2.5/5 ★ – JayTheCh1cken's review of Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon.

Starting with the later games and coming back to do this now made it obvious: this is exactly a first game in a series. Nothing is done particularly well and at times this game feels like an empty tech demo as wide as an ocean and as deep as a puddle. Where RF2 frustrated me to no ends with its fumbling of good ideas and its extremely demanding mid to late game, this game annoys me with how well things are set up only for the game to ask nothing of you aside from grinding farming inside the dungeons. For all the things the series would ask of you later in the series, here (at least in my experience) there are no relationship events, few festivals, no weapons worth using outside of the default shortswords, no crafting aside from upgrading tools, and no reason to interact with the monster taming system outside of what the game asks you to do to get into one of the dungeons. Even marriage has no point thanks to Rune Factory Frontier acting as a sequel to this game, thus necessitating that Raguna remain single for THAT (Though I won't hold this game back for that obviously). That said...this is still a great fun Rune Factory experience even despite the general clunkiness. The villagers are fun and I found myself attached to them even compared to future games. Dungeon diving is fun when you get in the rhythm of going through them, even if it's stupid how you have to do a dungeon all at once to beat it. The Sechs Empire are also great as the villains of this game, now knowing the effects that does in regards to RF4. The ending itself is one of the most hilarious things and 'Rune Factory' things to come out of Rune Factory (Spoilers, I guess?) The Sechs driving up out of nowhere with an army of tanks preparing to mow down the town is a level of rawness that these games don't usually go to, but then Terrable showing up to stop the army with plant breath just deflates any tension the scene had. The whole army just giving up and walking home like a bunch of saturday morning cartoon villains while the whole town applauds your efforts in stopping a war (as if you even did anything) is HILARIOUS. Oh, and then you get treated to a scene revealing that Raguna was actually Ivan's (The random traveling salesman with zero plot relevance) brother the entire time, and actually the both of you were the princes of Norad the entire time, all with no context. So obviously this game's plot is peak, and if anyone is a fan of this series and wants to give this game a try with a liberal use of cheats and an open mind, I'd recommended it. Even despite it's problems, it was still very interesting to see how this series started.