Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Not Just Easy, Cheap Also

So I went to Game Stop the other day and made a gem of a purchase: Rune Factory for the DS. It's like Harvest Moon, with a little extra. There's a little more story going on (albeit not much more) and along with general agriculture you can also adventure into caves and do battle with monsters. The greatest thing though, is the fact that instead of killing the monsters, you can choose instead pet them into submission and they will join your team to either farm alongside you, or kick some ass with you.

If you're a fan of Harvest Moon games at all, this is one you definitely need to own. If not, I would still recommend it to you. It's fun and pretty addicting once you get into it. Sometimes I'll sit down for a short stint and wind up playing for hours.

The stylus is implemented flawlessly making the gameplay simpler than your typical d-pad, a, b, x, y control scheme. You can use the stylus to kind of auto assign tasks to things. So instead of busting out your cheap hoe and walking 1 square at a time mashing the B button you can just click on areas of the field you want cultivated and go to town using the stylus.

My only "beef" is that until you skill up your attributes enough in the various areas you'll be repeating day-to-day you're going to find yourself running out of energy and having to throw in the digital towel early on an ingame daily basis. Also every now and again a typhoon will destroy all of your hard work in the fields. The last 3 crops I have planted in my fields have all been destroyed by typhoons meaning you're sort of forced into cavern planting, which while enjoyable means you have to travel back and forth to water your plants and harvest them.

Other than that, everything about this game is well thought out and very fun to play. I give it 4 pimp slaps out of 5.

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