Why I Like Rune Factory

The Floofer Zone #15 | February 4th, 2024

To avoid any potential confusion: all screenshots of Rune Factory 3 and 4 in this post are from the “Special” remasters, not the originals. You try taking a screenshot on an actual DS…

Friends, I’m gonna be real. While I would love to spend this time talking about more cool, obscure games from the past instead of something you’ve already heard of (from me, no doubt), I can’t, because the last 40 hours or more of my free time has been swallowed up by the only game that is currently on my mind: Rune Factory 4 Special

And yet funnily enough, I have more hours in NES Switch Online

It feels like not that long ago I had never even played a farming game before, and now here I am on my third Rune Factory, having spent over 100 hours of my life frolicking through fields and dungeons in Rune Factory 5, and over 50 hours chasing after Daria in Rune Factory 3 Special. How did we get here???

Gather 'round, floofers... it’s time for a story

On June 13th, 2021, Nintendo uploaded a video onto YouTube that would literally change my life

I was already somewhat interested in the farming sim genre, but I never actually tried one bc I was too afraid of how different they are from everything else I like. As someone who grew up on a diet of action games like Mega Man, Metroid, Bomberman and Castlevania, I wasn’t confident that the more laid-back camp nature of farming sims would be able to capture my attention in quite the same way

Rune Factory, on the other hand, is a little different— it’s half farming sim, half action RPG! Now, I knew of Rune Factory at the time (in the same way that Ramona Flowers knew of Pac-Man), but this trailer intrigued me enough to actually give it a try. With my modded 3DS at hand, I decided to pirate play Rune Factory 3 for the DS and see what all the fuss was about

YARR HARR FIDDLE DEE DEE

I have never, not once in my life before or since, fallen in love with a video game as fast as I did with Rune Factory 3. It was summer when I began my playthrough, and since I didn't have any schoolwork to do, I just kept playing Rune Factory 3 for hours and hours and hours at a time. I loved the music, I loved the visuals, I loved the characters, and I loved the gameplay; I just loved everything, it all appealed to me way more than I ever could’ve imagined. It got to the point where I deliberately chose to stop playing and wait for Rune Factory 5 instead, bc I didn’t wanna spend my entire summer playing only one game!

Rune Factory’s gameplay is really really addictive and fun, and at the time I couldn’t quite put my finger on why, but I think now I can boil it down to a few main points:

  1. Rune Factory offers a perfect balance of lots of different activities, from farming to fishing to cooking and crafting to dungeon crawling and many more. You’ll be crossing off a different item on ur proverbial mental to-do list everyday, and the game rarely, if ever, feels repetitive

  2. Everything u do in Rune Factory, no matter how small, makes progress. This has to do with the skill system: everything u do in Rune Factory earns u experience points towards a different skill, and higher level skills offer many different benefits, like increased stats or the ability to craft better stuff. And when I say everything, I mean everything, even just walking around!

  3. Rune Factory somehow manages all of this while being simple enough to pick and up and play for a complete newcomer to the farming sim genre, and yet still having dozens of hours of content and some hidden complexity underneath the surface for all the hardcode min-maxers out there

To sum it up, it’s not an accident that Rune Factory is as fun and addictive as it is— the Rune Factory formula is just that strong

I also really feel like I need to emphasize the visuals and music. Rune Factory 3 and 4 share the same visual style: a striking blend of beautiful hand drawn backgrounds, and characters represented by small little 3D models that run around on top. I know these are far from the only games to use this technique, but they pull it off very well: the art in both 3 and 4 is consistently very pretty

And as for the music… god Rune Factory 3’s soundtrack is so fucking peak. I could pick a random RF3 song from a hat, and there's a 90% chance it’ll be a song that I absolutely love

Every Rune Factory I've played has had a consistently incredible soundtrack, with maybe Rune Factory 5 being the only exception

All that being said, though, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention what I think might be the most important reason why I keep coming back to these games, and it's something that 3, 4, and 5 all have in common: the characters! Every Rune Factory game I’ve played has had a wonderful cast of lovable characters with cute designs, silly personalities and tons of dialogue— sometimes adorable dialogue, sometimes funny, sometimes heartwarming, and sometimes completely out of left field

Margaret pls this is a kid's game

And of course, since this is a farming game, u can marry them

Daria my beloved <3

Eventually, I’d like to write a little more about Rune Factory 4 specifically, but this post is getting long enough as it is. If anything I’ve said here has made u interested in giving this series a shot, I’d highly recommend starting with Rune Factory 3. The “Special” version on Switch and PC has remastered graphics, an improved translation and some quality of life upgrades, though for the most part it’s exactly the same DS game that I fell in love with (which should tell u something about how good it is!)

also u should totally marry daria. no bias