Rune Factory 4 3DS is a life sim farming JRPG by Natsume and is part of the Rune Factory series. Like earlier versions, it focuses on an amnesiac character who is working with the small town they find themselves to build a life and improve the village, while destroying an evil force that plagues the land.
The story was not that good and the slow pacing and bland characters definitely took away some of the game’s appeal. It is one cliche after another and don’t expect to see events happening too quickly given the slow nature. The localization is cheesy and the voice acting was average at best. The comedy was distracting because of too much jokes every few moments. The artstyle and the graphics were excellent.
The localization in general was also a mess too, but its not surprisingly since this is from Xseed the English publishing division of Marvelous the games developers from mismatching dialogue and voice lines to, even oddly untranslated lines too maybe its not the case for the ports but here its not hard to miss.
The town events too, alot of them are huge idiot plots especially anything with Illuminatia who’s unwarranted self importance and very pushy behavior and that one scene with Amber with the seeds was really out of pocket and while i personally don’t consider Amber to be a loli or that gen-z/gen-alpha term called “minor” coded cause she’s a grown up and there’s grownups that like kids do have hyperactive cheerful perky personalities doesn’t mean necessarily that they are on anything like that its just how they are, but still that scene with Amber was way uncalled for and just way out of linne and really should not have been even written in the first place, but thankfully Illuminatia gets run up and done by Forte in one story event which was really funny and honestly well deserved cause her personality only just creates more bullshit events than anything honestly and at least Terry was a huge step up from her and yeah, Illuminatia is by far one of the most fucking stupid characters I've seen in a jrpg period. (Honary mention visual novel wise goes to that one particular nurse in Trauma Center with a certain scene reffering to telling a patient to go unalive themselves so she and Illuminata are both characters who defo would be a perfect match in hell if you ask me lol.)
Town events too, especially the third arc it can take a long while at random for it to really happen too.
The game has you in charge of the town and you gain titles as you that allow you to improve the town in order to encourage more tourists. The more tourists you get by doing activities like shipping items and taking part in festivals, the more benefits you gain as time goes by.
Some dungeons can be a confusing mess with quite a bit of backtracking, otherwise a good amount of them were fairly straight forward. You can improve various skills to help you out in combat as well as in the field like farming and equipment making and it takes a long while for it to get to the stat level that you need. You can develop relationships as before as time goes by in the game and get partners to help you out in combat. You can tame monsters and have a monster barn like before and you can now even tame boss monsters too and also ship items and use various gardening tools and items to help grow them. One of the complaints I have since Kingdom Hearts is purchasing points to use for user interface features like displaying enemy health and levels that should be free,
Overall, it was an ok game.
To be honest now, i really can’t see myself playing any Rune Factory game at all in the future from here on in, as i really just find the games to be clichestorm after clichestorm and just too cheesy for my own liking, and I'll still play other xseed/marvelous developed games but rune factory will not be part of them period.
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