Rune Factory; a different kind of time waster.

Games like Animal Crossing or Harvest Moon have always been games that a subset of gamers can really get into, and their popularity has increased with the influx of more female gamers. Yet I often see a lot of people, me included, who just can’t get into these game, no matter how open they keep their minds. It may be because some people enjoy a more communal and relaxing playstylw, as opposed to some needing clearer goals and direction.

In a sense, I like feeling like I am progressing, building up to something, but those two games do not have a definite ending. You can’t « beat » Animal Crossing or Harvest Moon. You jus tplay until you are bored of it. I have many games to play and too little time, so the prospect of getting lost for years on one game doesn’t appeal to me. Yet, I enjoy Rune Factory, an offshoot of Harvest Moon, and I’ve always wondered why. I think I came up with an answer.



Rune Factory lets you manage your own farm, foster relationships, and just relax, but it also has a few differences to consider. Rune Factory has an actual story, combat, and dungeon-crawling. It allows the player to break the monotony of farming with exploration, and an unfolding narrative. It is hardly the deepest narrative, but it is something to work towards, and the life sim aspect becomes something you can use to immerse yourself in the world between story beats.  There is an end goal, and a definitive ending. While you can play past the main story, it gives you a good stopping point if you require it.

Rune Factory brought someone like me in, and it is in large parts because of the combat. It didn’t need to be great, just serviceable enough to break the monotony. If combines the farming with dungeon crawling by allowing the player to farm little plots of land in dungeons in order to get more energy to carry on further. Since your character can get tired, it is important to manage their stamina, albeit, they will use less and less stamina the more they engage in certain things. It is possible to brute-force the game through fighting a lot and then using little to no stamina in battle.

The game accomodates people who want goals to strive towards, and it isn’t that I think that Harvest Moon or Animal Crossing are bad games, but Rune Factory has achieved a happy medium between the two types of gamers that I find very interesting. This si why I prefer Dragon Quest Builders to Minecraft for instances.



Rune Factory is a franchise that deserves more attention, and after nearly dying once due to the closure of Neverland, I am happy to see it back (now can I have Lufia again?)