if you want, but it'll take longer to build up PP.

Part of what makes Rune Factory fun is that you're not pigeonholed into doing one thing. You can spend a month running your personal shop or make a giant, sprawling farm and carefully balance the fertilizer levels and nutrients to get the best possible crops. You can become a blacksmith and make your money forging weapons and armor. You could adventure all the time and not worry about making stuff. You'll progress faster if you mix things up, but I never felt like I was being held back when I let medicine crafting fall by the wayside. It also wasn't difficult to get back into it once I picked it up again.

RF4 has a lot of adventures. The game is packed with dungeons, both plot-related and optional. They're not overly complex but tend to have enough depth that it might take multiple days to complete one, especially later in the game. Combat uses a simple isometric style similar to the old-school Zelda games, and it largely involves swinging your weapon at enemies until they fall down. You can use anything from short-range daggers to massive broadswords and axes, each with varying speed and power. As you use weapons, you unlock the ability to charge them up for extra damage or unleash an ultimate attack that drains some of your RP but hits hard. You also unlock special rune skills that can be anything from fireballs to powerful swings of your sword but require a chunk of RP. Combat is fun, especially when you're trying to clear large rooms of enemies without getting hit, but it falls into some rote patterns after a while. There's only so much variety available with the combat system, and you'll probably fall back on the same few powers.

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You can also invite your townsfolk friends to adventure in the dungeons with you, but you'll need to equip them, and that can be costly. On the other hand, you can also bring along any monsters you've tamed to work on your farm. These monsters are weaker in the long run but can survive well on their own. It's also hilarious to see a pair of chickens brutalizing their way through a goblin encampment. You even can gain special buff songs that power up your allies or convince them to attack certain enemies, if you'd prefer to not do the fighting.

The fun thing about Rune Factory is how these two elements combine. All the crafting, farming, making friends — pretty much everything you do in the game — contribute to your combat strength. There are stat levels for everything from swordplay to bathing to sleeping. The more you do, the higher your stats are. If you spend a lot of time crafting, befriending people, and growing crops, you'll get stronger as surely as if you punched enemies to grind levels. On the other hand, going into dungeons and fighting enemies allows you to do more in the social and crafting aspects. You unlock new characters for the town, new materials to use in crafting, and plot sequences that offer new opportunities or new places to farm. You're never stuck doing one thing for too long.

RF4 isn't the best-looking title on the 3DS, unfortunately. The graphics are fine, but they're not a huge improvement over the original DS titles and can be a little muddy in spots. The character artwork retains the modern Harvest Moon style of 'everyone looks roughly 12 years old,' which leads to some adorable art design but feels weird when marriage and romance come into play. The 3-D effect in this game is among the worst I've seen on the 3DS. It's muddy and doesn't add any sense of depth. I strongly advise playing without the 3-D because it only detracts from the experience. M96 swedish mauser serial numbers. The soundtrack is good but not very memorable.

Rune Factory 4 License

Rune Factory 4 is probably the most polished and well-crafted Rune Factory to date. It doesn't change the gameplay much, and that's sometimes to its detriment, but that also makes it a very accessible and enjoyable title. It's fun to play, regardless of whether you're crafting swords, running a high-yield farm, or battling monsters in a dungeon. There's always something to do, and it's always fun to do it. It has flaws, but none really take away from the overall experience, and there really isn't another game on the 3DS quite like it. Beyonce b day itunes torrent. If you're looking for an RPG where saving the world comes second to growing turnips, Rune Factory 4 is the game for you.

Score: 8.0/10

Rune Factory 3 Cooking Recipes

With Rune Factory 4 as my first foray into the series I was pleasantly surprised with the entry. I was expecting a similar experience to that of Animal Crossing or Harvest Moon but what I found instead, was a game richer, and more diverse in content, allowing numerous hours to slip by unnoticed.

The game starts you off with an unfortunate question which decides your gender, after this you find yourself aboard an airship and after a scuffle with some thugs, falling towards the town of Selphia. Typical JRPG tropes are delivered in quick succession and shortly after the fall you are left with amnesia, soon after this you have become the stand-in Prince(ss) of the town. As it turns out there's a lot of jobs for a Prince(ss) to do and Rune Factory 4 takes its time allowing you to have free rein of your princely duties. If you stick with the game for a few hours though you'll have a handle on what the town requires and what you can get up to during the day.

The main core of the game revolves around a blend of farming, dating and maze-like dungeon crawling. Shortly into the game you are introduced to the farm; here you can plant crops, tending to them to eventually sell for profit, or to use the ingredients during cooking. You'll find yourself partaking in plenty of activities during the day, each one feeling like a worthy diversion of your time. This is due to the fact that you can level up numerous skills quite easily to begin with adding a consistent sense of progression. It's fun to see your level rise quickly at the beginning of the game and even though there's a lot to do, you can tailor each day or indeed each part of a day to honing a particular skill.

Combat is light and enjoyable and although it doesn't offer an in-depth system of combos and counter attacks, it's fast paced and difficult enough to warrant sufficient attention. There are numerous weapons to use and you can upgrade your ability with each one, learning new moves to attack enemies with. You can also equip your character with magic abilities such as fire, water attacks or even healing spells, to give you an added boost in combat. You can obtain help in combat by befriending monsters, making them help with enemies or just having them tend to the farm. It's a nice little feature and the fact that you can have numerous monster pets means you're not limited in your choosing.

The romance system works in a similar way to Harvest Moon's meaning you chat to townsfolk, offer them presents and go on adventures with them to build up a relationship, which can result in marriage. The romancing options are made more enticing by the fact that every character has a unique personality. It's exciting to find out a character's likes and dislikes and even more exciting to build up the relationship through the aforementioned methods. The writing for the entire game is humorous and charming and I often found myself smiling at conversations. Unfortunately, much like the previously released Tomodachi Life, Rune Factory 4 does not allow same-sex marriages and this was highly disappointing to see. It's a fault that should never happen in the times we live in but developers can sometimes seem miraculously blind to this issue. This issue aside Rune Factory 4 has a unique and quirky cast of characters who greatly benefit the day-to-day activities that you take part in. The story is relatively simple but because of the likeable cast you'll want to see it through.

Apart from these aspects of gameplay, as Prince or Princess your job is to improve the town of Selphia and keep the citizens happy. You can do this through Prince(ss) Points, which allow you to build new buildings, obtain licenses for cooking, forging, medicine etc. and more. You can't do this without pleasing the townsfolk though so you'll have to take requests from citizens to gain enough points. It’s a nice system that gives you incentive to complete smaller tasks for citizens. Knowing there were larger upgrades to be gained for my town made me want to complete numerous tasks to gain enough Prince Points to build bigger and better things.

There's not much to fault in Rune Factory 4, the game looks beautiful with the town of Selphia feeling very much alive due to the scurrying of busybody citizens. The audio is surprisingly good, and I often found myself humming along to the catchy tunes. As it's my first Rune Factory experience I can easily recommend it to newcomers as the game offers up tutorial after tutorial for the uninitiated. I can see this being grating to existing fans though as the beginning of the game does limit your freedom quite a bit, making you trod through simple tasks before giving you a free rein. Saying this there's plenty to do once you're past this stage and it's here where the game really comes alive. Whether you want to farm till your hearts content, pursue romance or do well by your townsfolk, Rune Factory 4 will invite you back in time and time again.

Rune Factory 4 (Reviewed on Nintendo 3DS)

This game is great, with minimal or no negatives.

There's not much to fault in Rune Factory 4, the game looks beautiful with the town of Selphia feeling very much alive due to the scurrying of busybody citizens. The audio is surprisingly good, and I often found myself humming along to the catchy tunes. As it's my first Rune Factory experience I can easily recommend it to newcomers as the game offers up tutorial after tutorial for the uninitiated. I can see this being grating to existing fans though as the beginning of the game does limit your freedom quite a bit, making you trod through simple tasks before giving you a free rein. Saying this there's plenty to do once you're past this stage and it's here where the game really comes alive. Whether you want to farm till your hearts content, pursue romance or do well by your townsfolk, Rune Factory 4 will invite you back in time and time again.