After handing over the flowers, you could ask them to join you on an adventure into the field - both to raise their all-important Love Points and provide some much-needed backup.
You might start out planting flowers to sell in the shipping box, but hold on to a few extras at harvest time to make a bouquet for your beloved.
Festivals, by the way, have come a long way since the original Harvest Moon, in both interactivity and creativity, and they'll definitely keep you on your toes - an early event sees your character running around the town square as the townsfolk pelt you amicably with different types of beans, like some sort of seed-based bullet-hell shooter in reverse.Ī big part of what makes Rune Factory 4 so much fun is that all three of its main activities - farming, flirting, and fighting - intertwine into one incredibly addictive cycle. This might be the only game that lets you methodically level-up in 'Sword', 'Love', 'Fishing', 'Walking', 'Sleeping', 'Bathing', and 'Throwing' categories - among many other important abilities - and we love it for that.Īll these different deeds also help you to earn Prince(ss) Points - a merit-based system you can use to commission new buildings, expand your farm plot, schedule festivals, and generally improve the town. There are specific experience points to earn in dozens of different areas, with surprisingly encouraging "Skill Up!" messages appearing on-screen every time you move up a level. It seems like it would be easy to feel overwhelmed by the options, but one of Rune Factory 4's best features is that you can choose to spend your day however you see fit - there really are no wrong choices - and no matter what, you'll be suitably rewarded with visible progress. Or you could take up various requests from the townspeople, helping them out by learning to cook, bringing them an item they need, or clearing an area of monsters. You might decide to set out exploring, braving the baddie-filled field map as you discover new dungeons, monsters, bosses, and plot-points.
You could also concentrate on wooing one of the game's six bachelors or bachelorettes, giving them gifts, taking them out on dates, and eventually getting married. From daybreak to dusk (where each in-game minute lasts a real-world second) you might choose to work in the fields, harvesting crops and planting new ones in their place, gathering resources, and shipping out your prince(ess)ly produce. It's quite a mix, and it means there's always plenty of fun things to be doing. The core of the Rune Factory experience is a unique blend of three main gameplay styles, taking Harvest Moon's tried-and-true formula of farming-meets-dating sim, and adding in action-RPG elements and an overarching adventure. Rune Factory 4 combines Harvest Moon's joyfully fulfilling fusion of farmwork and flirting with the slice-of-life storytelling and andante tempo of the Atelier series, and adds in a generous helping of Zelda-style action-RPG combat on the side, making for one of the freshest feeling farming games in years. It sounds incongruous, but somehow it works - if Harvest Moon showed us that the spade was just as mighty as the sword, Rune Factory proves that they're even better together, and this latest instalment absolutely perfects the message. It seems odd, then, that Natsume's ten-year anniversary gift to the franchise was the beginning of the Rune Factory spin-offs, famously described as "Harvest Moon with swords". An RPG where players progressed not by fighting battles or banishing evil, but by tending gently to the land, caring for animals, and finding true love there was nothing quite like it.
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The Harvest Moon series has become something of a standby over the last decade or so, so it's easy to forget just how revolutionary it was when it first hit the Super Nintendo back in 1996.