Harvest Moon like you have never seen before
Pros: Lengthy gameplay allows for countless hours to be spent exploring and farming, however the game goes much further with character interaction. The introduction of the 'weather cave' system allows you to grow multiple season items even during the winter. RPG elements like weapons, armour and stat and skill increases.
Cons: Sometimes this game can be annoying, especially when farming and the season switches over half way through a crops growth. You might find at times that the gameplay is repetitive.
Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon takes place in a small village comprised of about 35 other characters whom you must interact with, especially the girls who you talk to and build a relationship status meter, much like past Harvest Moon games. You are a lost young man who wound up in a strange village, but unfortunately you have lost your memory. A local girl named Mist takes you in and agrees to let you use her farm. Unlike in past games, you are capable of capturing monsters who can help you on your farm, however you have to spend time gathering wood and you need money in order to build housing for your monsters as well as providing food for them. In order to collect monsters you must first gain access to caves, where you can battle them as well as store crops for each season, as each individual cave is seasonal. There is a boss lurking at the end of each cave though and you must be strong enough to survive the cave, you also need to destroy all the enemy spawning machines in order to get at the boss in the first place.
Of course as you progress and interact with the girls in the village, your relationship status rating goes up like in most dating sim games, at the end you have to pick the girl you want to marry. But you need a proper house with the right furnishings and stuff as well, which again you need lots of money and wood in order to build. But at the end of it all, Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon is a fantastic game that Natsume has done really well and is the best offering in the series in many years, mixing fun dungeon crawling, RPG and life sim elements all into one game, packed with nice pre rendered scenery and 3D character design.