Very addicting farming sim/RPG with a solid storyline. Too easy though.
At the start of the Second Generation, the character you previously played as leaves and you take control of his son or daughter (You can choose the gender of your child during Gen 1. The story within this generation is that your looking for your father, along the way you discover your a decendant of skill magic users called the Earthmates.
I really enjoyed the story of this game, for a company that doesn't do much work with RPGs they did a great job, and the idea of combining it with their signature Farming Sim games was really different, but successfully so. My only issues with the game we're graphics, framerate and difficulty.
So we all know how handheld Harvest Moon games look right? Rune Factory tries hard to be higher quality with its graphics. Im not too critical about it but sometimes the character sprites did seem a little pixelated and sloppy, overall the game looks great though, don't get me wrong but I prefer Harvest Moon's style.
The graphics might have something to do with the Framerate as well. Often times if a number of charaxcter sprites were in close proximity the game would experiance a lot of slow down, and also when you use the "Escape" spell to warp back out to the entrance of Messhina Valley there would be some brief slow down just afterwards.
The biggest problem and hardest hit to the rating is the difficulty. I know Natsume isn't experianced with balancing RPG games but I found all the boss quite easy, even more so than the enemies of their given regions, with exception to Messhina Valley's boss which is faught with limited space. Also teh seasonal regions and dungeons make it much to easy to grow waht you want and collect money really quick, I had so much cash that I always bought more Platinum than I mined out of sheer lazyness, and because I could..