Rune Factory 4 Special

The original version of this game and the last Marvelous farming sim I played, Friends of Mineral town, were released 9 years apart (2003 to 2012). And man, 9 years used to be such a long time in gaming, because these games are on different planes of existence. It's like they have completely opposite design philosophies. I thought Rune Factory was Harvest Moon but with some ARPG combat and dungeon crawling, like maybe a little more complex than the combat in Stardew Valley, but it's so much more. Random example: Weather is not the same the entire day. I know, it sounds like such a small thing, but it's the ONLY farming sim I've played that has this. I think it has a chance to change every 4 hours. Oh, and rain doesn't instantly water your crops, it actually takes time for each plot. The farming system itself is by far the most complex I've seen. Crops don't actually need to be in a specific season to grow, they just have good and bad seasons that affect their speed and level. Your soil has all these properties like health and grow speed that encourage you to group and rotate crops. Crops can be from level 1 to 10 and by harvesting and destroying full grown crops you get seeds of one level better, but your soil properties can affect the produced crop level as well. A lot of this can be ignored if you're not going for full completion and I still don't fully grasp a lot of it after 60 hours, but it's cool af. Along with farming there are systems for crafting (both combat gear as well as food, medicine, and tools) that are similarly deep and complex, and actually put me off the game for a bit initially. But through it all I appreciated that these systems were even made by the same company that made FoMT less than a decade later. Dialogue also does something I haven't seen in another farming sim, where people will have a few lines of greeting before going into their actual daily dialogue, making the conversations feel a lot more dynamic and like there's more dialogue than there really is. But no worries, because (again completely unlike FoMT) there is a mountain of dialogue here. I didn't start noticing repeats until halfway through my second year. Along with default character dialogue, dialogue for events (upcoming and occurring), dialogue based around things happening in the story, there are also days where the whole town will be talking about one specific subject, like the head butler winning a butler award. These are pretty fun. There are also "town events" where members from the town will participate in a larger event with a story that may take a few days to see through, and these are also great. While it's not as good as Coral Island, the relationship and dating system in this game is very nice. You can take your partner to different locations, choose different dialogue or buy different things, and choose how to see them off at the end. If you bathe while your partner is in your party they don't come with you but they'll give you a snack after, and if you try to get in their bed they'll react to it. Also, you get to see your love interest in a swimsuit. The one thing I don't get is why the male bachelors all flirted with me so insanely hard when the game doesn't have same-sex dating and marriage. Seriously, the guys flirted with me 5x harder than the women ever did. The other negative I'll say here is a marriage prerequisite is seeing random town events related to your spouse, which happen like once a week. I of course chose the character who has 4 prereq events instead of 1-2. The combat is honestly nothing to write home too much about but it's not bad. A lot of it is based on your gear which again goes into the crafting system, and levels of individual weapon and magic skills. Oh yeah, this game has like 100 skills you have to level, just another level of the insane leap in complexity from Harvest Moon. The dungeons are enjoyable to explore, nothing like Zelda or anything but decent enough dungeon crawling action. The writing, both in villager dialogue and the main story, is all really good I'd say. There are some moments I absolutely love, albeit some occasional eye-rolling ones that you'd expect from a 2010s anime product, like when I'm forced to tell this one character she should smile more. But, while it's cheesy to say, I don't know when the last time was that I fell for a game character as hard as I fell for Margaret in this game. This port to Steam is unfortunately kinda bad, it's janky when it comes to typing with the keyboard, and to reload your save you have to close the entire game, which is really annoying when savescumming. While the complexity of this game can feel high at times, especially to a newcomer, once I got in the groove it was excellent. I didn't 100% and I'm not sure if I will, but I definitely enjoyed my time with the game. I think if the combat and dungeon parts were a smidge better and some of the systems were a little more approachable it'd be a true 5/5 for me.