Equally so, I miss the livestock of Stardew Valley and fully customizing my environment from Animal Crossing. Like I said before, Rune Factory is a great first entry in the farm and life sim genre. This is certainly preferential, but this option sits rather well with me just because I don’t particularly enjoy this side of Rune Factory. Committing to your farm does make a few requests easier, but the farm never truly demands your attention a vast majority of the time. You still must use farming skills to fulfill requests for townspeople, like harvesting lumber or stone from objects, but that’s about it.Īt the same time, you have at your disposal a simplistic but complete farming sim gameplay experience that can keep you in the game.

If you wish to only interact with the townspeople and further the story, Rune Factory allows you to do that. This franchise offers you the chance to choose whether you want to include the farming side of the game. I need to start out this segment with the way that Rune Factory 4 Special handles its farm sim side. Other parts of the game see you just take resources from dungeons and distribute them, but crafting still needs your direct input to create something before giving it to someone else, which helps to add a little purpose to the game at large. This part of Rune Factory is its strength because you have more involvement in it. Without doing these, your progress slows down immensely. You must craft weapons for your character or create items to complete requests that townspeople give you. At the same time, the game rewards you for taking the time to level up each skill as much as you can.Ĭrafting also demands your attention. Most of your skills level naturally as you play, which helps keep game progression at a steady pace. This allows you to constantly feel your character improving, and seeing that “Skill Level Up” text pop up adds a little hit of dopamine to keep you motivated. These contribute to your character’s overall level, but you still need expertise in certain skills in order to succeed, like building up strength in order to defeat stronger enemies. This goes for farming, sharing gifts, talking with people, and so much more. Much like in the Elder Scrolls games, you must repeatedly perform a task or action in order to level up that action, like leveling attack by attacking enemies. Constantly Leveling UpĮverything you do grants you experience in some skill. You also learn some simple combo attacks, like using dash while attacking or holding the attack button to strengthen your hit, but the combos never get complicated.

You slay enemies in order to progress further into zones and their dungeons, and it makes for a good time in the short term. To complement this, the simplistic combat system plays into the formula well.

Rune factory 4 characters