Games: Rune Factory 3

Okay, here’s another farming simulation/rpg type game for the DS. This game is a lot of fun.

The story is simple: you are a young man who has lost his memory. A kind village girl takes you in and sets you up with a home in the Sharance Tree. This is an ancient tree that has watched over the land for generations – but it hasn’t bloomed for many years. You will settle down to farm and get to know the locals, while you help with the occasional monster problem, go after your lost memories, try to keep your secret from those around you, and seek to help the Tree.

This game is like a fantasy The Bachelor. Half the town’s population is made up of young, single women, many of whom are slightly crazy and/or generators of drama (just like the real The Bachelor). You can lead them all on simultaneously, before picking just one to be the winner.

The gameplay elements are very similar to Rune Factory 4, which I have described here.

Rune Factory 4 is generally held to be the better game, and I’d agree that it is. It’s more developed and the game lasts longer. Certain gameplay mechanics are improved and the characters are slightly more two-dimensional. However, Rune Factory 3 is still well worth playing. Let’s look at some areas and compare them with RF4.

Characters

The RF3 characters are all very distinctive and fun. Some of them can be a bit one-note, in that many of them really have one or two topics of conversation. After Hazel has made her twenty-seventh comment complaining about her lazy daughter, Pia her fortieth comment about fishies, and Marian her seven hundred and eighty-first comment about forcing medicine on an unwilling victim, you may prefer not to pursue friendship with them.

The RF4 characters are tropey (that is, many of them fit into recognisable anime stereotypes) but in general are less one-note. So I must say I do prefer the RF4 characters.

Then again, in RF3, you get a lot more choice in who you can date – 11 bachelorettes, as opposed to 6. In RF4, you can play as a male or female protagonist, and this affects whether you can romance the male or female singletons in the town (there are six of each gender). So if you’re playing as a male protagonist, RF3 might be better – as there’s much more choice – whereas if you want to date guys, you’ll need to play RF4 (and I think the male characters like Dylas, Doug, Vishnal etc are better than the bachelorettes of either game).

RF3 has a lot of the same strengths as RF4, though. There’s a lot of humour – particularly from your character, the only sane person in town, responding in bewilderment to the nonsense going on around him. In both games, the characters have lots of different dialogue – you can talk to them every day and hear different comments each time – and characters will interact in lots of enjoyable little stories and cut scenes throughout the game. As you get to know characters better, you’ll hear different dialogue and see character growth from them.

Requests

Both games have a request system. In RF4, this is more about encouraging you to extend yourself and try out the different things you can do in-game, like growing/shipping certain crops, raising friendship levels, raising skills, etc. You get rewards, but they are less story-based.

In RF3, there are a lot of requests more related to character development and story progression. By meeting numerous requests of the girl you like, you get to know them and participate in stories with them. By doing this, you can eventually marry them.

I like this about RF3: You have control over your own fate! In RF4, to advance in relationships with the characters and get married, you have to hope you can trigger random events. It could take a long time for this to happen. The main reason I chose Vishnal over Dylas was because his marriage events triggered first and I was sick of waiting. This problem doesn’t exist in RF3.

The only downside to the RF3 request system is that you can only do (for example) one mailbox request per day. If you are wooing eleven women at once, and each of them have a dozen or so requests, that’s a lot of days before you get through it all. In a way, this is the main system that extends the playtime – you may have finished the dungeons by early autumn, but you’ll still play day after day to see the character moments.

Game length

To me, this was the only real downside to RF3 – it’s very easy to finish the whole story well before the first in-game year is finished.

One motivating force of these games is getting stronger to progress further into the story. In the early days, things you want to achieve come thick and fast, and you may not have enough hours in the day to do all you want to.

But once you have finished the story, then all the dozens of higher-level weapons you’ve never unlocked – all the things you’ve never forged – all the obscure flowers you’ve never grown – well, there’s no reason to bother with them. For example, I collected heaps of gold and platinum but never once used them to make anything. The weapon and shield I had got me through all the dungeons without any problem. I kind of felt like there was a lot of stuff left to do but no story-related reason to do it. Like, if I continued to make bigger and bigger piles of money, what would I find to spend it on? Why go for flashier weapons if the main boss is already defeated?

(One positive: there are optional bonus dungeons you can enter through your basement. These are good for building your skill and getting lots of random loot. You don’t have to enter any of them, but they could give you extra motivation to skill up, if you wanted to try to defeat the toughest dungeons.)

Also, your marriage is the climax of the main storyline, meaning that once you get married, there is no more story – thus, no more story-related goals. But if you want to have a child, you have to wait a month from the time you get married. A month is a bit tedious to get through if you don’t have anything you need to do – get up, have a bit of character interaction, go back to bed at 7:30am each day. It would be good if there were still goals, even if they were less important ones.

This is where RF4 was better; the main story was longer, and it extended you more, even after you were married.

(Amusingly, in RF3, if you haven’t finished the love stories of the other bachelorettes, no drama! You can easily just carry on with them after you’re married. You philanderer you.)

Conclusion

Rune Factory 3 is good fun and would be worth playing if you have enjoyed Rune Factory 4. If you haven’t played either, then RF4 is probably the better choice overall. If you do play RF3, you may want to take it slowly and try to spin the story out – don’t complete the five dungeons too quickly, but try to stretch them over a few seasons.