Reviews// Rune Factory 4

There are two methods to crafting and cooking, either randomly choosing ingredients – which will usually fail to produce useful results – or by following one of the many recipes – recipes which you learn by eating magic bread. Obviously. In the end you’ll be walking out of this with more efficient tools to help you on the farm, more powerful weapons to help you fight stronger monsters, or tasty cooked food which can be eaten to increase your stats and recover health and stamina. Or you can use this to help you in the next facet of gameplay.

If you’ve played any of the Harvest Moon games you’ll find the social aspects of Rune Factory 4 very familiar. Making friends and influencing people is very simple in these games – you just give stuff to people that they like. The best results are usually gained from using your cooking skills to create the townspeople’s favourite foods and butter them up that way. As always there are a select number of characters in town who can be romanced once their opinion of you is high enough, and one of the game’s goals is for you to eventually marry one of the lucky ladies/bachelors.

Of course if you’re interested in more practical results then it’s worth noting that once people trust you enough you’ll be able to invite them to join your party when you head out into the wilds to hack through wild monsters and explore the land.

Of course, if you’d rather fill your party with something more interesting than quirky anime villagers there’s one more big gameplay feature to rely on – monster taming. The biggest and most notable omission from the Harvest Moon series here is the presence of farm animals. While in the Harvest Moon games you can raise and breed cows and sheep and the like, here in Rune Factory your barns are instead populated with monsters you must tame yourself while adventuring.

Taming monsters is fairly simple, much like with the townsfolk all you need to do is give them items until they decide you’re not so bad for a human. Once tamed and named the monsters take residence in one of your barns. From then on you can enlist them into your party at any time, and they will level up and grow stronger as they fight alongside you.

Once you’ve raised a monster's affection for you enough you can put them to work on your farm, giving them simple jobs to do each day to save you the effort. I’m a sucker for monster-raising games so forging my hapless Orcs into the world’s most fearsome fighting team was definitely my favourite element of Rune Factory 4.

Getting the most out of this game requires a lot of multi-tasking, but once you get things nailed down you’ll find a good productive day to be quite rewarding in itself, and Rune Factory 4 is at it’s most addictive when you’re planning ahead and waiting to see how the next day of work and adventuring turns out. If you’re familiar with previous entries in either the Rune Factory or Harvest Moon series’ you’ll feel right at home here, but there are enough improvements and expanded gameplay features to give you plenty to sink your teeth into.

Pros:
+ Gives you plenty to do.
+ Quite addictive.

Cons:
- Appeals to a very niche audience.
- Awful plot keeps trying to get in way of farming, hunting, fishing, crafting, whatever.

SPOnG score: 7/10