Rune Factory 3 Special Game Preview

The Rune Factory 4 Special port gave Rune Factory fans the world over a whole new slew of chances to try out a lovely farm sim/RPG that had been tragically overlooked on the Nintendo 3DS. The subsequent Rune Factory 5 breathed new life into the franchise by shifting the game to a 3D format and allowing same-sex marriages. While working on the future of the Rune Factory series, XSeed and Marvelous have also decided to look back upon the series to give another old Rune Factory title a second chance at life: Rune Factory 3 Special. We were lucky enough to sit down with the title's PC version to have a preliminary playthrough.

So, long-time Rune Factory fans know how this works. For any newcomers: you're an amnesiac, you wake up in a strange town, and your kindly new neighbors put you up in the local abandoned farm. You have Health and Rune Points, the latter serving as your stamina. Taking care of your farm—watering crops, sowing seeds, clearing rubble, chopping wood—all take up some of your stamina. Once you run out of stamina, your actions start draining your health instead. Lose all your health, and you wake up at the local apothecary, minus some money for the local doctor's efforts in resuscitating you. Unlike the mainline StoRy of Seasons games, however, Rune Factory plays around with your stamina: your Rune Points also let you take actions in combat, from swinging your sword to unleashing spells. So doing anything requires some degree of foresight and planning. Thankfully, if you use up all your Rune Points doing your morning chores, you can soak at the local bathhouse to regain it all, clearing up the rest of your day. But there is still a very clever system at play where doing your farming eventually makes everything easier.

Rune Factory 3 Special designates all of your actions as “Skills”. Hammering the boulders on your farm? That's Mining. Using a Fishing Rod? That's Fishing. Walking around and taking a nap? Er... “Walking” and “Sleeping,” as per the notes. Raising all of these skills not only make your actions more RP-efficient, but they also boost your base stats in some capacity. Walking, for example, will eventually contribute to your Rune Point pool--and you're going to be doing a ton of walking anyway just going into town and getting seeds, so sooner or later, you'll get enough of a cushion to power through most challenges. Of course, this also applies to your combat abilities: the more you use a certain type of weapon, like Short Swords or Spears, the more sophisticated your options become with that weapon. In our time, we focused on the Short Sword; prolonged use allowed us to extend our basic combo, learn a dash attack, and even a charged attack.

You also have loads and loads of options for your tools. Later in the game, you can forge new weapons, cook dishes to regain health and RP, or even produce all kinds of useful medicines. But your transformation sets Rune Factory 3 Special apart from similar titles. Your protagonist can use a skill to shapeshift into a monster—really, just a Wooly (the Rune Factory series' iconic adorable sheep-monsters). While you can't use your standard equipment in monster form, you have your associated skills and a cool grappling system for use on stunned enemies. Transforming into a monster also expands the cast, as there are towns of demihumans who want nothing to do with normal humans walking around. This leads to the main crux of the game, where human and non-human tribes are separated after a forgotten conflict from ages past. Evidently, it'll be up to you to solve it.

In the meantime, Rune Factory 3 Special looks about as good as it ever will. The original title utilized simplified 3D character models upon a pre-rendered 2D background—a lost art if there ever was one. The character models look far better on PC than they ever did on the DS, with all the charming outfits and designs freed from those tiny grainy screens. It can be a bit jarring looking at your fields and all of the simple crops and plants being 2D sprites while your character is in 3D.

What might be a bigger issue for longtime Rune Factory fans is the step backward in the relationships department: there isn't an option for a same-sex relationship in Rune Factory 3 Special, nor is there an option to play as a woman. You get to play as a boy who turns into a sheep, and that's it. While this is primarily the result of playing an RPG for the Nintendo DS from 2009, it's a shame that there wasn't a bone to be tossed for players wanting gay relationships or the option to play as a woman. We've come a long way since 2009, and the recent Rune Factory 5 and StoRy of Seasons releases hammer that point home.

Nevertheless, folks who want a trip to yesteryear and a return to a classic Rune Factory title no longer need to shell out ridiculous amounts of money for an old used DS copy. You can look forward to returning to the land of Sharance on September 5 on Nintendo Switch and Steam platforms.