Farm team

The concept of clichés in JRPGs is far from new, and the amount of criticism leveled at it is insurmountably high. Rightly so—if there’s one genre that suffers the most from stale, overwrought plots, character dynamics and stereotypes, this is it. This goes for the subsets of RPGs, whether tactical, strategic, simulation-style or whatever.

The concept of clichés in JRPGs is far from new, and the amount of criticism leveled at it is insurmountably high. Rightly so—if there’s one genre that suffers the most from stale, overwrought plots, character dynamics and stereotypes, this is it. This goes for the subsets of RPGs, whether tactical, strategic, simulation-style or whatever.

Even the old masters of the genre seem to have gotten lax in the past few years. And while I wouldn’t say that the farming RPG sub-genre has really done things that differently, the Rune Factory series, it seems is a step in the right direction.

For those of you not in the know, farming RPGs are literally about farming. Rather than going on global, multi-cultural quest to save the world in a typically epic fashion, you maintain your farm by tilling soil, planting crops, raising livestock and the like. And if you think the concept sounds boring, you’ve clearly never played one.

Series vets know what I’m talking about: the farming addiction was cultivated and kept for years by Harvest Moon, the only series I can think of that essentially contained a sub-genre entirely on its own.

At any rate, Rune Factory was introduced a couple years ago as a spin-off to the king of farming games, adding adventuresome dungeon crawling into the mix. Frontier is the first Rune Factory entry for consoles, and it’s a shot in the arm over the many different Harvest Moon variations.

The core elements are all there: planting, raising and selling crops, cooking, making and upgrading tools, tending to your animals, home expansion, wooing the ladies—but now there’s monster raising, battling, alchemy and some pretty decent dungeon crawling (among other things) to boot.

You’d think with so much going on Frontier might spread itself too thin, but somehow it doesn’t. The game is gargantuan, and just about every option offered is plenty deep. The fact that it’s on the RPG-anemic Wii just makes it that much better.

It had actually been awhile since I played a Harvest Moon game, but my time apart from the farming genre made no difference. For the most part, Frontier plays as well as the best outings of its sister series, and in some ways, even better. From the first day when I inherited my broken down old farm, I was tilling and plowing with the best of ’em.

That being said, if you’re anything like me, you’ll probably spend a lot more time harvesting your crops and chatting up the chicks in town then you will wiping goblin blood from your sword or battle ax. Both are necessary to making your way through the story, but it seems the emphasis is still on being a farmer, which, quite frankly, is where it should be.

The trade-off between watering can and hoe, however, is that you basically have to level up your character in battle in order to get your stamina to a point where you can actually, say, rid your whole field of debris and then plow it. It would have been nice to be given the option to gain levels simply working outside as well as slaying beasties.

On the flip side, you’re skill level goes up with farming work, and the action-RPG combat is fairly streamlined—definite pluses in a genre so overwrought with endless stats and technicalities.
 
Not to say that you won’t spend a lot of time with this one. I dare you to try your hand at farming and not get addicted.

Once you start seeing the seedlings of those first crops or the sprouts of your flowerbed, you’ll hurry through the rest of the day just to get up and see what progress was made during the night. (You’ll be that much more excited if you’re waiting on flowers to give to whichever girl you’re trying to woo.)

Of course, selling crops yields more money, which in turn yields … more stuff to do. Frontier is bursting with activity, and aside from perhaps offering too much to realistically have time to tackle, I can’t really see this as a bad thing. It’s kind of like a way-less combat heavy Final Fantasy XI, only not online and with an agrarian twist. Charming.

I do have a few quibbles with the game, though—first, why no adjustable camera? Second, and more importantly, it can be really tough to figure out what you’re supposed to do, which makes the acquisition of a couple of the first tools you get to be a bit of a headache.

So it might be just a little bit too open-ended at times. If you’re looking for clear-cut answers, you may be a little annoyed with Frontier’s somewhat-to-downright obscure (or flat-out nonexistent) cues.

But that shouldn’t keep you from tilling the lands offered in Frontier. The high level of polish and shine put into this one is commendable, and the gameplay? It’s seriously like a drug. Who ever said agriculture is boring?