While you're still working your farm and building relationships with simple dating-sim style options, where Rune Factory differs is where it becomes an RPG - dungeon crawling.
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Surely, I thought, this can't be an RPG.Rune Factory definitely bears a huge resemblance to the game series it's been spun off from, featuring the same cutesy anime characters living and working on a tiny little farm which has plenty of room to grow into a sprawling, impressive business. When the game arrived I questioned why this apparent farming management and simulation game was sent through to us at RPG Site - the box proudly boasts that it's a 'part of the Harvest Moon Family' and there's a young anime-styled chap on the front holding an axe. Rune Factory is a perfect example of never, ever judging a book by its cover. Doing so, by saving your progress in the bedside diary and turning off, feels like abandoning a living, breathing world - a world where your crops will shrivel and die without your care and attention, and where you friends and potential suitors will gradually lose interest if you don't go and visit. And like those games, it's also maddeningly compulsive.Despite the sedate progression - dropping hints and equipment as you stroll around town chatting to shop owners, post-girls and dotty professors - it's a very difficult thing to put down. Likewise there's the option of agricultural pacifism, focusing on the production of crops and ignoring the underground seasonal dungeons and the caverns of the floating Whale Island completely.In many ways it's completely cyclical, a play on the drip-fed incremental rewards of new objects, toys and activities which fuel games such as Animal Crossing so successfully. It's possible to completely suspend your farming activities, saving up enough crop money to set you up for an extended period of dungeon-delving. Everything putters by at a gentle, easy pace, despite the fact that every ticking second represents a minute on the game's clock, making each day 24 minutes long. Then you're left to your own devices.It's one of Rune Factory's defining characteristics that, while there's an almost endless array of activities, jobs and pastimes to partake in, you're never really given any kicks up the schedule. Two minutes in and you're settled into a spacious home in the expansive town of Trampoli, with a pocketful of turnip seeds and a cheap hoe on your arm.
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Rune Factory's main departure from that series is the addition of dungeon-crawling, rendered in the same cheerfully Arcadian style as the events in town, but adding another huge layer of potential complexity to the already bewildering crop-farming and local-girl-schmoozing.It starts just like every single other Harvest Moon or Rune Factory basically does, with a sweeping epidemic of amnesia, an excuse for relocation and the convenient availability of a deserted but potentially profitable ranch. By flashing its schmaltzy anime portraiture and pastoral plumage, Rune Factory disguises a hugely complex and extensive RPG, which just happens to orbit the binary stars of market gardening and playboy romance.You're probably dimly familiar with legume propagation sim Harvest Moon already.