Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon

"I just escaped a zombie infested town and then took on a giant mutated monster with a knife on hard difficulty. What did you do?"

"Well today I sold cabbages and planted carrots. Tomorrow is the annual fishing contest and I'm hoping to win first prize."

The alternative to macho escapism is the easy life farming sim, Harvest Moon. It'd be easy to be labelled a 'girl' for wanting to divulge in a stress free game where everything is perfect and cute. Instead of battling hard for the umpteenth time trying to take out an over-complicated boss, the biggest concern in Harvest Moon is perfecting your vegetables and finding a girl who's willing to marry you. The similarities to real life are striking, as the perfect pixels on offer will marry you depending on the size of your cucumber. With many games now in the franchise, Rune Factory takes a step further and into the fantasy and introduces dungeons, monsters and combat - there goes the easy life then!

At the start of the game you stumble into the town of Kardia, suffering from a severe case of amnesia. Fortunately you meet a young female farmer called Mist, who kindly gives you a shack and a field and encourages you to become a farmer too. Not knowing who you are or where you came from, you accept the offer and another outing in Harvest Moon begins. A strong storyline is never a concern in Harvest Moon and after the initial premise is introduced, nothing more is mentioned for many hours of game play. When you get into the farming and fighting, you'll soon forget there was ever meant to be an actual story.

As usual you begin with basic rusted farming tools, a few seeds and almost no money, your aim being to grow and sell the crops to earn plenty of money, then upgrade your tools, grow better crops and build a bigger house. Farming hasn't changed much over the years with the standard formula of ploughing the land, planting the seeds, water daily and after several in-game days, the goods are ready to pick and sell. This will take up a lot of your time at first, but after a certain amount of ploughing, the mayor will give you a pass to one of the nearby caves. This is where the franchise changes and the influence of RPGs and perhaps early Zelda games show.