Rune Factory DS heading to Europe

By Tom Bramwell Published 15 April, 2008

Harvest Moon with fighting.

Rising Star has announced plans to release Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon this September in Europe.

Rune Factory, you may recall from, er, all that copy we didn't write about it when it came out in Japan and the US last August, is a Harvest Moon game with an action-RPG twist.

That twist is that, in addition to being a standard-issue Harvest Moon farming type, toiling in the fields and so on, you're also an amnesiac swordsman with a murky past you're trying to uncover.

This you do by taking Mayor Godwin's instruction to go out and duff up local beasties, hoping, according to the delicately appointed press release description, that the deepest of the caves' secrets "holds the key to unlocking your past".

For some reason, there's also Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection support for swapping emails, screenshots and messages with other players.

And with Rune Factory due out here in September, presumably we can expect the recently released Rune Factory 2 in about 2028.

Picture of Tom.

About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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Comments (3) Latest comment 4 years ago

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  • Dizzy #1 4 years ago

    >an amnesiac swordsman with a murky past

    Not AGAIN!!!!

    Do Japanese games designers have no inspiration what so ever?
    Edited by 1 at 15/04/08 @ 09:57

  • jaxon58 #2 4 years ago

    This is taking so long to come out over here!

    Glad I imported last year. Great game.

  • CaoSlayer #3 4 years ago

    Rune factory was disappointing.

    The game as a farming one, is better than harvest moon DS, controls are better and they removed old stupid limitations such not being able to step on a crop.

    But the game has two flaws: combat and challenge.

    By combat is the dungeon part of the game, is totally snes gameplay of walking to an enemy, hacking it with your normal combo and repeat. There is magic, but hurts more than helps by draining stamina and the combat lacks of variation and the dungeons are just find a room, kill everything and move to the next room.

    Challenge is how easy is to get money and how cheap is everything, most prices are about 1000 gold and that is a normal farming day worth, so in less of an year you will have everything. Also the game has a fatal flaw that makes this worse, minerals are overpriced and are very easy to get, after getting a level 3 hammer, you can make more than 30000 gold in a day ruining totally the economy of the game.

    Also the wifi system has the trouble that is required for some stuff, you can't marry certain girl without using wifi.

    Finally, the plot is totally fantasy standard without imagination.

    I liked it for little time until I grew bored by the lack of deep and challenge.