Most of the now-married characters have children about your age, so you can embark on the same quests and dialogue-trees you’d undertaken as the original character-only this time, they end in these adorable little play-marriages that mean nothing to the overall game but lend some serious authenticity and humor to the game’s handling of child characters. Of course, the farming doesn’t go away, and neither does the relationship-sim. Moreover, the town has moved with you-all the twenty-somethings of the game’s first half are now thirty-something adults, with jobs and lives and marriages (which is particularly funny if you married one of the NPCs that the game auto-pairs with another, since it just inserts the female merchant character into that relationship instead.) There’s a school now (that you-or well, your father-helped build), where you learn crafting and cooking and combat, all essential features of the first Rune Factory game that had seemingly been ignored here, and where you slowly build up your trove of magic and spells. The farming takes a backseat-for seven year-old children aren’t quite as suited for days of fieldwork as adult amnesiac dudes-to a vastly expanded version of the series’ signature dungeon crawling (because of course, seven year-olds are totally cool with monster-slaying). They’re the the original character’s child… and the game’s true protagonist.Īnd then suddenly everything changes. There’s a new character to name-and this time, one whose gender you can actually choose. Then we go to another player-select screen.
Your player-character-who the game default-names to Kyle (though you have full freedom over his renaming)-says something mysterious to his family about having to stop some calamity. Then, in the grand tradition of twists, we flash a ways into the future. In other words, it puts you through some slow, workmanlike worldbuilding, and sets you up for what’s about to follow. All in all, you can only move through four sections of each fifteen-to-twenty section dungeon-a limitation that made me wonder, as the 7th grader I was when I first played it-what happened to the rest of the game.Īs it turns out, the rest of the game is hiding behind one of my favorite twists, but that twist wouldn’t work if Rune Factory 2 didn’t force you to spend lots of time getting to know the people of Alvarna-farming yourself into a respectable community member, fulfilling various quests for the townspeople, and showering your chosen female NPC with so many gifts that she ditches her childhood sweetheart for you. Because of course, while you can only grow summer crops during the summer, you can sail to Blessia Island all year round and grow as many pineapples as your heart desires.īut these dungeons are mostly closed off-most of their paths are blocked by these small yet impassable fences, and the remaining ones are guarded by these mysterious floating statues that never move or speak. Of course, all that Harvest Moon is only half of the Rune Factory equation-there are also four dungeons that you can enter, each corresponding to one of the seasons. As the days pass, you interact with the townspeople, building relationships and chatting up the local women until one of them likes you enough to say, “yeah I think I’ll ditch the guy I’ve known all my life and marry you, strange amnesiac dude.” And it’s fun, in a laid-back kind of way. Rune Factory 2 begins as all Rune Factory games begin-you, an amnesiac dude with an anime haircut, wander into a small farming town and are then given a house and a plot of land to go get your grow on. But I’ve never played a game that gave me the kind of experience that Rune Factory 2 did-that kept as many secrets, that surprised me with its eventual depth and complexity, or that managed to marry such disparate mechanics as dungeon crawling and farming into something so strangely harmonious. Sure, I’ve played “better” games-games that I spent more time in, games that I just enjoyed more, games that developed my appreciation of the medium more than this underrated DS adventure with “A Fantasy Harvest Moon” stapled to the end of its title. If I set up a competitive bracket for my all-time favorite games, Rune Factory 2 would be the true dark horse. Or, at least, I doubt it’s as large as this game deserves.
And while Rune Factory 2 is far from an indie game, I doubt the cross-section of audiences that enjoy both intensive dungeon crawling and Harvest Moon-style farming-and-relationship simulators is all that large.
A game’s qualifications for this loosely-defined series of mine usually begin and end with my belief that not enough people have played it.