Rune Factory 4 Special (English) · Test

Passionate Love, Sweet Marriage

Story of Seasons originally known as Harvest Moon is a household name when it comes to the slice-of-life Farming genre but that kind of relaxing gameplay might not be enough for you. What if you want Action or Monster Taming?

Well, look no further! Rune Factory is an official offshoot of the Story of Seasons. It started as Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon and since then is capable of standing on its name. But what is Rune Factory? Producer Yoshifumi Hashimoto has just the explanation for you: It’s a Harvest Moon where you wield a sword.

In short, it’s an RPG Version of Harvest Moon where you have to go through dungeons and a linear Story AND romances with 12 potential Spouses (6 Female + 6 Male). Passionate love, sweet Marriage is the topic of Rune Factory 4 Special.

Can Rune Factory 4 Special successfully execute this ambitious mix of genres?

Out of the blue sky

The story begins with our protagonist on his way in an airship for a seemingly very important mission… that he immediately forgets because suspicious robbers have whacked on the head. As we all know, the only result that can come from that is Amnesia. To make matters worse they are even dropping you off the airship into certain death but lady luck has other plans. There’s a blessing in disguise awaiting after dropping onto the local dragon of Selphia. Your future home. Due to forgetting everything except your name, the dragon mistakes you for the awaited prince and thus begins your life in Selphia.

The overarching story consists of going to dungeons and a lot more. Aside from the daily life as a prince and administrator, you also have the opportunity to find a Spouse out of the 6 + 6 candidates.

It’s not a fast-paced story and fits perfectly into the gameplay that consists of mundane but fun work and occasional adventuring. This doesn’t mean there isn’t a serious story awaiting you.

If there’s one thing you’ll notice immediately is the idyllic atmosphere with a calm and relaxing environment and people. Making sure you feel right at home from day 1.

Just to emphasize the atmosphere, there’s one very important fact to be mentioned. There’s an explanation that the monsters come from a different dimension and you don’t kill them. After they are knocked down they only go back to their dimension.

Controls and Gameplay

While the controls are pretty simple since it’s based on a 3DS game. You’ll be using about 3 buttons most of the time aside from calling up the menu. Picking things up, keeping them and attacking will be your most frequent activities.

The L-Button is a quick item menu that is put into 4 different categories: Weapons, Tools, Items, and Skills. You’ll be using this frequently because each activity requires a specific tool. Chopping wood, sowing seeds, watering, hammering stones and more are part of the essentials and thus a lot of equipment.

As you can see, there’s a lot to do wrap your head around, despite the simplistic controls.

A short introduction into the gameplay

Rune Factory 4 Special consists of different parts that are intertwined: RPG/Action, Farming, Monster Taming and more. Every single thing you do will level up that specific action. Even the most mundane action like throwing, plowing and whatever you can imagine is specified as its skill and you profit from it.

Health is the standard HP bar.

Rune Points (RP) are a little more special and are required for specific tasks like farming, cooking or crafting. You can recover them by using food or cutting down very specific flowers.

To give things more nuanced, there’s also a day/night cycle that runs at 1 Minute is 1 Second in realtime.

One of the most important features is the ability to return to town at any time using the specified shortcut button. There’s no need to worry about backtracking as there’s a good fast travel system ready to be unlocked early on.

Farming

This couldn’t be any easier but still adds some extra depth. Rune Factory 4 Special does not have months but rather is split into the 4 seasons with 30 days each. Different crops prefer different seasons. From the very beginning, you get to take care of your garden and it’s something you’ll probably do like a clockwork after waking up.

In case you’re fearing that some crops are available for growing, there are special fields available that are locked into a specific season. Find them and use them wisely.

From the very beginning, you’ll be introduced into farming as a quest and therefore also get provided with seeds. After that, you can get them either from plucking ripe crops (with a lot of luck) or buy them at the store.

To sow the seed you have to plow the field first using the hoe and follow up with some watering aftercare using the watering can. The watering is a daily essential to get healthy crops.

It might be difficult to believe but Rune Factory 4 Special has a slightly realistic system that requires you for the farmland to rest.

To make things easier there’s a special bin that creates compost and automatically spreads the fertilizer as long as you keep it fed. Even the most useless weed will find a use!

Farming will be one of your major income streams and source of ingredients for cooking and interesting enough you can even decide what kind of strategy you want to go for.

One of them is to just go for quantity by plating a lot of crops and buy new ones en-masse.

Another strategy is to up the quality of your crops that requires us to talk about another tool: The Scythe. Use it on fully crown crop and you can get a higher level seed.

You can mix and match both strategies and that’s the beauty of it.

Now, all that farming work might sound like a lot of work that takes some time from other important work. What’s there left for adventuring and dating? To be fair, things can be done pretty fast depending on how much time you want to spend on it. But there’s something else that can help you out!

Befriending Monsters

The fact that you can tame monsters blew my mind and it’s not even limited to normal monsters. Boss Monsters are on the table too but they require specific gifts. What are the advantages of befriending them? You can take them out as helpers for adventuring and they can take care of your farming work. Make sure to rotate them to keep them healthy if you do.

They can also take care of sowing the seed but that understandably doesn’t come free and who would expect that with a good conscience anyway?

Some monsters are even giving you materials regularly in the barn or you can actively shear the sheep-like monster too but make sure to let them keep their wool in winter!

In regards to adventuring, some monsters can be used as mounts and it’s a sight to behold when you see your character riding a fish for example. Riding them gives you a good speed boost and offers a special mounted attack.

The task of befriending monsters is for sure something to keep in mind as there are many advantages to it and who wouldn’t want some badass boss monster or cute ones as friends?

RPG/Action

Possibly the most important difference between Rune Factory and Story of Seasons. You get the typical Action RPG gameplay reminiscing of Legend of Mana on the surface level. You fight and move in realtime. There’s a level-up system and a lot of weapons are at your disposal and all of them have their moves to unlock by using them.

Aside from the normal attacks, you can find special Rune Abilities and Magic. You can only ready up at least two of them as shortcuts (Y and X) and both of them deplete RP.

One of the more subtle but very important actions while fighting is the Dash-Button (R-Shoulder Button). Usually, the attacks require you to wait for the animation to complete to move again, which leads to dangerous moments of immobility. This is where the Das comes in. It can cancel the latter part of the animation and increases your mobility making it easier to dodge.

It’s important to note that healing requires items like food and crafted dishes increases the base potency of the ingredients by a lot.

If things get too tough you can take with you a friendly monster or ask one of the potential Spouses to accompany you.

Looking for a Spouse

Another one of the most interesting elements of Rune Factory 4 Special is the option to marry one of the 12 bachelors. Build up your relationship by gifting them things they like or invite them to adventure. Once they like you enough, there might be some special event awaiting you that helps you get to know them even more.

Once they like you enough you can ask them to dates and after that, you can finally tie the knot. And then? There might be a time soon where you will be planning an adventure as a family…

Missions

To spice things up you get to do some quests every day. It starts with one each day and steadily increases the amount you can take on. It also doubles as a tutorial as the requests are there to teach you how to do things and get rewards for it. A very organic and entertaining way to ease you into the game.

Festivals

Another one of your administrative jobs is to get people to visit your town and there’s nothing better than offer some fun festival competitions. Not only is everybody invited but you can also show your prowess by joining the fun. Cooking, fishing, shearing, there are enough activities to have something interesting to look forward to.

Gameplay impression

Time flies in Rune Factory 4 Special. The well thought out mix of different mechanics going from RPG to Farming and Romance puts it in a special spotlight. It has an interesting crafting system that supports creating everything yourself and putting every single material to use. Cooking and Farming are intertwined as you can grow your ingredients and level up your cooking together.

There’s no time for boredom as you get supplied with daily missions and a steady supply of story missions.

There might be one or two things to nitpick. One of them is the RNG elements. The supply of rock and wood is static and it’s up to the RNG gods to provide you with them. If you take it slowly you won’t get any shortage as they refresh every day but it could be different if you’re on a fast track.

Another one is the item management. You have to use a lot of tools for specific actions so it makes sense to keep them in your bag but this, in turn, reduces the number of things you can take with you. Thus you’re going to spend a good amount of time in menus to clean up your inventory.

Graphics and Sound

Considering that this is an HD Remaster of a 3DS game, it looks pretty good. Yes, there are can be slightly blurred details but characters come in high resolution making it much easier for the eyes. Aside from the technical standpoint, the visuals design is very unique and colorful with some cute designs too. To add some more details to the characters and their polygonal selves each character has their character artworks when talking giving you a much more detailed view of them.

The Music is equally good as you can expect from this type of game. Couple it with the visual design and you got a memorable experience. There’s a wide range of soundtracks that accompany you in different locations, magnifying the atmosphere in a good way. They aren’t always as memorable as the Town and the Road theme but fit right into the mood of your location.

There’s also a limited amount of Japanese and Englisch dub but it’s nothing crucial to the enjoyment of the game.

Verdict

Rune Factory 4 Special is an exceptional game that combines multiple genres into a single package. Be it RPG, Taming or Crafting, the execution is nothing short of stellar. Even though this is an HD Remaster of a 3DS game, it still convinces in close to every regard and also offers new exclusive content for this new version.

If you already own the 3DS version, then you'll have to judge whether a higher difficulty and the bonus Newlywed Mode (extra stories for the married life) are enough for a double-dip.

At a moderate price of £32.99, it certainly over-delivers when you consider how much it offers.

Fans of the before mentioned genre should take a close look at this game and even those who had no interest before might find it very appealing.

Rune Factory 5 has already been announced and I can’t help but look forward to what it brings. Those who got a taste of the farming and liking it can look forward to STORY OF SEASONS: Friends of Mineral Town which Launches 10th July on Nintendo Switch.

Wertung

9.5Hervorragend

Kaufempfehlung

95% Kaufempfehlung

95%Absoluter Pflichtkauf