I finished Rune Factory 3
1. The girls are pretty cute. They also have very different personalities, some better than others. It’s a nice variety. For the record I like Touna best.
2. There’s a lot of forging, pharmacy and cooking to do. Each successive Rune Factory game has more and more things recipes to play with, which I think is wonderful. Unfortunately…well, we’ll get to the ‘unfortunately’s in the next post.
3. The battles are easy, but not too easy. You can’t just tap A mindlessly, but you won’t be seeing the Game Over screen often either.
4. All the game characters have differing schedules and a range of things they do from day to day. They won’t be standing at the same spot at the same time every day, though you can predict where they’ll be from time to time. It livens things up a lot.
5. Growing and leveling up crops is much easier and faster this time. You even get free seasonal seeds from the ground sometimes when you hoe, yay. Also fertilizers are cheap and easy to make in your workshop.
6. The animals on your farm are very helpful. This time even produce animals like woollies can help out on your farm, and they don’t just water. They’ll also clear the ground of weeds and debris and harvest your crops too. Nice!
7. You can find Runeys (or whatever they’re called) left behind occasionally when you harvest, and they’ll give you random stat ups. This makes leveling up even easier!
8. This is a big one: Items you carry can stack! Remember how in all the other Harvest Moon games you pick one turnip, put it in your rucksack, pick another turnip, put it in the sack? This time you can pick and hold 9 items in a row, pop pop pop, and then put them in the bag or the shipping bin together. You can even leave them on the ground and they’ll be neatly piled as one. Awesome!
9. As I said, you can put stuff on the ground and it won’t vanish. Not only won’t it vanish immediately, but it will stay on the ground for hours, or unless you leave more than 9 items lying around on the same screen. To the best of my knowledge only Grand Bazaar and Rune Factory 3 have that ability (haven’t played Rune Factory:Frontier yet). Double awesome!
10. Drop rates are way better in this game. Just about everything drops, and drops frequently from the monsters in the field, so there’s none of that killing 2000000 monsters just for a 1/90million chance drop. It was so bad in RF1, got better in RF2 and I think they’ve hit the right rates in RF3. Good show.
And other assorted little details. My next post will be on the not-so-fun parts of this game, but even if I get negative don’t let that discourage you. I still played and finished this game with glee, so it can’t be that bad, okay?
I also found that the fact the weather can change makes everything very interesting.
One day you spend an hour in the desert, go back home to water your crops and discover it has rained. It’s a really nice feature. (Also great points)
Right, I liked that it could start raining in the middle of the day. It was very realistic.
Twin Villages has midday rain too, but they tell you in advance so it’s not such a nice surprise.