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Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon is yet
another handheld presentation for the widely loved Harvest Moon
series, turning its attention back to the Nintendo DS for an
appealing exploration
into new territory. Alongside the traditional resource management
and farm life simulation prevalent in the series comes an expansion
into Role-Playing Game (RPG) territory, supported by the strengths
of Harvest Moon’s often emotive storylines, bringing dungeon
crawling and real-time combat into the equation.
A totally implausible plot opening with an amnesiac
protagonist and an incredibly naive young girl begins an adventure
quite unlike any Harvest Moon before it. The storyline may
well be far-fetched and rather ham-fisted with its’ urgency, but
remains layered with the intrigue and charm that characterise the
series. From this immediate introduction, the player will begin
building their empire with a small plot of land, a handful of
low-grade tools and a few seeds.
A great deal of minor improvements have been made to the
framing aspect of the series, most of which are notably for the
better. Players can now walk across crops instead of having to plan
their layout accordingly to allow for watering spaces, or risk
unnecessarily losing resources, and the Inventory has been expanded
exponentially. Newcomers to the franchise will still find a steep
learning curve in place, but long-time fans will undoubtedly feel
right at home.
As with previous entries in the Harvest Moon franchise, the
game restricts your progress by way of limiting the length of each
gameplay opportunity, forcing you to return home to sleep. As the
 size
of your farming empire grows, players will have to trade-off between
their adventure and their business. The RPG aspect of the title is
comparable to many titles already available on the Nintendo DS, most
notably Square Enix’s Children of Mana and Rising Star Games’
own Dungeon Maker. The player can buy new equipment from the
stores in town and venture into numerous dungeons in order to find
new fertile land, and other items of interest. Different areas
benefit/suffer from varying conditions, allowing for different crops
to be grown – but only once the area has been cleared of monsters -
stretching the importance of time management further.
The game features plenty of other distractions – side quests and
meta-games aplenty – but the real treat lies in the multi-player
gameplay options. While demanding a Multi-Card set-up, in which, the
player brings with them their existing game data and items, the game
allows for a fully operational co-operative mode in which two
players can work together on a single farm, or go hunting for
monsters together.
Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon looks gorgeous – easily
on par with Square Enix’s 3D Final Fantasy remakes.
Beautifully hand drawn backdrops compliment the crystal clear
 anime
Cut-Scenes; sequences that are filled with just the right amount of
ludicrousness. Bizarrely, full Touch Screen control has only been
implemented on fertile land – the areas in which a player can grow
crops – whilst all travelling must be done via the D-Pad.
Rising Star Games have handled some fantastic Nintendo DS releases
across the last year, but few come close to matching the proficiency
of the delivery shown in Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon.
Offering everything a Harvest Moon title should within a
beautifully realised world, the incorporation of an RPG aspect is
simply an wonderfully thick layer of icing on the cake. Rune
Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon is clearly the finest Harvest
Moon to yet grace a handheld system, and with an increasingly
respectable fanbase, that will be more than enough. |
