Rune Factory 3 Special Review - Screenshot 1 of 6
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

Being a Rune Factory fan has been a bit of a rollercoaster ride for the past several years. After Rune Factory 4 launched in 2013, the games went on hiatus for nearly a decade, with the fate of the series itself being pretty up in the air for most of that wait. Against all odds, and after a change in development teams and rights holders, Rune Factory 5 finally saw a release last year and… well, it had its issues. Despite the middling reaction, the developers evidently saw good enough sales numbers that they could justify greenlighting Rune Factory 6, and while we wait for them to finish that up, the team saw fit to re-release Rune Factory 3 to fill the gap. Rune Factory 3 Special shows its age here and there, but this is overall a strong entry in the long-running farm sim series—we just wish that more was done to take advantage of the opportunity to bring it to new hardware.

Rune Factory 3 Special Review - Screenshot 2 of 6
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

Rune Factory 3’s narrative opens on a rainy night with a monster falling from the sky and crashing to the earth below, alarming the residents of the town of Sharance. A girl quickly takes pity on the monster and brings it into her house, giving it a room to stay in and a bed to recover in, yet the monster is nowhere to be found the following morning and has instead been replaced by a mysterious boy (named Micah by default) who has a bad, convenient case of amnesia. Micah is given a spare home built right into the trunk of the great Sharance tree just outside town and his relaxing new life as a resident there begins while he slowly puts together the pieces of his past.

It's a fine enough story for a farm sim, but by traditional JRPG standards Rune Factory 3 feels pretty weak. Skip to the following paragraph now if you're sensitive to spoilers, but you can probably guess why Micah and that strange monster from the beginning are never spotted in the same room together. The whole ‘mysterious protagonist with amnesia’ thing was a played-out trope even when this game originally launched on DS in 2009.

Luckily, what Rune Factory 3 loses in its premise it more than makes up for in its characters. The diverse cast is a delight to interact with and each character is memorable in their own way, which infuses each day with a lot more meaning as you greet people and come to better understand their various interpersonal connections.

Rune Factory 3 Special Review - Screenshot 3 of 6
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)

Gameplay follows typical farm sim rules on the surface, though there are a lot more activities to engage in beyond the sedate pace of farm life. Every day typically begins, of course, with the loop of tending to your basic farm tasks like tilling soil, harvesting ripe crops, and collecting resources from the various animals under your care. Different crops are sold from the general store according to the seasons, and though you can plant and grow anything at any time, the in-season crops will always do much better than the out-of-season ones. The proceeds from your sales enable you to slowly start upgrading your tools and farm size, offering a rewarding payoff for all your hard work day after day. As you’d expect of a game directly descended from the famed Harvest Moon series (the real one, that is), these farming mechanics are quite satisfying to engage with and provide an enjoyable gameplay loop that encourages you to play at your own pace.

This farming gameplay is far from all that Rune Factory 3 has to offer, however, as the whole gimmick here is that Rune Factory is also a proper RPG. So, if you want to put down the hoe for a day, you can instead pick up your battle axe and run out into a nearby dungeon for some good ol’ fashioned monster hunting and swashbuckling. Combat in the dungeons follows a relatively basic hack ‘n’ slash formula, but there’s a nice variety of weapon types and spells you can utilize that can mix up your approach. Plus, you can eventually bring villagers and befriended monsters with you into combat, giving you some backup for the tougher sections while also offering up some bonding opportunities. Then materials and goods you obtain from your raids can be sold off back in the village and you can use the proceeds to build another barn if you want.

Rune Factory 3 Special Review - Screenshot 4 of 6
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)

The RPG trappings extend far beyond just a few dungeons—in fact, effectively everything you can do will boost at least one obscure stat to some degree. Obviously, fishing or cooking will raise your respective levels in those areas and make you more proficient and less exhausted by those activities, but even the simple acts of walking and sleeping will raise stats for those activities and will have a measurable effect on your character. Part of the fun of having so many things to level up is that it ensures you’re never making any wrong choices; everything you do is making progress on some front and has the effect of making things just a little bit easier whenever you pick up another project.

Even though there are a lot of options for how to spend a given day, you’re not totally unlimited in what you can do. Not only are you restricted by how much time you have in a given in-game day to fulfill various tasks, but there’s also an energy economy to manage as you work. Every time you swing a sword or cast a fishing rod, you’ll lose a little bit of RP from your bar, and if it empties before you go to sleep or scarf down some food, you’ll pass out. It’s not that big a restriction, especially once you establish yourself more and find ways around it, but we appreciated how that little blue bar is something that gives you just enough of a reason to take a step back and apply some dandori before you jump into another day of activity. Plus, leveling up various stats will usually see you gaining a few more max RP points, which makes you feel that much more capable as you get more done in a single day.

Rune Factory 3 Special Review - Screenshot 5 of 6
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)

Visually, Rune Factory 3 borrows heavily from the art style used in the original release, just touched up a bit with an HD sheen. Environments all use prerendered backgrounds that the 3D character models run across, which worked a little better in the original than here—there are some sections where the backgrounds look just a little too low-res for our liking. Even so, the visuals do a fine enough job of selling the quiet beauty of a cozy world. While more could have been done to make the graphics feel more modern, this nonetheless feels like the right choice after Rune Factory 5’s disappointing 3D approach.

Although Rune Factory 3 certainly has it where it counts, there are various little nitpicks and omissions that add up to make this feel more aged than it should. When moving things between your inventory and storage there’s no 'move all' button or something that could expedite the tedious process of emptying your bag—you have to manually move the cursor to every individual item and move them over one stack at a time. If you want to make multiple copies of the same dish in the kitchen, you can’t just set a quantity and make them all at once, you have to keep selecting the same recipe from the menu and watch part of the cooking animation play out each time before you can make the next one. Such irritations aren’t really that bad in the broader picture, but the fact that the developers went to the trouble of a full remaster and didn’t take the time to make minor adjustments to improve the experience can make this release feel a bit like a missed opportunity.

Rune Factory 3 Special Review - Screenshot 6 of 6

Rune Factory 3 also feels like a noticeably more basic version of Rune Factory 4, which is also available on the Switch and can probably be found cheaper. Features such as the Prince(ss) Points system are sorely missed here and Rune Factory 3 clocks in at roughly half the length of Rune Factory 4. There are reasons to buy 3 over 4—we enjoy the cast in this entry more than we did the one in its successor—but it’s hard to deny that RF3 feels like a step back after the series’ peak, and once again highlights the sense that the developers missed their chance to make the most of this chance to revisit Sharance.

You’ve probably read up to this point wondering when you’d see something about the changes made that justify the 'Special' moniker for this re-release. Well, for better or worse, there really aren’t any changes here. The biggest addition, one borrowed from 2020’s Rune Factory 4 Special, is the 'Newlywed Mode' (available separately from the main story) which gives you a brief little playable side story for each marriage candidate that you marry. It’s nice to give that extra bit of texture to the world, especially given that marriage in the main game feels like something that barely gets acknowledged, but this is more of a neat unlockable than a headlining feature. Aside from that, the only notable changes here are the addition of a harder difficulty mode and the enhanced visuals and music.

Conclusion

The real draw here is simply the ability to play Rune Factory 3 on a console that doesn’t have ‘DS’ in its name—about 90% of the experience is exactly the same as the original, and that remaining 10% doesn’t exactly cover a whole lot. Luckily, Rune Factory 3 is and always was a great farm sim/RPG hybrid, and it’s something that we can still easily recommend to new and returning players alike. That said, if you fall into the latter group, we’d encourage you to consider carefully how much you want to shell out to replay this on modern hardware. It’s a great game, but it’s effectively the same thing as your DS copy. Still, it’s good to see a return to form after the rather uneven Rune Factory 5. If you’re looking for another very solid farm sim to add to your Switch library—and you haven't played it before—this is definitely one to consider.

Related Products

Please note that some external links on this page are affiliate links, which means if you click them and make a purchase we may receive a small percentage of the sale. Please read our FTC Disclosure for more information.