

Stack onto that plenty of skills to improve, from cooking to chemistry, special attacks and magic weapons and you’ve got a streamlined battle system that’s surprisingly enjoyable. Defeating – sorry, returning – enemies also earns you materials you can use to improve your tools and weapons. Growing crops not only earns you money to spend on new weapons, harvesting them in the dungeons lets you restore your stamina, letting you explore further. The audio is of a similarly high quality, with some amusing voice acting and soothing yet catchy tunes accompanying you wherever you go.Īlthough they may seem disparate gameplay types, the farming and combat dovetail beautifully. There’s a lot of the traditional Harvest Moon character to the game’s design, but it also feels authentic to the fantasy leanings of its combat system. It’s also worth saying that Rune Factory is one of the more beautiful games on Wii, with a great palette and fantastic design, not to mention the well-drawn animated cutscenes and portraits. The script is noticeably smarter and sharper than, say, Tree of Tranquillity – although that’s damning with faint praise – and there’s far less of the awkwardness about character movements. Other under-developed areas of recent titles get a much-needed boost here, too.
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Series veterans will feel right at home, but the addition of more exploration and combat elements helps to reignite the recently flagging series. You’re doing them a favour, see? If you don’t want to return them you can enslave them on your farm instead, as the critters replace the cutesy livestock from previous titles in producing eggs, wool, milk and more.ĭespite the addition of combat, plenty of the traditional Harvest Moon elements survive: seasons come and go, crops need watering, animals need tending to and you have to find yourself a wife.

Whenever you defeat one with your weapon or farming implement – yes, really – they get returned to the First Forest where they live happily ever after. Now European gamers may chow down on the finally ripened Rune Factory Frontier for Wii, and what a delicious feast of vegetables and animal slaughter it is. There’s many a Zelda game that could have been saved with a bit of ploughing, yet the combination has been mostly ignored by cultivators of digital goods, with only the snack-sized Rune Factory on DS reaching fruition. If there’s one thing guaranteed to liven up a good hack-and-slash dungeon crawler, it’s a bit of farming.
