Rune Factory Frontier: a Review

Players of Harvest Moon, or casual farming games such as Alice Greenfingers, will find the farming portion of this game comfortably familiar. You hoe, you plant, you water, you harvest, you sell your crop.

The farm animals, however, you must tame from dungeons, and are not your typical cows and chickens. Instead we have Buffamoo, a buffalo-cow hybrid, as the first milk producers you can get, and Cluckies, which are exploding egg -throwing creatures somewhat like overgrown chickens, as egg producers, and they're just the beginning. There are the Spring, Summer, and Autumn family that are energy-ball-spitting plants that, when tamed, give you seeds for your farm, the tamable man-eating treasure boxes that provide jewels and ore, and the plant-elephant hybrids that can be ridden or assigned to water your crops. Later in the game you can tame unicorns to ride, fairies to harvest your wild plants, and other typical fantasy creatures, as well. The creatures are a good mix of beautiful/cute and mutant baddies, providing ample choice for all tastes, aesthetically.

Another major difference is the fantasy storyline and the dungeons. There's hack and slash, there's loot, and there's a well developed crafting and forging system to make your own gear. You can even farm and fish inside the dungeons. Fans of traditional rpgs and farming games may just love this mix.

It's a very relaxed game, if you don't feel like focusing on farming for a while, there's little penalty for that. Your crops just don't grow. Or you can tame monsters to water and harvest for you, leaving you free to dungeon delve, fish, socialize, or work on your other skills while still generating farming income. The storyline can be left indefinitely without penalty, and the dungeons aren't going anywhere.

The only possible negatives are in ignoring the runey system. Runeys are the spirits of the rocks, trees, grass, and water. They affect the overall growth and life of an area, and have an ebb and flow that can cause an area to have too much of one type or ultimately all go extinct there. So you do have to check in now and then to keep an eye on populations, to try to keep them in a general balance, and replenish or thin out as needed. But this, too, you can make as time consuming and complex as you wish or virtually ignore and just tend to once a week or once a month.

One thing that ordinarily would have put me off the game was that your character is male, with no choice whatsoever in that. However, the game itself is so engaging, and the art so beautiful, that this did not bother me at all. Even my young daughter is so drawn in by the pet monsters she doesn't care, either, and is also playing.

I was concerned about the dating simulation element, as well. It's not something I'm interested in, and I had tried to play Tree of Tranquility (which does allow you to play a girl) but the dating/love, particularly with the love festivals, felt so over-emphasized I set it aside for other games long before I finished the storyline. In Frontier the dating aspect is easy to ignore, and yet, the stories of the characters are so well written you may find yourself caring in spite of yourself and interacting with the girls as well as the rest of the village, just to advance their stories and solve their mysteries.

There's a lot to do here, well beyond the primary storyline. The dungeon monsters and dungeon bosses reset when you leave, with the bosses coming back stronger after their initial defeat, offering more fighting and more challenge if you want to come back for it. The farming and fishing can go on forever. In fact, you can finish the main storyline long before you've fully explored two of the dungeon areas, and then you will likely still have side quests left undone and social aspects you might like to tend to, as well as the ongoing farming, fishing, pet taming, or even monster breeding. In terms of value, this is a great game, easily 100+ hours of play before you finish the primary storyline and then open-ended for countless hours more.

I found the Wiimote and nunchuck comfortable to use, but the motion sensing capability is barely utilized. I'm used to games that integrate it more, so that seemed a bit of a waste. It works with the classic controller, as well, and all you'll miss out on is the ability to knock on doors, which you would most likely never use/barely need anyway. If you prefer the classic controller, this a good game for it.

As a parent, I like to know anything about a new game that might help me make the decision as to whether it's a good fit for our family, so I try to include information about possible areas of concern, as well as appropriate ages, in my own reviews.

The game is rated 10+. As I mentioned, my seven-year-old plays, but much of it is too complex for her, and she needs a lot of help with the reading. She mainly focuses on the pet monsters, and that she can handle pretty well on her own (after a basic explanation).

There's a town drunkard, which might bother some parents. He's generally presented neutrally, or negatively when he acts foolish and it's blamed on the drinking. I was more concerned with the joke made of his wife hitting him (referred to as her "100 slaps"), off-screen but with video-game sound effects. Both are pretty mild as video games go.

Monsters "killed" in this game are returned to their home, the First Forest, by their defeat, according to the game. When they "die" they become a shining little light that floats off and disappears. There's no gore whatsoever. And although they're called monsters, there's little anyone would find scary.