Rune Factory 4 -Not fixed but much better

I don’t know how to check play time in Rune Factory 4, but I’ve played a lot more since I last posted about it. About 10, 15 hours more I estimate. It still freezes on me from time to time, but less often that it used to.

Freezing issue: I went into the game settings and disabled everything there: portraits, BGM, voices, sound effects, everything. Rune Factory without the BGM and sound effects is just so weird, it doesn’t feel right at all. But thanks to that I only get one or two freezes per day – real time 24 hour day, as opposed to several freezes per game day. I’m making real progress now.

Circle pad issues: RF4 lets you use the directional keypad to navigate so it’s not a big issue. Even though the keypad on the 3DS feels a lot stiffer and less responsive than the PSP and DS pads. As long as it works, right? The circle pad is actually much better though. It doesn’t stick in any particular direction any more, but it’s much happier going right than left and forget about running in a straight line.

Sticky Y button: Will you believe it actually fixed itself? It bugged me during Stella Glow (randomly undeploying and unequipping units, zooming in and out of maps), got worse during 7th Dragon III (pulling up the Field Skills menu all the time, taking people out of my party). At one point it got so bad I couldn’t run five steps without the Skills menu popping up.

I got so frustrated I… well I didn’t exactly bang on it, but I gave it a very firm, sharp press, like CUT IT OUT ALREADY! …And it did! I haven’t heard a peep out of it since! I haven’t dared touch it since, which means I can only map magic to X in RF4 and not Y but at least now I can play it without text randomly starting to fast forward. Too bad nobody says anything particularly interesting.

Current progress

I’m having a good time, though progress feels much slower than in previous RF games. You need a license for just about everything, then you have to unlock seeds and recipes in stores and then things are so expensive. But it’s a good thing compared to the first Rune Factory where you could be a multi-millionaire in just a few months.

I’m sure things will pick up once I’ve unlocked a few more seeds and fully-equipped my kitchen. At least forging and crafting are easier than before because you can use a fair number of substitutes AND failure rates are very low because of changes to the success/fail system.

And hopefully I’ll get bigger dungeons to explore too. Yokmir Forest and the Water Ruins are just too small! I just finished the Water Ruins, btw. The boss was so cheap, he pretended to be dying and then got up and attacked me again! That’s just not done. I gave him an extra-special beatdown just for that. I rescued the guy within who is kind of cute but an annoying jerk so I’m sticking to Arthur for life. Beside he has amnesia too. That’s my gimmick!

The festivals have all been fun so far, especially the defluffing festival. Fluff fluff fluffity fluff! I won handily with Dual Blades, and now I’m torn between sticking to Short Swords or switching to dual-wielding. Maybe when I have better armor and accessories to make up for the loss of the shield. Seeing all those numbers popping up all over the place is just too sweet. Fishing festival and bean toss festival were all nice in their own way. If I could get lures to attract fish faster I could really get into the fishing in this game.

The only real letdown in Rune Factory 4 has been the characters. Yes, they’re all nice decent people, and they have a lot of different things to say every day, which is great but ehh… they’re so… bland. So… boring. Just, zZzZz… you know? What a bunch of milquetoasts. Marvelous was probably trying to dial things back after going overboard on the crazy in Rune Factory 3, but now they’ve made a bunch of identical bores. I usually go wild at the start of RFs giving everyone presents and trying to learn about them but this time I’m not going to bother.

Also Ventuswill is doing that stupid “I know what’s going on but I’m not gonna tell you because then the game would end after 2 hours” nonsense I hate so much in RPGs. Booooo, hisssss. I make sure to fire a few fireballs in her general direction every time I go in there. It’s not like Rune Factory games ever have fantastic stories anyway, just tell me already!

Aynywayz, a luta continua. I’m on standby until the next bit of story unlocks/doesn’t unlock. In the meantime I’m doing quests and buying tools and growing crops and all the other stuff people play RF for. See you with another update in the near future.

Rune Factory 4 – Randomly f-f-freezing

Before I start, hands up anyone who is sick and tired of hearing about my 3DS hardware troubles. One, two, three… four hundred thousand people. Okay fine, I’ll just whine to myself. ZOMG Self, you won’t believe what the 3DS is doing this time! I worked around the circle pad issue, the Y button seems to have unstuck itself, but now Rune Factory 4 is freezing every five minutes. It wasn’t doing this before, it just started the day before yesterday and now I can barely make any progress at all!

Most recently I woke up, watered some plants, went to the general store to buy seeds and it froze. The time before I’d caught some good fish and was heading home to cook them when it froze. Before that, Forte and Frey had extensively explored the Water Ruins and had just warped out to save when bzzt, you guessed it, another freeze. That was particularly painful because I found Cooking Bread in a chest on that run through and when I loaded the next time there was just junk in the chest ๐Ÿ™ So sad.

Actually… come to think of it… I haven’t had freezing problems with any other games, and I was playing Stella Glow and 7th Dragon III just a few days ago. Could it be a Rune Factory 4 thing? Brb, Googling…

Ugh… It is a Rune Factory 4 thing. The 3DS is innocent, for once. But from my googling it seems most people only suffer from the occasional freeze. Mine freezes really really often. I can barely get through a game day normally. I thought the SD card might be on the fritz, but after testing it with both Windows and a testing app, it seems to be just fine. What am I supposed to do? :-<

Well… I’ll figure something out. I really really want to play this game. For now, a progress report. Frey is level 11, got her revenge on the butterfly boss in Yokmir Forest and has been plying Arthur with turnips every morning because the way to a man’s heart is through his love for veggies. I was planning to get Doug at first, but I realized I don’t like his smile (am I petty or what?) so Arthur it is. TBH I’m regretting playing as a girl a little bit because the girls are so much better than the guys. Forte, Margaret, Xiao Pai, Lumie, Amber… The guy list is just… who’s on it again?

Also I recently bought a refrigerator, a cooking table, a knife set and a chemistry set. My room looks like a disaster zone, or something from Shepherd’s Crossing. I need a bigger room. My progress is being blocked by a lack of Cooking Bread so I can’t learn recipes as fast as I want to. I bought bread the other day and I couldn’t even eat it because it was too advanced for me, what gives? Luckily enough it seems I can skip the Porcoline racket and get all my recipes from an online FAQ. Ha! Take that! My current goal is to save up for a forge and a crafting set and update my equips before taking on the boss of the Water Ruins with Forte.

There doesn’t seem to be much of a story beyond “You have amnesia, therefore you must develop our town.” I can’t even remember how the former led to the latter, but somehow Frey is the Chosen One so that’s how it goes. I’m not too hung up on stories in RPGs these days anyway. It’s fine if they just get out of the way and let me get on with it. After all, I already know how all Rune Factory games go. You kill all the bosses in all the dungeons then you kill their boss when he comes to complain and then you win the game. Now if only the game would stop freezing so I could actually do all that stuff.

I’ll google around a bit more for a possible solution. If that fails, I should be able to play Legend of Legacy now that the Y button is behaving. Fingers crossed!

7th Dragon III: Code VFD – Everybody’s talking at me

It’s not even a dungeon-crawler any more, it’s just another RPG where the characters just can’t shut up. Except your actual party is made up of mutes, so you just stand there while the NPCs pratter and blather. They tell you when to get up, when to go to bed, when to turn left, when to turn right, they just won’t leave you alone. Every once in a while they let you make some cosmetic choice, but I’ve been around the block often enough to know that this won’t make a whit of difference in the long run. Everybody just shut up!

Nothing much has happened in the story so far. Except we’re wasting time dealing with some ISDF fellows who are all going to die or join my party by the end of the game so I wish they wouldn’t even show up. Acting all tough just makes it more pathetic when the tide turns and dragons take out everybody’s headquarters. Yuma is probably going to turn into a dragon and make me have to kill him. Either that or he’ll do some kind of heroic sacrifice. He’s a goner either way so I don’t know why they’re bothering to build him up. Who’s going to be the traitor from Nodens? My money’s on Julietta for now. Whatever, just let me fight!!!!

This is where I would normally add something like “I’m still enjoying 7th Dragon III anyway” but this time I will add no such line because it’s not true. But it is early days yet – I’m only in chapter 2, just finished killing the High Dragon in Cladeon – so there’s still a chance for things to look up. After all 7th Dragon 2020 was even worse than Code VFD, but by 2020-II I had earned my stripes and got far more respect and autonomy from the higher-ups. Also I killed at least one of the people bossing me around, that always helps.

About the new classes and 2nd/3rd party systems… no me gusta. Me no like. Simply because they don’t introduce all the classes straight away. I’d made up my mind way back in the trailer stage that I was going with a Banisher and possibly a Rune Knight, but instead I have to waste time creating, equipping, leveling and learning to use throwaway classes instead. What for? Don’t you know I’m busy?

Ahem. I’d better stop before this post gets too whiny. It’s not Sega’s fault I’ve already played the earlier 7th Dragon games, and this is a good introduction to the series for newbies. I’m grateful to Atlus for bringing it out in English too, wouldn’t want to discourage anyone from playing it. I’m certainly not going to quit playing it any time soon. Time for another assault on Atlantis!

Densetsu no Kusuriyasan trial version – Kinda pointless

I feel slightly bad calling someone’s hard work “kinda pointless” but sometimes you have to call a spade a spade. And evidently the developers agreed because they never bothered to release an actual game. A trial version of Densetsu no Kusuriyasan is all that has existed for the past 12 years.

Densetsu no Kusuriyasan (ใงใ‚“ใ›ใคใฎใใ™ใ‚Šใ‚„ใ•ใ‚“, lit. The Legendary Pharmacist) would have been an R18+ otome and crafting game hybrid that would have been released by Japanese indie developer Mix Factor in 2012 but never made it past the (thankfully) worksafe demo stage. Normally this would sadden me a little bit, seeing as I love crafting games and I (think) love otome games but the resulting game would have been too adult for me to play anyway. Also the demo sucked. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, let’s take this in proper order.

Story

Mimosa is an apprentice pharmacist who chafes at the slow pace of her training and longs to apply her skills to the real world. She runs away from home and becomes the resident medicine woman in a small village. When our story begins, her grandmother has just tracked her down and is about to take her back. Luckily the village chief strikes a deal with granny allowing Mimosa to stay and work for just one more year. What’s more, if Mimosa can craft the highest level medicines in a book her grandma gives her within that year, she will become a full-fledged pharmacist and be free of her arduous training forever. With nothing to lose, Mimosa agrees to give it her best shot and so the game begins.

Gameplay

The game menu (and your depressingly dark studio):

Mimosa can take one action on weekdays and Saturdays and two actions on Sundays. Somehow she has to balance studying to learn new recipes with making medicines to raise her level with going out to forage for ingredients with visiting guys in their rooms, all within that extremely limited schedule.

The worst part is the medicine synthesis because every drug no matter how basic takes a full action to make. Way to take all the fun out of what should be the most enjoyable part of the game. Crafting is disappointing in other ways as well. For one, there are no icons or pictures of any of the ingredients or finished products, and yet all the flavor text is dry and pedestrian.

For another thing, there’s no in-story demand for any of the medicines you make. You only make them as a way to grind out your pharmacist level so you can unlock more recipes so you can grind your level even higher and round and round it goes. It’s possible that Mix Factor would have eventually added quests and story events that called for Mimosa’s medical skills instead of leaving crafting as “That thing you have to do if you want to finish the game.”

As Mimosa studies and forages and levels up, her stats rise and fall dramatically.

This is something that would have needed serious tweaking in the final game, because certain stat growths tend to cancel each other out. Study once and, for example, your intelligence goes up +6, physical strength goes down -3. Then you go foraging once and Strength up +6, intelligence -3. Not quite cancelled out… unless you choose to study or forage twice in a row, then you’re back to square one. Fine then, I’ll alternate studying and foraging every day, you say. But that’s useless because you don’t need to forage that much. Forcing yourself would just be pointless busywork to preserve your stats at the expense of a fun game experience. Oh and, btw, you’re never told what each stat actually does… Or if any stat actually does anything at all… Pointless, I tell you.

The other thing you can do with your time is visit one of the game’s four eligible bachelors. There’s Kai the chief’s son who likes to tease you but isn’t a bad sort. Then Rosmarinus or whatever his name is is a sickly noble who recently moved to the village. Arty is a lively adventurer who also just moved in and Lou is a live-in helper your grandmother assigned to do your housework.

Since Densetsu no Kusuriyasan was going to be an adult game, Mimosa probably would have gotten up to all kinds of ungentlemanly activities with these fine fellows. Since this is the clean demo, however, all you ever do is talk and drink tea together. It doesn’t even say what you talked about, just that you talked. You can also give them medicines you’ve made as presents. There’s no way of checking affection and repeated conversations produced diddly squat by way of special event. No events, no CGs, no dates, no nothing. …Pointless.

The demo ends after a month of play, by which point very little has happened. Mimosa will have raised her pointless stats a bit and increased her pointless level once or twice and made some pointless medicines and had pointless conversations with a few guys. And the gamer will heave a sigh of relief as she chucks the game into the Recycle Bin and wishes she had just played Solitaire instead.

Impressions

Densetsu no Kusuriyasan is a well-meaning game, I suppose. The more “cute girls doing alchemy” games we have, the better. The premise is serviceable too and I liked all the guys well enough. I could easily do all their routes in a better game. That’s the thing, though: there are better games out there. Otome games are a dime a dozen even on the indie circuit. And thanks to Gust and Cyberfront I have unreasonably high expectations of “cute girls crafting” games.

It’s not like Densetsu no Kusuriyasan couldn’t have been salvaged, but it would have required an extensive overhaul of everything from the graphics to the crafting system to the relationship and stat-raising systems. Most likely Mix Factor run a few numbers and realized that putting in so much effort for an R18 game was, yes you guessed it… pointless. They pulled the plug and nothing of any value was lost.

Moving on…

IIRC I have one or two more indie otome + alchemy games to try but that will have to come much later. Right now I’m knee-deep in 7th Dragon III: Code VFD. They’re doing that thing I hated about 7th Dragon 2020 where the navigator just wouldn’t shut up and every 5 minutes or so I’d be summoned back to headquarters for a useless meeting. I play videogames to get away from real life, thank you very much.

I’m also looking to start another otome game soon, either Angelique Etoile or one of the Harukanaru games. I haven’t played a good otome in ages. And I just rediscovered a note to myself where I meant to play Princess Maker 3 soon. Ehhhh… okay. Soon. That gives me a full plate in February going into March then I’ll make more plans if we’re all still alive.