A Fantasy Harvest Moon
The first game in the Rune Factory series, released on the Nintendo DS. It was developed by Neverland Co and published by Marvelous AQL. The game was intended to be a single Spin-Off game that commemorated the 10th anniversary of the Story of Seasons series. It was later released in North America by Natsume on August 14, 2007. Rune Factory was a hit with gamers and critics, which resulted in Marvelous AQL deciding to continue the series independently from it's parent franchise.
The story begins with a young, amnesiac man named Raguna collapsing in front of a home on the outskirts of a village called Kardia. The homeowner named Mist finds Raguna and attempts to help him... by giving him a hoe and a watering can. Eventually, she does manage to actually help him and allows Raguna to live on an unused area of land nearby (with compensation).
Soon Raguna is producing crops for profit, slaying monsters, wooing the village ladies, and potentially stopping the Take Over the World plot of Ethelberd and his Sechs Empire next door.
This game provides examples of:
- And Your Reward Is Parenthood: If you get married, your wife will eventually have a baby. The child doesn't get any special introduction; they're largely just an additional character portrait that pops up when you talk to her.
- Awesome, but Impractical: Magic (except for Heal) is essentially worthless, because every spell has a fixed RP cost and you have a fixed RP cap, and RP restoration is a pain to come by.
- Big Bad: Ethelberd is the ruler of the Sechs Empire who aims to Take Over the World by controlling the Divine Earth Dragon Terrable.
- Critical Annoyance: Only in caves, because only there can you get a Game Over. The beeping increases in frequency as your HP decreases.
- Developers' Desired Date: The opening heavily features Mist, the young woman who first finds Raguna unconscious at the beginning of the game, while the other marriage candidates get a very brief cameo alongside the rivals. Mist also technically owns the farm that needs to be managed as part of the game, so Raguna ends up seeing a lot of her.
- Disk One Nuke: It's perfectly possible to make the Heaven Asunder, one of the best swords in the game, well before the first Winter makes available the rest of the game's caves, and with them, the materiel for the other, much harder to make weapons and tools.
- Early Instalment Weirdness: Many fans will admit, it is very difficult to go back to the original game after playing the later iterations, especially when the developers refined and streamlined the game.
- There are little to no ways to restore RP outside of farming dungeons, thus you're managing your health not because of enemy damage, but because of the HP you will be spending trying to fight. In addition, the magic system in this game is non-existent due to the fact that you can't cast anything outside of your warp spells if you are out of RP.
- Character interactions are extremely limited compared to later games.
- You must destroy every monster generators in one go before the boss door unlocks, although it remains unlocked so you don't have to do it again if you did it before.
- You can only eat one thing that isn't medicine and you have to wait to eat something else.
- Evil Empire: The Sechs Empire, naturally. The climax of the game is a desperate effort to stop their attempted invasion.
- Gaia's Vengeance: The ending, as the dragon god Terrable's Big Damn Heroes moment. The invading Sechs army are ultimately defeated by... farm crops?
- Game-Breaking Bug: Camping in Misty Bloom on the last day of winter has a chance of crashing the game and corrupting your save file. Of course, if that doesn't happen, and you didn't bring the Teleport magic, your game is now Unwinnable by Design, so you're kinda screwed either way.
- Gameplay and Story Integration: Raguna cultivates the soil of each dungeon to proceed to the next one just as the Sechs Empire wants him to so they can use the Rune Factories to summon Terrable
- Karma Houdini: Ethelberd, invasion attempt thwarted by Terrable, just leaves and sees no real consequences. It won't be until three games later that any real comeuppance is delivered.
- Magic Is Rare, Health Is Cheap: Almost no restoration items recover RP. This is one of the Early-Installment Weirdness factors making the RP system practically nonexistent.
- Official Couple: While you can choose any bachelorette you like in gameplay, animated cutscenes make it pretty obvious that Mist is the canon Love Interest.
- Rouge Angles of Satin: The script is absolutely riddled with spelling errors, most memorably a misspelling of 'swordsman' as 'sowrdsman' in the very last scene of the game.
- Royals Who Actually Do Something: Ivan turns out to be a member of the royal family. Raguna is hinted but not confirmed to be one as well.
- Sdrawkcab Name: All the spellbooks are by "Grand Mage Egam Dnarg".
- Sequence Breaking: Going fishing day 1 and selling your catch in the bar lets you buy the small kitchen from Ivan immediately, instead of having to wait til Summer. This isn't that helpful long-run, since the game eventually makes you clear Misty Bloom (only accessible during Winter) as part of the plot, but it lets you buy the lower-tier kitchen tools immediately on Spring 19 instead of having to listen to Ivan nag you about not having a kitchen yet.
- Sleeping Single: If you get Sabrina and Neumann to reconcile and remarry, the newlyweds will continue to live in their original, separate houses for the time being, since they both have preexisting work there. The bride hints that she expects the groom to build a new big house for them soon, though.
- Unintentionally Unwinnable: Using save points in caves while poisoned and sealed is dangerous — fainting inside a cave means Game Over, and poison can deplete that all-important last hit point, while being sealed means you can't use your Warp Whistle magic to get out instantly. If you're in deep enough and didn't bring enough healing items, the combination can end your game for good.
- Unwinnable by Design: If you were foolish enough to camp in Misty Bloom on the last day of winter without bringing Teleport magic (and the Game-Breaking Bug "luckily" didn't happen), you'd be stuck there.
- Unwitting Pawn: From the time Raguna stumbles up to Mist's house to the point the final boss is summoned he is single handedly supplying the enemy with all the energy they need to summon said boss.
- Useless Useful Spell: All of it, except Heal and the two Warp Whistles, due to the unpolished RP system.
- Warp Whistle: Escape, which brings you from a dungeon to its entrance, and Teleport, which brings you from anywhere outside to your house.
