Rune Factory 4 Special

My absolute favorite game of all time, and the title that got me into Rune Factory as a whole, now available on modern platforms. It's a dream come true! I would recommend Rune Factory 4 to anyone who loved Stardew Valley who wished the combat was a greater part of the game, or who wished for a more in-depth story, or just generally enjoys a cute anime aesthetic. And of course, fans of the parent franchise Story of Seasons (Harvest Moon) as well, and just any farm life sim fans who also love JRPGs. Particularly with how cheap RF4S goes for on sale, you really can't lose. Rune Factory 4 has such a charming setting and cast of characters. They're all a bit tropey in that shounen anime sort of way, but I personally find that aspect super endearing. Likewise, while the story isn't super deep or complex, I found it very emotionally engaging, and the same goes for the individual character arcs. The crafting is super in-depth, with plenty of ways to customize your equipment as you see fit, and plenty of little hidden secrets to discover. Unfortunately, it's rather grindy to max out your crafting skills (which is effectively required when it comes to forging weapons, at least), but the game does offer some decent options to alleviate that, and I find the satisfaction of playing around with it satisfying enough to balance out. (And this is the sort of game where it's best if you enjoy a good mindless grind every now and then, anyway.) The combat is fun and satisfying, particularly in combination with the crafting, though it can be frustrating how bosses can easily stunlock you into death. Still, the sense of satisfaction upon finally defeating a tough boss, and seeing how far you've come in power upon going back to grind for crafting materials, is a great reward. The farming has a fair amount of depth in spite of being only half of the game's focus, particularly with taking proper care of and improving your soil, as well as leveling crops and making giant crops. It's also very fun seeing the goofier ways the game ties your fields into the RPG adventuring, between crops that can be used as weapons, and being able to grow dungeons. The biggest shame with RF4S, I feel, is just that it doesn't feature same sex marriage (a feature that wasn't introduced until the franchise's return with RF5). There is the workaround of using the postgame feature to change your appearance to that of the other protagonist, but you will still be referred to with the opposite pronouns and gendered terms, so it's not quite satisfying. It's understandable that adding in same sex marriage was too much to ask for for an enhanced port of a 3DS game, but still, it is unfortunate given how much of the market for this game would be looking for exactly that. If we ever get a full remake of a prior game (or even RF4 itself), I would hope to see that implemented. Regardless, RF4S is an incredible game, and absolutely worth it for anyone who's a fan of both farm life sims and JRPGs.

I'm blown away. My flabbers are GHASTED. I haven't enjoyed an rpg so much since forever ago. I thought stardew was a cool game. Stardew is now an icky sticky doodoo husk of a game that does not compare (though it does have superior farm decorations, so if you like designing your base you may like stardew more.) BUT IT WON'T COMPARE. Not to the story, nor the social aspect, nor the action or adventure of the glorious rune factory 4 special. Buy now

My favorite thing about Rune Factory has always been the satisfying and constant progression of your character's stats and strength and how well it ties in with both farming and exploration/combat. In terms of story, I'd say this would be the one that hit me most emotionally since I have a soft spot for lonely dragons (or any lonely ancient being for that matter). For gameplay alone, I didn't have as much fun here compared to RF3 Special which had newer and less grindy QoL changes. I especially disliked how events were randomized which ruined the pace of the story for me as having to wait out love/marriage events was tedious. For achievements, if you have an extra 30+ hours to kill and have the stomach for terrible drop rates or just enjoy grinding. Meh

Rune Factory 4 is interesting. I prefer RF3 to RF4 solely due to the cast but this is still a good game in the series. Compared to RF3 it's got quite a bit more depth with the crafting mechanics as all items and components have levels now, and crafted items get a bonus for using high leveled components. You can even combine 2 accessories to add their passive effects to a single slot which is a big improvement to having to carry around a bunch of item swaps with you. Improving from RF3, you are allowed to pick a gender for the first time in the series with this game and there are 6 people you can marry from each gender. There isn't gay marriage sadly so if there's someone you've got your eyes on you'll have to pick your character's gender up front and plan for that. Aside from there being half as many options for either gender as RF3 has available to you (11 bachelorettes in that game) I don't find any of the female options to be very interesting as they either recycle character concepts from RF3 (Xiao Pai feels very similar to Sakuya from RF3, Clorica is almost the same as Karina, Amber is almost a carbon copy of Shara). Thankfully romance and marriage isn't required for the story this time around so you can choose to ignore it entirely if you prefer to keep it as more of a farming rpg kind of game. As with all the rune factory games (other than RF2 as I recently found out) your character has amnesia and has to build a new life in the small castle town of Selphia. You end up mistaken as the new prince or princess of the town that was supposed to be coming in, and put right to work running the farm and helping the townsfolk. The story is in 3 distinct arcs with credits rolling after each one finishes so don't be put off by credits rolling thinking the game is over after not a lot of gameplay. The first arc has you travel to various dungeons around the town and defeat bosses that are actually people who have been transformed into creatures. I won't spoil anything past that but there's quite a bit that changes in the story as you progress compared to RF3 which was quite a bit more straightforward with its plot. As the prince or princess of the town you earn some points with almost any action you do, completing requests being the most points but you also get a small amount from simply talking to people every day and defeating monsters and bosses. These can be used to buy upgrades such as unlocking festivals, expanding your inventory, and building barns to house monsters you can recruit. As with RF3 there is the same style of randomized postgame dungeon available for purchase for 3000 PP after Arc 2 is completed. The levels for this game's dungeon range from 350 to 1000 although power in this game is a lot more gear dependant than level dependant. With endgame gear you can get close to 100% immunity to all elemental damage and status conditions and also just be strong enough to ko the bosses in the sharance maze before they can do much. This does take a lot of prep and grinding but it shows that the crafting can be quite deep if you choose to explore the mechanics of it.

The definitive Rune Factory game, but probably not the best. Rune Factory 4 originally was the last of its series, as developer Neverland went under soon after its release in america. It shows that it was meant to be a send-off for the series as it's packed with new features and references to the rest of the series throughout, as well as just packed in general. The references don't get in the way if you're new, and the length and new features were great in 2013 when it looked like this was the end of the line, but sitting here many years later with the (admittedly sub-par) Rune Factory 5 and Guardians of Azuma behind us, and more coming, a more focused experience would have been better. Rune Factory has from the start been a light farming sim/RPG hybrid, originally having the tag-line "A Fantasy Harvest Moon". Being in part an RPG, the farming has always been a bit crunchier than Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley. You have farming and watering level, your plants have a level, your soil has several stats that can level up (or down). A lot of it isn't that complex, you can run a successful farm without any of this, but if you want to become the turnip king, then you'd have to think a bit. It isn't just an RPG for the farming though. Much like Stardew Valley after it, you can delve into dungeons to gather minerals and fight monsters. You can take on the world with several different weapon types or spells, which more often than not you've made yourself. It all feeds into itself rather neatly. You farm to get food, money and medicine. The money goes towards buying new crafting recipes and tools, while the food and medicine goes towards exploring dungeons. In the dungeons you mine minerals, slay monsters for stuff and perhaps also tame a few of them. The minerals and other stuff goes towards your farming equipment and armour and weapons, while the monsters can help out on the farm, or join you on your adventures. And every action also goes towards leveling up one skill or another (I have yet to see another series where walking, sleeping or eating is a skill). From that last statement, you might have picked up that there is some bloat going on. A lot of Rune Factory 4 is grinding, and when you have several disparate systems that you can make progress in, you can easily overlook some part. You might be the mightiest warrior in all of Norad, but if your equipment isn't up to snuff or you haven't eaten your daily greens, then you're not getting anywhere. If you've ever played Disgaea, it's the same problem as you can have there where you can be overleveled in some aspect, but underleveled in others, and in turn make the grind much worse. The story isn't the most engaging. It's par for the series, but it's rather generic anime-fantasy. It also focuses on a very small subset of the cast. If your favourite is one of the butlers then I hope you get enough of them from their day-to-day interactions, because they aren't getting characterised through the story. It makes sense that some people would be important, and some people wouldn't, but when a big appeal is supposed to be the townsfolk, it feels like an odd bit of favouritism. Showing my hand a bit early, Tides of Destiny, a PS3 spin-off and my favourite in the series also has a story with rather serious consequences, but there they somehow managed to equally involve a dragon priestess, a (supposed) sorcerer goddess of evil, the foremost golemancer in the world, and a nurse. (That story is still very standard, but having everyone involved felt much nicer) Concluding is that too much of a good thing can be bad. I love a systems-heavy RPG, but even with my peculiarities, this is a bit too much (Don't get me started on crafting optimal gear). As I said above, my personal favourite in the series is Tides of Destiny/Oceans, as it stripped down several systems severely in order to focus more on exploration and combat, which I think makes it a much more interesting experience (it also looks and controls the best, which should be an inditement to later non-handheld games). I haven't had enough time with RF3 to determine if it's also more focused, but I do know that it's many people's favourite. If you want the entire package, then go for RF4, but if you want something slightly more focused, then it might be better to look at some other entry in the series.

I am going to be honest, this game has a very interesting story, and a unique cast, but overall it feels very clunky, managing your items, getting stuff done, moving forward, everything should be overhauled basically from combat to farming. I will try to get used to it for maybe another 5 hours atleast, but it's honestly the type of game that I want to love so much, but I can't cause the gameplay mechanics programmed very poorly, like you can't even cycle between tools with the mouse wheel, there's not even a quick heal button during fights, even with tools you have to Press R, search the water can for example and you not only select it, you additionally have to press a "yes" button after the game ask "you sure want to equip this?" basically. It just tries to be so much, and it is clear that this game probably has 100+ hours of content on end, and every dialogue is different, I'm especially touched how Segami's voice actor voices Amber, but I just can't enjoy the game, cause it feels like everything that you want to do has unnecessary steps that you have to do everytime to get to the actual thing you want. The story is the only thing that keeps me here, and the lifesim part of things, but tbh not even that, cause there's no same sex marriage, which I usually go for in games if the male character's seem cooler, which with RuneFactory 4 is the case.

After enjoying RF: Guardians of Azuma a lot, I wanted to try out other Rune Factory titles. RF4 is amazingly detailed game and I really love how characters interact with each other. However, I am finding combat very tedious. I'm playing on easiest difficulty but even then I am finding the combat rather difficult - the combat mechanic itself is simplistic but every so often there is a huge difficulty jump due to a huge enemy stat inflation which force players to grind to upgrade weapons and armors. I was thinking about ignoring main story so I don't have to farm materials to upgrade my gear to win against enemy bosses - however, there are characters locked behind story progression. Therefore, I am begrudgingly working towards upgrading my gear but it is so painful, I am contemplating whether I should just drop the game altogether. Overall, I found it enjoyable enough to play 40 hours but much less so than RF: Guardians of Azuma. I would have given it a neutral rating if the option is available and would recommend to get the game on a sale.

TL;DR: I've heard great things about the game, but the state of this port is uninspiring. I've heard that RF4 was the best game in the series so I decided to pick this one up because it's currently on sale. Regardless of whether the game is good or not, this is not an experience to be enjoyed on PC. 1. Keyboard and mouse controls feel like an afterthought. 2. Physics are tied to frame rate so running the game on a monitor that is more than 60hz will cause the PC to slow down immensely a few minutes after start up, rendering the PC unusable at times until restarting. If you're originally a fan of the series and don't mind changing your set up to fit the game, then I think you should be fine. But if you're someone like me, who wants to get into the series, just know that there are quite a few hiccups on start up that will make you want to go play something else.