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Update 1: Movin' Out
This game has motion controls if you want them. The box even says they're "innovative".
You, uh, swing the remote.
Marvelous Entertainment has a long background with the Harvest Moon, (or rather Story of Seasons nowadays). They did a merger in 2011 to become Marvelous AQL, and 3 years later they just changed it back to Marvelous.
They do a lot of publishing, basically.
XSEED is a subsidiary of theirs, apparently originally founded by ex-Squeenix US employees. It's possible you've heard of them.
They do a lot of localization.
Neverland is the actual developers of the Rune Factory series, as well as Lufia and some other things. They went out of business in 2013 and the majority of its employees got absorbed by Marvelous.
This guy's the head of the Story of Seasons series, since this whole spinoff series was a sort of collaboration effort.
After this starts the opening FMV, and you bet it's got J-Pop.
And, it's uh...unique. Here's the video if you wanted to watch it and ignore the following 40 screenshots.
Music: The Sweetest Time
(I'll also be doing music links as this game's soundtrack is pretty alright. Outside of the J-Pop intro and outro, it's all done by Tomoko Morita, who's basically done the score for the majority if not all of Neverland's games.
Fortuntately, someone's already uploaded the soundtrack on Youtube, so hey, saves me time- you're a credit to this LP, mate.)
There's some sort of light flying in this tiny aspect ratio screen.
It and the screen get bigger. It's some sort of hyped up butterfly or something.
We go green.
Now there's a bird flying towards the light.
We've gone blue now.
Hey there, title card, that was fast. I almost forgot what game I was LPing.
As the lyrics kick in, the bird flies over a horizon that looks like the title screen of the first game.
Then the bird vanishes into light spaghetti.
Now we get two very uncomfortably close close-ups of our protagonist.
Ah, yes, the peaceful pose in idyllic agricultural scenery.
Well, it's more of his face.
By staring at the bushes, he uses his innate farmer-ness to create... oranges?
That bird comes by again and makes everything orange.
We now turn our attention to another anime now holding a candle in a snowy cabin.
She gets out of the chair and it's suddenly spring now, and also the house is gone.
The candle is now a butterfly and the chair is gone.
I don't think this farmer magic follows the laws of conservation of mass.
And then an orange falls into this person's hand and she turns it into air spaghetti again. She's a new face at least!
This anime is fascinated by fish, apparently.
Oh, and now there's a nun.
A brief interlude of our protagonist looking very serious alongside a squirrel.
This anime gets barely 3 seconds of screen time.
They're just throwing them at us rapid fire now. All of these characters have similarly short screen time.
Well, this guy's not happy.
Cut back to more animes being fascinated by air spaghetti/oranges/birds/butterflies.
And also this cool pose for about 4 seconds. I guess we slashed the big demon guy into a bunch of petals or something.
Then there's these two- red/magenta eyes is always a good sign, right?
We've got a witch running through a field. No information right now on whether or not she practices orange air spaghetti magic.
If those hands get any closer I'm gonna have to come up with a censor filter.
And we cut to our protagonist running through a field much bigger than we'll ever hope to have.
Thanks to the sunlight blurring some features, most of these people don't look that happy to be here.
Music: Title Theme
Wow, I spent 40 screenshots of your time on that.
Amazingly, we get 3 save slots this time. As far as I remember, every game after this point has 3 save files, which is a bit nicer than the two the previous games gave you.
Doesn't really affect me as I've got savestates, but whatever.
These things on the loading screen are a new mechanic exclusive to this game we'll get to in due time. Probably in a couple updates. This game starts slow.
Music: To You
(This track so happens to be a remix of the intro theme from RF1. A number of tracks are, which makes sense with this being a sequel and all.)
This is a rather generous recollection of the events. He literally passes out in front of her house, 3 minutes away from the nearest town, and gets suckered into ownership of a run-down farm.
But yeah, this is the plot that links this game to the first. This girl up and moves out, and our protagonist decides to track her down her whereabouts immediately, apparently infinitely grateful or something.
Yep.
As to how many of the events of the first game transpired, this game doesn't make it clear. If this was supposed to make it easier to connect this game to your playthrough of the first, it just ends up doing the opposite. In practice it usually feels like a retcon remake, but with our protagonist having a bit of backstory now instead of "has amnesia". You'll see what I mean much later.
Music: Night Ambience
(This isn't actually a song. It's just crickets and owls and whatever and I would've told you to imagine it yourself, but it seems this playlist's got me covered again.)
I don't know if it's because I was just used to the art of the other games, but Raguna in this game always looked a bit off to me.
I wonder if I can find lodging over there.
The screen fades again as we move towards that building in the distance. This whole scene makes a little less sense when you get an idea of the town's layout.
If you don't mind this humble place, you should stay here for the night.
Thank you so much! Sister, um...
Earlier Rune Factory games always had this unexplained religion around, though this is the last game that has it, I believe. It's vaguely Catholic given the nuns, I guess.
It changes to either being unmentioned or dragon worship later.
And here is where we name our character. Raguna is his standard name, (Ragna in Japan,) but I would presume that the thread has a better name.There's a 6 character limit, so keep that in mind, and make it easy to tell what your vote is or I might miss it. I'm new to this thing after all.
We've also got access to roman numerals for some reason...? Try to keep the name sensible I guess.
Oh, and I'll need a name for our farm as well. Bit of a spoiler, I know, getting a farm in a series about farming, but we do get one soon. It's similarly 6 letters long.
Anyways, I'll cut this update here not to make it a pagebuster, even if hardly 20% of the screen shots were even part of the game. Could I have put the FMV in a different post? Yes, but I didn't.
Next time we engage the struggles of being an agricultural landowner (actual gameplay) and become acquainted with our neighbors (more dialogue).