Rune factory once again hits the wii and even though it's also on the ps3 it was designed for the wii and ported so both versions are identical. Will this be the same as frontier and contain game crippling mechanics like the runey system or will we finally get a true rune factory 3d experience? (also shut up about the punctuation etc bs 
)
Introduction
You start out with your best friend sonja taking a walk when suddenly a portal opens up and sucks both of you into the future except sonjas body is nowhere to be found instead it is inside of your body! As you try and figure out what has happened you find the locals are rather friendly and have even set you up with a free house to live in while spending time here and trying to figure out how to get sonja back into her own body you soon discover that a dark plot is unfolding that could destroy the world itself and it's up to you AND sonja to stop it.
Sonja finds a seed and plants it behind your house which turns into ymir a huge golem that is able to walk across the ocean this is how you will be discovering the islands and dungeons hidden in the world. Sonja is going to with you pretty much the whole main story and whether you like it or not she's going to be reminding you what time it is (listen carefully when she says six o clock), when it's time to go to bed, making annoying karate noises when your fighting or saying hello to an empty room! When you talk to people she can talk to them too and she can even control your body sometimes so you better get used to her voice because you will be hearing it A LOT!
Just like in frontier you have a rune point gauge and everything you do whether it be fighting, cooking or crafting costs RP run out of RP and you start to lose HP run out of this and you will faint and be transported back to your bed and a day will go by there's also a chance you'll catch a cold which can easily be gotten rid of with a trip to the clinic or a cold medicine. The world is completely different to rff for instance everything is fully 3d unlike rff which was 2.5d building, mountains and levels in dungeons are all 3d! Oh and one last thing the runies system is gone so no more wasting hours of game hours harvesting, re-positioning and wasting your time on these little bastards!
Like in rff you can do lots of stuff in this whether it be cook, craft, forge, fish, sleep, walk, jump, talk...that's right you can pretty much level up anything and everything in this and you'll gain RP from it! Feel like leveling your jumping skill than just jump around town like an idiot or take a bath every day to level your bath skill (keep an eye out for the bath scenes for a chuckle) even sleeping levels up! What you will be wanting to level the most though is your cooking, Crafting and forging skills so you can get access to better equips and food. making an item involves getting a recipe and having the ingredients than stopping the bar on the blue parts to make the item. And unlike in rff where you can buy all the recipes it's not the case this time you will only be given a recipe from an event the 1st recipes you are given simply involve touching the crafting stations at the blacksmith, inn, mansion and clinic. That's right you start off with nothing in your house and are forced to run around town using the stations at the various locations so better save up your gold so you can upgrade your house early!
Every Thursday and holidays you can visit the market where you can purchase rune abilities for your weapons these are special attacks that cost RP to use. You can also purchase equipment for your house after you've upgraded it so you won't have to run all over town to craft! You can also get little chests appraised for a random item you can get little chests from big chests on islands you've discovered.
To get access to more recipes your going to have to get friendly with the locals that means, talking and buttering them up with gifts to increase their FP (friend points) which cannot exceed 6 until you've finished the main story. Check the bulletin board for requests in the INN and complete them to not only advance the story but also gain access to more recipes by completing tasks for the locals. Some requests won't show up until the person has a high enough FP level so get talking and gifting early! Don't know what a person likes than head over to the local dragon shrine and make a wish you can ask the dragon what a person likes to increase their fp faster.
To progress the story you need to do the requests on the board with the golden turnips this usually involves getting on ymir and going to a spot on the map and using B to lift an island from the sea than going ashore and heading towards the obelisk or getting rid of all the portals on the island to make a chest with the dungeons key to appear. Sometimes when you go to lift an island a sea monster will appear which you have to fight it mortal kombat style there's even fatalities! You've got all type of moves to fight you can punch, throw rocks, body slam, pick up and slam as well as block. Once you stun the monster run up and push B to do a fatality where you'll be treated to a cut scene!
As you make more stuff your crafting levels go up and you get access to better weapons, armors and foods. You can try and make an item 20 levels above your current level but the higher you go the shorter the blue box gets and the higher chance you will fail at making an item but don't worry just try again as long as you have RP/HP you don't lose any ingredients except in cooking! In rff if you made too many items you could pass out not this time there's a fail-safe and it won't let you make anything if you don't have enough energy.
You can also go fishing to catch fish and cook or add to more elaborate meals simply go to a body of water and push A to start fishing you than want to get the fast moving bar into the blue OR the green to catch a big fish which is worth more.
Gameplay
Rune factory games have pretty much always followed the same formula even on the DS which involves farming, fighting and friendship TOD also follows this formula but with a few changes. First off the farming has been completely re-designed gone are the watering can, seeds and formulas to make your plants grow faster your entire farm is now controlled by...your monsters! That's right to make anything grow at all you are going to have to capture monsters and put them to work this involves running up to them and brushing like mad to tame them than you can put them to work on your farm. All they ask for is cookies which you can buy rather cheaply from the general store and as long as they have a supply the monsters will pretty much run your farm for you.
Battles are much more better like in rff portals spawn monsters which you can attack to stop them but the actual battles are way more faster and better if i had to describe them being like it would be like in KH2! You can button mash to attack or jump and attack push C to quickly strafe and later on you'll get new abilities such as the duel swords knock an enemy into the air, run and attack or the ultimate furious whirling blades which involves simply button mashing A until you go into a frenzy! The battles are furious too at once you could have 10+ monsters on screen at once all coming for you the only problem when this happens is you get lagg the FPS drops to 10 and below! This is the only bad thing in this game but you can stop it most of the time by just going solo and not taking any monsters with you except to bosses it's fine. If the battles get too hot for you simply push the 2 button twice to teleport away or out of a dungeon you can also use teleport in town to jump back yo your house just like in rff.
Dungeons this time around are huge and their fully 3d meaning multiple floors on one level there's 4 dungeons in the game the earth, fire, water and wind temples. Each dungeon gets more and more levels and some dungeons have you doing a bit of running around looking for switches to lower a bridge to get to the stairways too! Dungeons are full of monsters and portals if you want you can simply run past the portals and not fight at all until you get to a room that locks you in with barriers and the only way to get out (except for teleporting out) is to smash ALL the portals in the room. Once you reach the top floor you have to fight a boss where the cam is set into a 360 mode where you can circle around a boss and trying to fight a boss without adequate armor and weapons is a BAD idea so better sharpen up those crafting skills early!
Back to farming which simply involving running up to a planting point on an island and waving your planting wand to start sprouts your monsters will do the rest and I really mean that you have absolutely NO control over what they will plant! Each monster can grow up to 4 different crops, flowers and ores and you have no say over what they choose to grow it's always random. To make them grow better or higher crops you will need to increase their friend points a daily brushing with the monster brush will accomplish this. Each crop takes a certain amount of time to grow higher crops take longer to grow and I'm happy to say it only takes half as long as the damn crops in frontier so no more waiting months for your flowers!
Speaking off as I said monsters can grow crops, ore and flowers and they can grow them anywhere except winter island. You have 4 islands to plant stuff on spring, winter, autumn and summer island when you 1st get these islands they will be turned to stone and you have to use spirits (runies) to get them back to normal. Now i KNOW what your thinking oh god no not again well relax this time around all you have to do is harvest the runies from islands from logs just walk up to it and push A to harvest them than simply take them out of your inventory and drop them on an island and that's it!! The more runies you put on an island the more planting spots you have access to once you get it to 100% you have unlocked all the spots.
You can grow any crop on any island anytime and not have to wait till the right season rolls in except winter island this is the only place you can grow ores and nothing else. Once crops are grown and sparkle you simply use B to pick them up or you can even get harvester monsters to do the job for you! They'll go around collecting anything harvestable and place it in the storage bin that each island has except on winter you'll have to do everything yourself and the higher friend points the monster has the more crops they will harvest for you.
Some monsters will also produce items for you such as eggs, milk, honey, gems and ores although it's much easier to just buy the ingredients at the store except for gems and ores you might want to capture a couple of monsters that produce them to farm from them for a while.
As well as crops and ores your monsters can also grow trees which are oak and maple and the wood harvested from them can be used in both crafting and making furniture. You'll have to cut the trees down yourself but it only involves one swing of the axe you'll also have to collect the wood yourself. If your lucky you might get a rune crystal grow from the trees which you can collect these will restore all your hp and rp in 1 hit! You can also take monsters with you into dungeons and battle areas and they will fight with you but be warned about doing this with more than 2 monsters you will suffer from crippling lagg especially in the dungeons! The lagg has nothing to do with the wiis capabilities because I've heard it does it in the ps3 version too how the devs could let this go unchecked is beyond me! So the whole game your pretty much going to be solo in the dungeons so better sharpen those battle skills.
The last thing your monsters can do is grow ore, gems and crystals on winter island the same formula as farming is used which is use the wand to plant than drop monsters on the island to grow the stuff. However you will have to do all the mining yourself which involves using a hammer to smash the rock than collect the ores all manually there's no harvesters this time! This could take half a games day to do this unless you know the jump trick which involves jumping in the air and pounding the a button to smash the rock quickly than as the rock crumbles push C to quickly jump and land and hold B to start harvesting!
Graphics
The gfx are great in this a much better improvements from rff plus it's in 480P this time the dungeons look gorgeous with all kinds of weird effects in the background as well as the dungeons themselves look spectacular. The character models are cute especially the swim suits
Sound
Sound is good with some great island and boss battle tunes the characters voice acting isn't bad and monster noises isn't too annoying. What is annoying though is sonja never shutting up about practically everything she tells you what time is is, when to heal, when it's too late and time to go to bed as well as saying something every-time you go into a room. Thankfully later on you can finally shut her up but the games story is pretty much done than.
Replay value
Replay is good you can try the game with a different weapon, see how fast you can get the better equips or do a speed run of the dungeons. When you have beaten the main story you get to decide to continue the game as the male or as sonja what you choose next decided how the game plays out from here on. If you choose the male you can increase the girls FP past 6 to 10 and marry them and get them pregnant the other male bachelors will remain at FP 6. If you choose sonja you no longer have control over the male character you was you can get the male bachelors past FP 6 to 10 and marry them and sonja can get pregnant all the girls however will remain at FP6. You may think big deal right well that's when a rather stupid mechanic comes into play some recipes you cannot get unless a certain person is past FP6 and since it's only possible to get some people past FP6 with the male or sonja it means you will never get access to all the recipes plus the main game is over and most of them will be pointless to get now like the LVL S pharmacy recipe from james at FP8!
Overall
RFTOD is a great fun game if you loved rff but hated the runeis well than this is the answer is has all the great stuff rff had plus better it's fully 3D, way better battles, easier farming that doesn't take up your whole day and an interesting story. If it wasn't for that damn lagg it would have gotten a perfect score!
Score
8 / 10
)Introduction
You start out with your best friend sonja taking a walk when suddenly a portal opens up and sucks both of you into the future except sonjas body is nowhere to be found instead it is inside of your body! As you try and figure out what has happened you find the locals are rather friendly and have even set you up with a free house to live in while spending time here and trying to figure out how to get sonja back into her own body you soon discover that a dark plot is unfolding that could destroy the world itself and it's up to you AND sonja to stop it.
Sonja finds a seed and plants it behind your house which turns into ymir a huge golem that is able to walk across the ocean this is how you will be discovering the islands and dungeons hidden in the world. Sonja is going to with you pretty much the whole main story and whether you like it or not she's going to be reminding you what time it is (listen carefully when she says six o clock), when it's time to go to bed, making annoying karate noises when your fighting or saying hello to an empty room! When you talk to people she can talk to them too and she can even control your body sometimes so you better get used to her voice because you will be hearing it A LOT!
Just like in frontier you have a rune point gauge and everything you do whether it be fighting, cooking or crafting costs RP run out of RP and you start to lose HP run out of this and you will faint and be transported back to your bed and a day will go by there's also a chance you'll catch a cold which can easily be gotten rid of with a trip to the clinic or a cold medicine. The world is completely different to rff for instance everything is fully 3d unlike rff which was 2.5d building, mountains and levels in dungeons are all 3d! Oh and one last thing the runies system is gone so no more wasting hours of game hours harvesting, re-positioning and wasting your time on these little bastards!
Like in rff you can do lots of stuff in this whether it be cook, craft, forge, fish, sleep, walk, jump, talk...that's right you can pretty much level up anything and everything in this and you'll gain RP from it! Feel like leveling your jumping skill than just jump around town like an idiot or take a bath every day to level your bath skill (keep an eye out for the bath scenes for a chuckle) even sleeping levels up! What you will be wanting to level the most though is your cooking, Crafting and forging skills so you can get access to better equips and food. making an item involves getting a recipe and having the ingredients than stopping the bar on the blue parts to make the item. And unlike in rff where you can buy all the recipes it's not the case this time you will only be given a recipe from an event the 1st recipes you are given simply involve touching the crafting stations at the blacksmith, inn, mansion and clinic. That's right you start off with nothing in your house and are forced to run around town using the stations at the various locations so better save up your gold so you can upgrade your house early!
Every Thursday and holidays you can visit the market where you can purchase rune abilities for your weapons these are special attacks that cost RP to use. You can also purchase equipment for your house after you've upgraded it so you won't have to run all over town to craft! You can also get little chests appraised for a random item you can get little chests from big chests on islands you've discovered.
To get access to more recipes your going to have to get friendly with the locals that means, talking and buttering them up with gifts to increase their FP (friend points) which cannot exceed 6 until you've finished the main story. Check the bulletin board for requests in the INN and complete them to not only advance the story but also gain access to more recipes by completing tasks for the locals. Some requests won't show up until the person has a high enough FP level so get talking and gifting early! Don't know what a person likes than head over to the local dragon shrine and make a wish you can ask the dragon what a person likes to increase their fp faster.
To progress the story you need to do the requests on the board with the golden turnips this usually involves getting on ymir and going to a spot on the map and using B to lift an island from the sea than going ashore and heading towards the obelisk or getting rid of all the portals on the island to make a chest with the dungeons key to appear. Sometimes when you go to lift an island a sea monster will appear which you have to fight it mortal kombat style there's even fatalities! You've got all type of moves to fight you can punch, throw rocks, body slam, pick up and slam as well as block. Once you stun the monster run up and push B to do a fatality where you'll be treated to a cut scene!
As you make more stuff your crafting levels go up and you get access to better weapons, armors and foods. You can try and make an item 20 levels above your current level but the higher you go the shorter the blue box gets and the higher chance you will fail at making an item but don't worry just try again as long as you have RP/HP you don't lose any ingredients except in cooking! In rff if you made too many items you could pass out not this time there's a fail-safe and it won't let you make anything if you don't have enough energy.
You can also go fishing to catch fish and cook or add to more elaborate meals simply go to a body of water and push A to start fishing you than want to get the fast moving bar into the blue OR the green to catch a big fish which is worth more.
Gameplay
Rune factory games have pretty much always followed the same formula even on the DS which involves farming, fighting and friendship TOD also follows this formula but with a few changes. First off the farming has been completely re-designed gone are the watering can, seeds and formulas to make your plants grow faster your entire farm is now controlled by...your monsters! That's right to make anything grow at all you are going to have to capture monsters and put them to work this involves running up to them and brushing like mad to tame them than you can put them to work on your farm. All they ask for is cookies which you can buy rather cheaply from the general store and as long as they have a supply the monsters will pretty much run your farm for you.
Battles are much more better like in rff portals spawn monsters which you can attack to stop them but the actual battles are way more faster and better if i had to describe them being like it would be like in KH2! You can button mash to attack or jump and attack push C to quickly strafe and later on you'll get new abilities such as the duel swords knock an enemy into the air, run and attack or the ultimate furious whirling blades which involves simply button mashing A until you go into a frenzy! The battles are furious too at once you could have 10+ monsters on screen at once all coming for you the only problem when this happens is you get lagg the FPS drops to 10 and below! This is the only bad thing in this game but you can stop it most of the time by just going solo and not taking any monsters with you except to bosses it's fine. If the battles get too hot for you simply push the 2 button twice to teleport away or out of a dungeon you can also use teleport in town to jump back yo your house just like in rff.
Dungeons this time around are huge and their fully 3d meaning multiple floors on one level there's 4 dungeons in the game the earth, fire, water and wind temples. Each dungeon gets more and more levels and some dungeons have you doing a bit of running around looking for switches to lower a bridge to get to the stairways too! Dungeons are full of monsters and portals if you want you can simply run past the portals and not fight at all until you get to a room that locks you in with barriers and the only way to get out (except for teleporting out) is to smash ALL the portals in the room. Once you reach the top floor you have to fight a boss where the cam is set into a 360 mode where you can circle around a boss and trying to fight a boss without adequate armor and weapons is a BAD idea so better sharpen up those crafting skills early!
Back to farming which simply involving running up to a planting point on an island and waving your planting wand to start sprouts your monsters will do the rest and I really mean that you have absolutely NO control over what they will plant! Each monster can grow up to 4 different crops, flowers and ores and you have no say over what they choose to grow it's always random. To make them grow better or higher crops you will need to increase their friend points a daily brushing with the monster brush will accomplish this. Each crop takes a certain amount of time to grow higher crops take longer to grow and I'm happy to say it only takes half as long as the damn crops in frontier so no more waiting months for your flowers!
Speaking off as I said monsters can grow crops, ore and flowers and they can grow them anywhere except winter island. You have 4 islands to plant stuff on spring, winter, autumn and summer island when you 1st get these islands they will be turned to stone and you have to use spirits (runies) to get them back to normal. Now i KNOW what your thinking oh god no not again well relax this time around all you have to do is harvest the runies from islands from logs just walk up to it and push A to harvest them than simply take them out of your inventory and drop them on an island and that's it!! The more runies you put on an island the more planting spots you have access to once you get it to 100% you have unlocked all the spots.
You can grow any crop on any island anytime and not have to wait till the right season rolls in except winter island this is the only place you can grow ores and nothing else. Once crops are grown and sparkle you simply use B to pick them up or you can even get harvester monsters to do the job for you! They'll go around collecting anything harvestable and place it in the storage bin that each island has except on winter you'll have to do everything yourself and the higher friend points the monster has the more crops they will harvest for you.
Some monsters will also produce items for you such as eggs, milk, honey, gems and ores although it's much easier to just buy the ingredients at the store except for gems and ores you might want to capture a couple of monsters that produce them to farm from them for a while.
As well as crops and ores your monsters can also grow trees which are oak and maple and the wood harvested from them can be used in both crafting and making furniture. You'll have to cut the trees down yourself but it only involves one swing of the axe you'll also have to collect the wood yourself. If your lucky you might get a rune crystal grow from the trees which you can collect these will restore all your hp and rp in 1 hit! You can also take monsters with you into dungeons and battle areas and they will fight with you but be warned about doing this with more than 2 monsters you will suffer from crippling lagg especially in the dungeons! The lagg has nothing to do with the wiis capabilities because I've heard it does it in the ps3 version too how the devs could let this go unchecked is beyond me! So the whole game your pretty much going to be solo in the dungeons so better sharpen those battle skills.
The last thing your monsters can do is grow ore, gems and crystals on winter island the same formula as farming is used which is use the wand to plant than drop monsters on the island to grow the stuff. However you will have to do all the mining yourself which involves using a hammer to smash the rock than collect the ores all manually there's no harvesters this time! This could take half a games day to do this unless you know the jump trick which involves jumping in the air and pounding the a button to smash the rock quickly than as the rock crumbles push C to quickly jump and land and hold B to start harvesting!
Graphics
The gfx are great in this a much better improvements from rff plus it's in 480P this time the dungeons look gorgeous with all kinds of weird effects in the background as well as the dungeons themselves look spectacular. The character models are cute especially the swim suits
Sound
Sound is good with some great island and boss battle tunes the characters voice acting isn't bad and monster noises isn't too annoying. What is annoying though is sonja never shutting up about practically everything she tells you what time is is, when to heal, when it's too late and time to go to bed as well as saying something every-time you go into a room. Thankfully later on you can finally shut her up but the games story is pretty much done than.
Replay value
Replay is good you can try the game with a different weapon, see how fast you can get the better equips or do a speed run of the dungeons. When you have beaten the main story you get to decide to continue the game as the male or as sonja what you choose next decided how the game plays out from here on. If you choose the male you can increase the girls FP past 6 to 10 and marry them and get them pregnant the other male bachelors will remain at FP 6. If you choose sonja you no longer have control over the male character you was you can get the male bachelors past FP 6 to 10 and marry them and sonja can get pregnant all the girls however will remain at FP6. You may think big deal right well that's when a rather stupid mechanic comes into play some recipes you cannot get unless a certain person is past FP6 and since it's only possible to get some people past FP6 with the male or sonja it means you will never get access to all the recipes plus the main game is over and most of them will be pointless to get now like the LVL S pharmacy recipe from james at FP8!
Overall
RFTOD is a great fun game if you loved rff but hated the runeis well than this is the answer is has all the great stuff rff had plus better it's fully 3D, way better battles, easier farming that doesn't take up your whole day and an interesting story. If it wasn't for that damn lagg it would have gotten a perfect score!
Score
8 / 10
