The only reason I abandoned this is because I'm going to actually finish it on the Switch, I'm pretty sure. Anyhow, this game's pretty great! The cast is fun, the gameplay is engaging, and I like the story quite a bit. It's not breaking new ground, certainly, but it has a lot of heart and the way you get to know the characters gets you invested.

Though, it's the way you get to know the characters that makes me like this game a bit less than its predecessor. Instead of exploring relationships through a request board or even just heart events like in the Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons game, the events are... kind of random as to when they pop up. One of them is notorious for being required to unlock the third act of the story, and it can take forever to show up. I never made it to this point myself, but I definitely heard about it from friends, and honestly I found myself wishing the events were more predictable from even what I played. In every other area this was a step up from the previous game, with the ability to play as a male or female character and the cast being a little more grounded and less reliant on gimmicks, but that was a weird change that hurt things a lot. I have no idea if the Switch version fixed that. I guess we'll see...............

Somehow went from exclaiming "this is the perfect videogame" multiple times in my first several hours in Rune Factory 4, to being 20 hours into it and pretty happy to never play it again despite only being around about halfway through the main storyline.

Rune Factory 4 really has everything. Effortless, overflowing amounts of charm with every character leaving some sort of positive impression, an expansive farming system with so much depth sprawling in seemingly every imaginable direction, arpg goodness with a ton of different environments each with plenty of personality and unique touches, a ton of weapons (some delightfully goofy) with meaningfully different movesets for you to go chew through all manner of environments with, the ability to turn almost any enemy in the game into your own personal Pokémon and either set your army of critters to work on your farm or take them out adventuring with you, loads of secrets, loads of polish (I can't really overstate quite how impressive the level of polish is here), always something exciting to be working towards both narratively and in terms of building up your home/farm/town.

Rune Factory 4 really has everything. My mind freezes up as I use my magnifying glass to see so many stats about the soil quality of this specific tile, half of that stats feeling like they mean nothing. Five different crafting systems, a few of those with several different subcategories of crafting system associated with them, all of which need to be levelled up individually, and you better engage with these myriad mediocre crafting systems because you have to sell all this pointless garbage you're making to get the shipping rate higher. Stats you can level up for literally anything you can imagine, from using a specific class of weapon, to walking, to bathing. Storage boxes and fridges stuffed full of literally anything and everything you've found that you haven't had to either sell for money or use up in crafting. Yellow speech bubbles above characters indicating you haven't talked to them yet today, begging you to go find every single one of them every single day because of course the game expects you to befriend each and every townsfolk. Endless rooms of enemies where you just resort to bashing the same two buttons over and over to grind experience. Vegetable and flower seeds that start at level 1 and which you can specifically go out of your way to individually grind up to level 9 one growth cycle at a time. A princess points task system that gave me nightmares of Animal Crossing: New Horizons' Nook Miles for all the pointless busywork it encourages. The same handful of trees and stones you have to return to day after day to get the ever crucial lumber and ore you need mountains of in order to build anything.

Leaving you drowning amongst its menagerie of empty compulsion loops, Rune Factory 4 is the perfect abyss. I loved a lot of my time with it, the game is genuinely beautifully made in many regards and it's hard to imagine a game really being better at the specific thing Rune Factory 4 is trying to accomplish, but despite this fuck I'm glad I got out when I did.

If you like RPGs and farming games like Harvest Moon-- look no further. Please play Rune Factory 4.

Rune Factory is difficult to recommend to people, in a way-- I don't think you can get away with only like one of the two genres it pulls from. Beating the game-- or at least the third arc-- requires all sorts of crafting, which requires money and material, and money usually requires farming. It really ties the game together, but if you don't already enjoy farming games, it probably wont work for you.

But it's a great game, honestly. There's much to do, and it's satisfying to toss all your old equipment to the wayside after making a new set of armor to go into the newest dungeon. The random events in town are sometimes a bit irritating if you're hoping for a specific one-- but at the same time, they make the town feel more lively, more real. The townspeople have lots of dialogue, and it takes a while to hit the end of their spiel. It's also nice that friendship builds over time without gifts, since you don't have to gift everyone in town every day to be liked. Gifts make it way faster, but you'll still find yourself integrating into Selphia if you just manage to talk to people every day.

Like any game, is it perfect? Of course not. But it's fun, it executes the genres its a part of well, and it makes me happy-- and I think that's enough.