It's all about the turnips
But while Rune Factory 2: A Fantasy Harvest Moon is a solid game relative to other recent iterations in the Harvest Moon series, it's plagued by overcompensation. Natsume is having trouble finding that "just right" position for a variety of their game mechanics. Previously, people have complained that Harvest Moon games are too slow-paced and too difficult to get into. Now, the opposite is true.
Since its beginning, nobody has ever denied that the farming sim has been, by nature, a repetitive game. The fun, then, comes from using the results of your daily grind to create progress in your farm and in your village. Consistently watering and occasionally harvesting crops is fun when you know that the next big harvest is going to pay for an upgraded barn or a new patch of land.
When this system is skewed is when the entire series falls off a cliff. When items such as seeds and tools are so expensive that you can barely afford them, or upgrades cost ridiculous amounts of money compared to the income from your farm, then the game inevitably gets off to a slow start and generally discourages players from enjoying it.
While it's taken them several new installments of the series, Natsume seems to have finally recognized this problem and taken steps to correct it. It's like they're rowing their Harvest Moon canoe down a river and suddenly see the big, freaking Waterfall of Slow Starts in the imminent distance. They guide the canoe away, thankfully, but they oversteer, and as a result end up running their boat over a bunch of sharp rocks. Sure, they avoided the waterfall, but the canoe is still screwed up.
The rocks that the canoe ran upon in this case is a complete lack of direction. Many things in Rune Factory 2 are too easily obtained. For example, you can easily max out all the available farm land in just a year, and after that there's really nowhere else to go. The idea of slowly building up a "farming empire" in Harvest Moon games has always been appealing, but Rune Factory 2 essentially throws that out the window. Ultimately, I feel this is a bad direction for the series to go. Admittedly, previous games' openings have been slow. But I'll take that to a game with no ultimate purpose or goal.
That said, Rune Factory really is an issue of extremes. On the one hand, you've got preliminary goals, like making a crapload of money, that are accomplished all too easily. And on the other, you've got some other goals that span multiple generations. For example, building a school is necessary to progress on to the second half of the game, but completing this task is something that takes anywhere from ten to twenty hours, depending on how aggressively you approach finding a wife.
As a result, the first generation that you play as in Rune Factory 2 is characterized by a huge, gaping void of activity and instead sports rampant repetition for no real reason. You wake up at six, water your plants, and are back in bead by 11 in the morning. Frankly, I'm surprised my character hasn't become a fat-ass after months and months of sleeping 19 or 20 hours every single day, interrupted only occasionally by short bursts of farming activity.
The bulletin board system, which throws handfuls of fetch quests at you, breaks up the monotony for a little while, only by providing a different kind of boredom. But after a little while the developers must have gotten tired of writing quests, because all of a sudden the quests just stop. The fact that you so quickly run out errands to run does nothing to help the fact that there's just not much going on in this game. Even the much-touted combat, an addition specifically for the Rune Factory games and a gameplay mechanic around which many of the quests revolve, is boring and lackluster. Mashing buttons isn't fun in other dungeon crawlers, and it's not fun in Rune Factory 2.
As easy it is to lay down the smack on Rune Factory 2, I actually do like the game. It can get dull and repetitive for stretches of time, but once you get to the second generation – IF you get to the second generation before you get too bored with the game – things pick up. As Harvest Moon games go, it's not bad. That said, it's still not great, which leads me to believe it might be time to put the series to bed. Harvest Moon has provided us with a lot of good times, but farming just isn't as fun as it once was.