Rune Cracktory: A Fantasy Harvest Crack
This is mainly for etherdarwin, who requested my opinion on one of the latest Harvest Moon games, Rune Factory, which I'd picked up back in September.
My previous experience with Harvest Moon has been solely with the original game; the first time I played it was on my iBook Mog, which was no good for technical reasons (insert long spiel here about logic board repairs), and I lost my saved game. I started over again from scratch on my then-desktop Carbunkle (R.I.P.) and managed to complete it that time. I also married a completely different girl the second time (the barmaid's daughter, as opposed to the seed store girl), and it was well worth it :P
Anyway, Rune Factory is Harvest Moon with a RPG-esque monster-fighting gimmick. In addition to simply passing out from working too hard, you can actually die and get a game over if you happen to be in a monster-infested cave at the time. There's the usual tasks of farming, weeding, chopping wood, breaking rocks, fishing, etc., but instead of buying cows and chickens, you tame monsters (when you aren't "sending them back to the First Forest"... this being Harvest Moon, nothing really dies in this game save for plants) and get them to work for you on the farm, shear their wool, etc.
One thing that's annoying about the game is that the manual only tells you half the story, and the rest is learned by doing. This is reasonable to a certain extent, but simple bits of knowledge (like knowing how many chops of the axe it takes to break up a stump, or what one needs to make certain items) could've been worked into the library's scant help files. As such, this game seems geared more toward the series' established fanbase than to newbies. Not to say that there should be a ton of hand-holding in here, but a little more would be nice.
Which brings me to the translation. In short, it's awfully muddled at times. For example, when talking to the guy who can expand your house, he tells you, "I'll need 2000 pieces of wood! That costs 200,000g!" Now from this, you'd think, "Okay, so I just need 200,000g for the first house expansion and he'll buy the wood." In actuality, you need to give him the wood and the gold.
Audio is nothing to speak of. Music is about what you'd expect from a Harvest Moon game, and the scant voice acting ranges from okay to bad. The voices also tend to distract from the on-screen text, especially for story segments. Oh, and there's this awful, awful J-Pop song that plays over the (skippable) opening movie.
Moving on to the story: you're a guy with amnesia (you know, like every good RPG hero!) who wanders into the area when you meet Mist, who cheerfully coerces you into looking after her decrepit old farm. The farm and adjacent town are in a kingdom near the border of another nation, so there's a touch of political tension there. It's fairly skeletal by JRPG standards, but anyone who plays a Harvest Moon game doesn't do so for the story...
All in all, Rune Factory is a decent game. It's addictive as hell (hey, it is Harvest Moon), which makes it easy to overlook its flaws after awhile. Oh, and it's a little buggy as well; I could swear that the day I'm currently on (the second one of winter) was the same as the previous day; it's also listed as a Tuesday when it should be a Wednesday o_O; Thankfully, so far I haven't run into any crippling technical flaws, though I have gotten finger cramps from playing it for hours at a time...
My previous experience with Harvest Moon has been solely with the original game; the first time I played it was on my iBook Mog, which was no good for technical reasons (insert long spiel here about logic board repairs), and I lost my saved game. I started over again from scratch on my then-desktop Carbunkle (R.I.P.) and managed to complete it that time. I also married a completely different girl the second time (the barmaid's daughter, as opposed to the seed store girl), and it was well worth it :P
Anyway, Rune Factory is Harvest Moon with a RPG-esque monster-fighting gimmick. In addition to simply passing out from working too hard, you can actually die and get a game over if you happen to be in a monster-infested cave at the time. There's the usual tasks of farming, weeding, chopping wood, breaking rocks, fishing, etc., but instead of buying cows and chickens, you tame monsters (when you aren't "sending them back to the First Forest"... this being Harvest Moon, nothing really dies in this game save for plants) and get them to work for you on the farm, shear their wool, etc.
One thing that's annoying about the game is that the manual only tells you half the story, and the rest is learned by doing. This is reasonable to a certain extent, but simple bits of knowledge (like knowing how many chops of the axe it takes to break up a stump, or what one needs to make certain items) could've been worked into the library's scant help files. As such, this game seems geared more toward the series' established fanbase than to newbies. Not to say that there should be a ton of hand-holding in here, but a little more would be nice.
Which brings me to the translation. In short, it's awfully muddled at times. For example, when talking to the guy who can expand your house, he tells you, "I'll need 2000 pieces of wood! That costs 200,000g!" Now from this, you'd think, "Okay, so I just need 200,000g for the first house expansion and he'll buy the wood." In actuality, you need to give him the wood and the gold.
Audio is nothing to speak of. Music is about what you'd expect from a Harvest Moon game, and the scant voice acting ranges from okay to bad. The voices also tend to distract from the on-screen text, especially for story segments. Oh, and there's this awful, awful J-Pop song that plays over the (skippable) opening movie.
Moving on to the story: you're a guy with amnesia (you know, like every good RPG hero!) who wanders into the area when you meet Mist, who cheerfully coerces you into looking after her decrepit old farm. The farm and adjacent town are in a kingdom near the border of another nation, so there's a touch of political tension there. It's fairly skeletal by JRPG standards, but anyone who plays a Harvest Moon game doesn't do so for the story...
All in all, Rune Factory is a decent game. It's addictive as hell (hey, it is Harvest Moon), which makes it easy to overlook its flaws after awhile. Oh, and it's a little buggy as well; I could swear that the day I'm currently on (the second one of winter) was the same as the previous day; it's also listed as a Tuesday when it should be a Wednesday o_O; Thankfully, so far I haven't run into any crippling technical flaws, though I have gotten finger cramps from playing it for hours at a time...