LogFAQs > #934645610

LinkPizza posted...

Maybe Ill look into it... What does it have that separates it from other farming games?

For RF4 in particular, the sheer depth to the writing is pretty mind-blowing. I'm pretty sure I went more than a full in-game year of talking to everyone in town every day before seeing some of that dialogue get repeated, which made talking to everyone feel genuinely worthwhile for more reason than just racking up friendship points. There's also a huge number of random events that offer mini-stories with even more character development, most of which flow very naturally from day-to-day gameplay, and some of which have over 1000 lines of dialogue. It was a very easy game to get socially invested into, which kind of spoiled me for other farming games (Story of Seasons, for example, offered like one unique piece of dialogue per character per season, and it didn't engage me nearly as well), and I feel that makes it one of the best examples of the genre.

Of course, that's on top of good farming mechanics (soil quality is fairly complex and demands either crop rotation or the use of specific fertilizers, and livestock consists of tamed monsters and therefore has some delightful variety to it), a deep crafting system (I put together a complex excel spreadsheet to help sort out how to optimize my equipment), combat and skill systems with plenty of variety, a variety of economic strategies to use throughout most of the game (endgame ends up with one option being distinctly better than all others, but that's almost impossible to avoid in the genre)... it's just an excellent game, with the quality and depth of writing being the icing needed to tie the whole cake together into a fantastic dessert. Literally my only complaint is that the story (and dungeon content) is divided into three arcs and the third arc is started by one of the aforementioned random events, meaning bad luck can result in playing for (in-game) years before seeing it happen. It can be circumvented by save scumming, but it's a design flaw that could easily have been avoided without compromising how organic the event system feels.

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