The Rune Factory series is a spin-off of the old Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons farming and life sim games. It captures the spirit and style of those games but adds more fantasy elements and hack-and-slash combat. Like the games that came before it, Rune Factory 4 Special is an amalgam of farm management, life sim, and action elements—the combination results in a relaxing, addicting, and admittedly repetitive experience. Rune Factory 4 Special is a solid port and a fine title to add to your list of PC games. It doesn't change or revamp anything compared to previous releases, but it also doesn’t pretend to be anything more than a slightly higher-res rerelease of a classic 3DS game. It retails for just $29.99, oozes charm, and comes packed with content.
A Big Package
The story of Rune Factory 4 Special follows you, an amnesiac envoy in the quaint town of Selphia. You must must piece together your memory, while also saving the town and its guardian dragon (Ventuswill) from internal conflict and external warmongering. And, on top of all that, you must take care of the town's farm, too.
The game uses blocky, slightly deformed, chibi-styled character models, simplistic textures, and a top-down isometric camera view to bring its world to life.
Don’t let Rune Factory 4 Special’s cutesy appearance and simple visuals deceive you. It's a beastly game, dense with content. You have a large field to cultivate and farm, as well as dungeons to raid, monsters to tame, an expansive map to explore, tools and equipment to craft, and of course, intimate relationships to foster.
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On paper, the game sounds like it has an overwhelming number of systems to learn, but the request system helps you ease you into its various mechanics. Requests are tasks or objectives you undertake from right outside your residence and serve as in-game tutorials for all the activities in Rune Factory. You start with basic farm work, such as tilling and planting, as well as household chores, such as moving and placing furniture.
As the days progress, the requests become more advanced. For example, a later request gives you an axe, which you use to remove stumps and wooden debris from your farmstead to make room for more crops. Later still, you tame animals and assign them to manage basic tasks on the farm. You also begin to amass an encyclopedic list of tools, weapons, and recipes. Despite this wealth of content, I never once felt overwhelmed or rushed. Rune Factory 4 Special is very accommodating, so you can play and advance at your own pace.
You can choose to whittle your days ignoring the story and simply managing your farm. Some days I hunted for a particular animal to tame, while I spent others fishing or cooking recipes I collected. If I felt particularly motivated, I would grind monsters and easy bosses to earn Prince Points, a currency you use to develop the farm and town.
The hack-and-slash combat is straightforward, but there is a good variety of weapons and magic attacks to unlock and master. Rune Factory 4 Special doesn't have crazy, high-flying action, but the ability progression, spells, weapon types, and townsfolk party members all help create a rich action system that reminds me of that of Legend of Mana.
Once you acclimate yourself to Rune Factory’s basic mechanics, it doesn’t take long to settle into a rhythm and start goofing off in whatever way you see fit. Rune Factory 4 Special is a simple game at its core, but it can be incredibly deep if you choose to invest time in it.
Relaxing But Repetitive
Regardless of what you choose to do, the game is fairly relaxing. Still, a fair amount of repetition is inherent to all the games under the Story of Seasons umbrella. As such, you perform some tasks repeatedly and often, especially early on when you don’t have any animal buddies to handle menial chores for you.
Rune Factory 4 Special can be tedious, so you need some degree of tolerance for repetition to be able to enjoy it. If you can look past that aspect or don't mind it, underneath is a beefy game to enjoy with endless farming, crafting, cooking, and dating elements.
Lots to Love
Relationships are core to the Rune Factory 4 Special experience. As a light-hearted fantasy life sim, the game encourages you to foster relationships with the townsfolk and like-aged bachelors and bachelorettes. Talking, trading, gifting, and flirting with the people of Selphia is as much a pillar of the game, as farming, crafting, and fighting. In fact, Rune Factory 4 Special pushes this relationship-building aspect to the forefront with the bonus Newlywed Mode unique to this Special edition—it's a new story episode for your in-game spouse.
Because you have 12 potential spouses to choose from (six for male and six for female), you have a sizeable amount of bonus stories to unlock. Similarly, Another Episode is a fully narrated epilogue for each of the characters that takes place after the main storyline. These charming events are worth playing through or watching if you take a liking to the cast.
Writing and Dialogue
The writing has a few fourth-wall-breaking gags and is generally lighthearted and humorous, though it has its share of somber points, too. Much of the game’s charm comes from the relationships you build with the townspeople, and how they assist you throughout Rune Factory 4’s three major story arcs.
The game is partially voiced, much like the 3DS game Fire Emblem Awakening. Select lines are fully voiced, but most text scrolls are punctuated with a few words or exclamations. I don’t mind the minimalist approach; given the game's 3DS origins, the voice work is surprisingly good overall. My only gripe is that there isn't a way to quickly scroll through text or have it automatically advance. I could also do without the annoying, booming sound bite that plays with text to signify when a character is speaking forcefully. Thankfully, the game does not use this effect frequently.
Can You Run Rune Factory 4 Special?
To play Rune Factory 4 Special you need, at minimum, a 64-bit processor and operating system, Windows 10, Intel Core i5-6400 CPU, 8GB RAM, Intel HD Graphics HD530 graphics card, and 5GB of hard drive space. For an optimal experience, your PC should have an Intel Core i5-9300H CPU, 16GB RAM, and a GTX 1650Q GPU. Rune Factory 4 Special isn't demanding, so there's no need to go shopping for a gaming CPU or graphics card to run it.
On a desktop PC with a Ryzen 5 3600 processor, Nvidia RTX 2080, and 16GB of RAM, I enjoyed Rune Factory 4 at 1440p and 60FPS without a hitch. I didn't experience any game crashes, frame rate issues, or bugs.
Rune Factory 4 Special's game speed is directly tied to its framerate, but Vsync is enabled by default, so you should get a smooth 60FPS at all times. Turning off Vsync runs the game at whatever refresh rate your monitor is set to, which in my case was a comically fast turbo-mode. You can toggle screen modes as well as tweak the resolution, textures, and keyboard configuration in the settings, but that's about it. The only thing noticeably missing from the game is the ability to quit at any time or return to the main menu. You can only return to the main menu from your save diary, which you need to physically travel and access at your bedside in-game. Keyboard functionality is satisfying and fully customizable, so Rune Factory 4 Special is easy to play whether you have a gamepad or not.
Something Special
Rune Factory 4 Special is an enjoyable game if you like cutesy sims with old-school charm. It’s packed with fun, relaxing gameplay, tons of depth, plenty of character interaction, and a tremendous amount of content. If you can’t stomach repetition or the dated visual style—as an upscaled 3DS port, it lacks the wow factor of many modern RPGs—you may want to skip it, however. But if you’re even remotely curious about the game or the Story of Seasons franchise as a whole, Rune Factory 4 Special should appeal to you.
For more Steam game reviews and previews, check out PCMag's Steam Curator page. And for in-depth video game talk, visit PCMag's Pop-Off YouTube channel.
Rune Factory 4 Special delivers all the life sim, farming, and RPG action of the original 3DS release—it's perfect for fans of the Story of Seasons series or Stardew Valley.
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