It's Rune Factory Frontier time! Even though this game is intended as a sequel to the first Rune Factory, you don't need to know anything about it to play the game or read this diary. In fact, the only thing that's even related is that a few of the characters from the first game show up, but they completely reintroduce themselves anyway and act as if you never got to know them in the first game outside of their names anyway.

The game starts out with a really cool animated intro. Each game in the Rune Factory series has a cool anime intro (often more than one, even) like this. RFF's is a lot more playful than the other games in the series, but maintains the tradition of using a lot of abstract symbolism and imagery.

There's even a character that can possibly change her appearance at one point in the game, and if that happens, the intro will actually be changed to reflect her new appearance (otherwise staying the same). It's a minor detail, but something that really shows off how much effort the Rune Factory team put into their games.

After the intro plays out (or you could skip it, but why would you do that?), we're taken to the Title Screen where the hero of the game calls out the name of the game. Another cute little detail in the game is that if you eventually decide to get married in the game, the voice of your wife will call out the game's title here, instead.

We have the expected options to start a new game or continue a saved game, but we also have an option called "Memories," where we can rewatch any of the anime scenes from the game that we've seen before, and there's another gallery for some still illustrations that we'll see later, too. I think to actually fill the gallery completely you need to play through the game like 12 or 13 times. My brother and I almost finished doing it on our original Wii. Sadly, you only get three save files, though, so you'll have to keep deleting some of your saves to do it.

Anyway, let's actually start a new game :)

Spring 1: The Church

The game starts out with the hero narrating the little passage I typed up in the introduction to this diary. Basically, we're searching for a girl who helped us out before. If you played the first game, you'll know that this is referring to the heroine, Mist.

I don't know why you would just leave your entire life behind to go on a journey searching for someone when they haven't even been missing for an entire day... I mean, what if they just were just staying overnight with a friend? And now you're gonna go traverse the world to look for them?

Though if you've played Rune Factory games before, you'll know that the stories make no sense. They're perfectly fine with unreasonable motivations for characters, effects with no recognizable cause, and plotholes that don't even bother trying to explain themselves. But in a way, that's part of the charm of the series. It's meant to be taken more lightheartedly, but they still put a bit of seriousness into the story here and there so you can still get excited about it.

Feeling exhausted after walking for a long time, we come across a church and wonder if they may have some lodging.

Inside, we meet Sister Stella, who feels sorry for us on our adventure to find this missing girl. She asks us if the missing girl is our 'sweetheart,' to which we get flustered and reply that she is not. It's possible in the original Rune Factory to have not only have Mist as your 'sweetheart,' but even to have married her! But it seems the continuity here implies that the hero didn't find any romance or get married at all in the first game, which is... outside of the play style of most players, I would assume, since the marriage system is a popular part of the game.

While introducing ourselves, we get the opportunity to name our hero. The default name is Raguna, but of course, I named him after myself, so his name is Thaao now. Normally I like to keep default names, but Rune Factory games are so personal, with you building a person life around the hero, that I feel like I'd rather have the hero be an avatar for myself.

Sister Stella offers us a room in the church for the night so we can rest and continue our search tomorrow. So it seems like the story of the game is going to be about a search for Mist.

Spring 2: The Hammer

Like the Harvest Moon series and other Rune Factory games, the game plays out over a calendar system. After our little introduction to Sister Stella, the day moves forward to Spring 2. Each year is four "seasons" long, with each season functioning more like a real-world month with 30 days each.

We wake up and ask Stella how we can repay her for her kindness, but she tells us that helping others is a simple duty of life, and prays for our success on our search. Interrupting our little conversation, the front door of the church opens.

We're shown our first little anime scene in the game. These are typically very short (only a few seconds long) that commemorate important moments in the game's storylines.

A lot of the early-game scenes feature the characters and the environments of the game. Here, the scene starts out with a panoramic view of the church, the light coming from the door bouncing off of the pews and spreading across the hall as it opens.

We cut to the door's opening to see a young woman's face appear from behind it, brightening up as the door opens all the way. She smiles as she enters the church, and our little animated scene comes to an end.

The woman walks up to us, and... it's Mist! She says, "You are..." but hesitates afterward. We're given the choice to ask her if we've met or be surprised that we're talking to Mist.

Neither impact the game too much overall, but this serves as a way to help players who haven't played the first Rune Factory to be introduced to the characters in a different way. If we choose the first option, Thaao won't remember any of the returning characters from the first game, and they'll have to introduce themselves to him again. He suffers from amnesia, so this kind of makes sense.

If we choose the second option, Thaao will remember everyone more readily and we'll be introduced to the characters in a slightly different way. Since there are only so many returning characters and this only affects the introductions, only a few lines of dialogue throughout the game are affected by this change.

Either way, I think it's a cute little detail. They could have just went with the amnesia thing and had everyone reintroduce themselves anyway.

We choose the first option (I kinda clicked it on accident while trying to scroll through text lol) so Mist wonders if we have amnesia again and explains who she is. There's no real need to know the backstory to enjoy this game, but if you're curious, basically the first game starts with Mist finding the hero passed out with his memories missing and helps him get back on his feet by introducing him to an abandoned home and farm, where he lives and works while trying to regain his memories.

Mist tells us that she isn't going to return home for now because someone is calling for her and she must find out what it's about. We don't really know what she's talking about, and refer to it as "nonsense." Mist has always been kind of weird like this.

And suddenly, she asks us to stay in this town, too!

We tell her we can't, but she tells us that there's yet another abandoned house and abandoned farm in this town. Mist tells Sister Stella that Thaao is quite good at dealing with this kind of situation, and just... starts taking us to the farm. Stella asks us to stop back in after we get some work done.

We keep refusing, but Mist doesn't seem to listen, so I guess the decision is just... made for us. We now have a new home and new life here. Just like that. This is why I say you don't need to take Rune Factory's stories too seriously.

Following Mist down the path away from the church, we notice something crazy in the sky. We ask what it is, and Mist tells us that it's Whale Island, which is always in the skies above Trampoli, the village we are staying in. Apparently there's a cave inside. This kind of thing is apparently not a surprise as Mist simply mentions it casually and then we continue on our walk.

Mist introduces to our house, which looks nice, but we are a bit worn out just looking at the bad condition the land is in, filled with weeds and stones and stuff. Mist tells us we can use the farm however we'd like. Considering we left the town less than a day after Mist did, I don't really understand how she's gotten so settled here already and even seems to have some kind of authority here to just be giving people houses and stuff.

Either way, Mist asks us to name the farm. The default name is "Mist," and I think if you name it as such, Mist might have a special reaction, but you can name it whatever you want. I named the farm Amanohashi, which just fit the character limit.

Afterward, Mist says it's a great name, and Thaao responds that he hopes she wasn't just planning on saying that no matter what we named it. I like how this is a reference to how characters always respond that way in games when you get to name things, even when you can enter terrible names. It's kinda like breaking the fourth wall but not at the same time. Very cute.

Mist also gives us a Cheap Hoe, Cheap Watering Can, and a bag of Turnip Seeds to help us get started. We play around with them a bit to get a feel for them (as in, the hero does the animations for using the tools while standing there).

Our first order of business is to clear up some of the land. There are various weeds and other things growing all over the place, we we just walk around and pick them up.

All of these things are pretty useful, actually, so we'll just keep them in our inventory for now. Well, I don't think there's anything else we can do with them, anyway. But we run around and pick everything up.

Our next objective is to till the soil. None of this is really necessary, of course; we could just run off and talk to Sister Stella. The game uses a grid-based system, so the farmland is divided into squares. We have a little "cursor" while we have tools equipped that shows us which node on the grid we'll interact with if we use the tool at that time. While tilling up some squares, we get a few "Skill Up" messages with a little chime.

This is our farming skill increasing. I'll go more into the skill leveling system and stuff later. For now, we're just going to get the work done and go back to meet Stella.

Afterward, we plant the seeds in the spots we tilled, and water them with the watering can. We can fill up the watering can at the river right next to where we were planting.

After finishing up our little chores, we head back to the Church where Stella asks us to do her a favor, to deliver a bamboo shoot to Turner, the fat man at the inn. That's our only description to go on.

We head a bit west of the Church to find the inn and head inside, initiating another little animated cutscene.

This time we get a view of the inside of the inn. Either this place is really huge, Thaao is really small, or the proportions were not really drawn that well. I'll give you three guesses to which it was.

The place is empty at first, but from the stairway we hear a voice asking if we're a customer. We're greeted by a cute, chubby, young woman with a :3 face carrying a basket of linens.

She yells for her dad a few times, but he doesn't come. Flustered, she asks us if we're staying about three times and then tells us the cost is 100 Gold. After she stumbles over her words for a while, we interrupt to tell her that we're not staying. We actually have the option to just say thanks and hand over payment, though I don't remember what happens if we choose that.

We let her know that we're new here and just going around and greeting everyone. She introduces herself as Eunice, and says that her family owns the inn.

Eunice is one of my favorites, and she was actually the first I ever married in this game. And yeah, she's supposed to be fat, but the artist doesn't really seem to know how to draw fat people well so she just looks kind of weird. But I still think she's super cute anyway.

We leave and re-enter the inn to get Turner to appear (it's kind of weird that we're supposed to meet him as our first little quest, but then this scene makes him disappear until we leave) and hand him the bamboo shoot that Stella gave us.

Turner is Eunice's dad and owner of the inn, co-owner of the whole building along with his wife, Rita, who runs the bar and cafe on the other side. Turned asks us to go talk to Ganesha the blacksmith for him. And, yeah, we're going to do a little run-around quest until we meet almost everyone in the village.

We head a bit north of the inn to meet up with Ganesha, the blacksmith in town, to tell her that Turner broke his knife again or whatever. We're a little bit surprised to see an elven blacksmith. In the other Rune Factory games, I think the blacksmiths are all burly dwarven dudes. Ganehsa tells us that what she lacks in raw physical strength, she makes up for in her attention to detail. She asks us to head to Danny's general store and pay her tab for her, giving us 100G.

I'm not sure why all these people are so quick to ask favors of a new resident the moment they meet them lol.

Danny is an annoying shopkeeper whose only personality is "give me money." He tells us to get out when we say we're not buying anything, but then we offer over Ganesha's dues. He counts it and tells us to buy something next time. But before we go, he asks us to go talk to Erik for him.

The shop here is pretty boring, too. We can only buy Turnip Seeds and a couple other very basic items, to which Danny says we can't complain since it's the only general store in town and we have no choice but to shop here anyway.

We say, "Again?!" which confuses him, but then leave off to find this Erik guy.

South of town, there's another farm that's a bit smaller than ours that's tended to by Erik, where he also sells farming goods like seeds and fodder. He keeps pretending like we asked him if he has a girlfriend. He also calls us "Young Man," and there's this voice clip where he says "Hey, Young Man!" almost every time he greets you, and it's really funny. It's become sort of a meme among my friends. We usually just refer to Erik as "Hey Young Man."

Once we start getting to the point, though, we realize that Danny didn't even tell us what we were supposed to relay to Erik. Erik says he knows what it's about though, because Danny's shipment came in recently or something. And with that, we've finished our little set of rounds. There are still a few people who we weren't forced to meet, though.

There's another farm across from Erik's run by this kinda spooky guy named Kross. He doesn't even tell us his name because everyone forgets it (even though that doesn't seem to be true, as later other people will easily refer to him by name). We figure it out anyway by reading his mailbox, which has his name written on it.

This guy says all kinds of weird stuff like talking about how the life cycle of grass is sad or whatever, and even this weird gloomy music always starts playing when you talk to him. In addition to running a small farm, he also is a carpenter and can upgrade or build stuff for us.

Upstairs at Ganesha's place, we can also meet her son Marco. When we first meet him, he asks who we are, and we have the option to tell him we're new around here, or tell him we're here to kidnap him. Despite how weird and disturbing the second answer his, he takes it as a joke and says we must have figured out he's the legendary hero or something. Marco has an active imagination and likes to pretend he goes on adventures and stuff. He's often hidden away somewhere where you don't just run into him while doing other things, so I tend to forget he even exists.

When running around town, along the path between our house and the church, we run across a big clock tower on a little hill. We marvel at it for a moment, and Stella arrives to tell us that this clock tower was here before even she was, and there doesn't seem to be any way to get the clock to work. Right now the place is closed up for some kind of indoor renovation, but it will be open again soon. Inspecting the door says that someone is moving in on the 7th of Spring.

Next to the clock tower is a sparkling sapling in the ground. If you don't do anything with this, Mist and Stella will start giving you hints about it, but you're supposed to water it with your watering can. It really stands out, and especially with the hints, there's not really a way you can miss it.

After watering it, it suddenly grows into a giant beanstalk that reaches all the way to Whale Island in the sky! You may be wondering why this thing has just never grown before if all it took was a little water. Well, that's because -- and this is probably the only plot point that is "missed" by not having played the first game at this point -- our hero is an Earthmate, which is a kind of "chosen one"-type person who has special earth powers to commune with nature, and sometimes these like... life miracle things happen because of them.

Mist kind of mentions it in passing at one point, but it doesn't explain what an Earthmate is. And honestly, this is Rune Factory, so even if there wasn't an explanation, they would still just randomly do something like this in this game.

We climb the stalk all the way up to Whale Island. I don't know how we climb this far in less than one minute, but we do! When we reach the top, we start hearing a voice in our heads, which is apparently the voice of Whale Island itself.

It tells us that it was once just a small clump of rocks that was granted awareness by the "influence of Runes," and it started flying through the sky. We're just supposed to accept that this makes sense and means something. The Whale tells us that the Rune within him is growing weak, and he fears something terrible may happen if it fades away. It doesn't explain what may happen, but since he's flying in the air, that seems to imply that this entire island could come crashing down onto Trampoli and kill everyone.

He asks us for help in figuring out what is wrong, and we of course adamantly agree to do so without question or hesitation.

He tells us to check out the stone tablet in front of us, which might be able to help. When we inspect it, this weird aura pops out and splits into twelve spinning spheres that then blast away in different directions. The inscription o the tablet reads, "The melody of trust grows within 12 maidens."

Nothing else seems to happen next, so we just continue on our way.

There's a big cave beyond the tablet, which is our introduction to our first dungeon! Our biggest problem now is that we don't have any weapons. We can indeed fight monsters by smacking them with the Cheap Hoe that Mist gave us, but it's not very effective. We can even sprinkle them with the watering can if we want, but that's pretty much useless.

So for now, we're just going to run away from them all and explore. The combat system in this game is a typical action-RPG type system where you press a button to attack with your equipped weapon, and enemies will run around and act according to their AI.

Most enemies in the game can easily be avoided just by running right past them, and there are few places in the game where you actually must fight to advance. But if you avoid fighting completely and just run into bosses or forced encounters, you'll have quite a bit of trouble. It is probably possible to LLG the game, but it would require a lot of patience and learning.

When we reach a section not far into the cave, we run across another young woman wandering around on her own. We warn her that it's dangerous (even though we're just a random farmer wandering around here on our own...) and she tells us that she "smells a hot spring" around here, and asks us to bash up this rock set in the wall. We don't have anything to bash it up with, so she gives us a Cheap Hammer. If she already had the hammer, couldn't she have just bashed it herself...?

Anyway, we do so, and a bunch of hot water comes flooding out. I guess it pours all the way down into Trampoli or something, because this girl is able to start a bathhouse there with it.

The Laga Springs bathhouse now appears between the church and general store (yes, the entire building just APPEARS instantly), with our new friend Melody running the place. Well, she's not really a new friend, because she's a returning character -- she ran the bathhouse in the first game, as well.

The bathhouse allows us to fully recover our HP and RP, though we do have to pay a small fee of 10G each time, it only opens after 3PM, and Melody will only let us take a bath once a day for whatever reason. But with our newfound stamina, we head back to Whale Island. Just north and south of the entrance, there are small patches of fertile soil. We can even grow crops in here! If you've seen any other games in the series, you're probably well familiar with this idea already. Unlike on our farm, dungeons don't have to worry about the change of seasons, so it's like having a hothouse catered to a specific season at all times. And there's monsters running around. After taking out the goblin in the front of the cave with the hoe so he doesn't get in our way, we start tilling up the land and plant some Turnip Seeds here.

And with that, we're finally done with things for the day. We're free to do whatever we want each day, but I'm trying to get a lot of these 'early' things out of the way to really open the game up more before going on.

Unlike the first day which kind of happened on its own, to end a day, we have to go home and sleep in our bed. We'll be restored and the time will advance to 6AM on the next day. Sleep is important, too -- if you don't sleep properly not only will you not restore your HP and RP, but you also risk getting sick, which causes other problems. I know I haven't explained HP or RP or anything yet, but we'll get to it, I promise!

Spring 3: The Glove

The first day was definitely very eventful, but it won't be nearly as hectic going forward since we've already met everyone. Well, almost everyone.

We wake up on Spring 3 to a knock on the door. We answer to find a short woman with some Woolies (those sheep-like creatures) following her around. She tells us that we were supposed to have submitted an application for change of address, and then delivers our mail.

This is Anette, the local mailman. She can run really fast and is for some reason always being chased by Woolies. She's very cute and friendly. When she runs off, we open the mail she gave us to find it's a letter from Anette herself welcoming us to town.

While we have some vague direction on what to do, like help the Whale, what we choose to spend our time on is really pretty open to our own preferences. There's not a lot to do just yet this early in the game, though. And it's always important to keep up on your chores, since a lot of goals in the game take more than just a single day to complete. For now, the only thing we need to keep up on are our turnips that we planted on the farm and in Whale Island. We can spend the rest of our time running around Trampoli and talking to our friends.

When we talk to Kross, he tells us that we can befriend monsters. He seems to have a strong affinity with monsters and nature, so maybe he's an Earthmate, too? But he gives us a "Pet Glove," which is just a big brush with a strap on it, and tells us to go rub some monsters. If we're able to calm down a monster enough, we can befriend it and bring it home. Before we can do this, though, we'll need a barn, which requires us to have wood, and we don't have any wood. It's not possible to get any wood yet anyway.

Sometimes in the bathhouse we can find a man named Nolan. This is the only place in the game we can ever see him. Basically he's just an old man that really loves baths. He sometimes causes a little bit of trouble for Melody by drinking in the bathhouse. He also has this weird cat thing over his shoulder. I don't know if it's supposed to be a cat or a doll or what. I don't think this is ever explained, either, lol.

If we're around our farm at 5PM, we'll run into the woman who collects the goods from our shipping bin and pays us for them. Shipping items items is the primary way of making money in the game. We'll need money to buy extensions to our house and farm and buy various other items. We can make money by putting crops and other items in the shipping bin, where Rosetta will collect them at the end of each day and leave money for us.

Rosetta is another returning character from the first game. She chews us out for not remembering her. If we had chosen to remember Mist at the beginning of the game, her reaction to us would have been a lot nicer. Either way, we explain the situation to her, and she thinks both we and Mist are crazy. Rosetta isn't a resident of Trampoli, but just comes by here to collect shipments as part of her business.

So now we've met a few more people and acquired the Pet Glove. We're still not done meeting everyone or collecting the key items that will really open up the game yet, though.

Spring 4: The Axe

Just in case you notice any of the dates being our of order on the screenshots (I'm not really paying attention, myself), I want to explain that I actually played the entire first week of the game on my own just testing out how it ran in the emulator. I've played it a ton on the Wii already and didn't think I was going to start playing it again but... here we are. Now that I think I'm really getting into playing again, I decided to do the diary on it, and then replayed the first week to get all the screenshots. But stuff happened in a different order because the game isn't particularly linear, even in the beginning when there's not much to do. So I'm going based on the order things happened in the original save file, which is the one I'll be continuing with throughout these diaries.

Anyway, we head to sleep again and wake up on the 4th of Spring.

Every morning around 6:45, Anette will show up to deliver the mail. We can actually talk to her before she gets to our mailbox to pick up the mail from her in person, which also gets us an extra little voiced Good Morning line from her. It's a cute little thing to do, and this game has an affection system that we'll talk more about later, and doing so will help Anette like us more.

Similarly, we can hang out on the farm around 5:30PM to run into Rosetta when she collects the day's shipment. Though what we actually ship affects whether or not we'll boost up her affection. For right now, most of the items we've been picking up from our farmland will be useful later, so we're not selling them. The bamboo shoots can be useful for cooking later, but right now, they sell for 110G a pop, which is way more than the 10-15G everything else sells for, so we're going to sell them to make some early money. Weeds only sell for 10G, but they are very plentiful all over our land, and they don't really have any use, so we can sell those, too.

Rosetta will be sad, though, if we sell weeds. I think she feels sorry for us because we're poor or something. She'll get tears in her eyes and sad music will play, lol.

We use our hammer to clear up a bunch of the stones in our field. Noticing that the field looks much nicer, Sister Stella brings up the subject of the field the next time we're visiting her at the church. We talk about clearing away branches, which leads to her finding out we don't have an axe. She gives us her old Cheap Axe so we can clear those up, too. We head back to the farm and chop some stick. Each stick we chop adds one lumber to our lumber collection, which we'll need to build buildings.

We head over to Kross's place and ask him to build a barn for us. We only need 1000G and 10 Lumber to build it, which is super inexpensive. I think getting the barn is meant to be your introduction to construction upgrades. The barn just immediately appears on the hill on the east side of our farm after we ask Kross to build it.

There's nothing really we can do with it yet since we don't have any pet monsters, and even if we did go tame some with our brush, we don't really have the means to take care of them right now.

When talking to Sister Stella again, she tells us that she heard that Mist has become ill. We visit her house to just find that she's caught a cold. She jokes that she can get rid of her cold by giving it to us, which causes us to promptly run away with a, "Bye, now!"

Before heading home to go to bed for the day, we stop by the bar to talk to the bartender, Rita. This is Eunice's mom and Turner's husband. We've actually already met her, I just didn't bother to introduce her until now since I knew we'd be coming here to see her on this day. Though we're never actually required to meet her at all. Rita for some reason things getting extensions built at your farm is a big deal, and if you come to the bar on the night you order an extension from Kross, she'll reward you with a free drink.

What she gives to you is completely random, though. When playing the first time, with the playthrough I am actually using for the diaries, she gave me something like a "Fruit Ole" or something, which I was able to put in the shipping bin and sell for more than 4000G. During this little run to grab the screencaps, she just gave me some milk, which sells for only 60G.

Milk is nice for other reasons, though, but having all that extra money this early was extremely helpful.

Spring 5: The Sickle

The next morning, we wake up and feel sick ourselves. It seems that indeed we caught whatever Mist had. And with all the work we did hammering and chopping yesterday, we're really not feeling well. Everything starts to spin and we faint right in front of our house.

A young woman walking by at just the right time finds us on the ground and takes us to the church.

We get another animated scene introducing Lara, a nun who has come to stay in Trampoli. She's also a qualified nurse, so she's going to be working as the town's doctor while she's staying with Stella.

Lara sternly warns us about taking care of ourselves, and lets us be on our way. She's another returning character from the first game, where she worked as an assistant to the main doctor there.

Despite all that's happened, it's still 6AM when we leave the clinic at the church. From now on, if we overwork ourselves or fall to monsters, we'll pass out and wake up here, getting a scolding from Lara. What's funny is that if we were to pass out before this event, we would just appear here anyway, even though it's closed and no one is in here.

After acquiring our new tools, Erik will tell us a bit about them, priding himself on being the walking farming tutorial. Once we've learned about the hammer, glove, and axe, he'll bestow upon us the last of our major tools we'll acquire in this little introduction week, the Cheap Sickle. This is an important one! We can use it to reap pasture grass that we grow, which will use to feed pet monsters. But more importantly, we can do a favor for Mist.

When we talk to Mist after acquiring the sickle from Erik, she'll complain that the grass in front of her house is way overgrown, and then start talking as if we already agreed to help her out cutting her grass. We'll be teleported to the front of her house in front of her grass. This will happen pretty much every time we talk to Mist after getting the sickle until we finally cut her grass. The biggest problem with this is that the dialogue is mistranslated, and she thanks us for already having cut her grass before we even do it. When I first played this game back when it was new, I thought that we automatically did it during the fade-out teleportation thing, and she was just thanking us. I thought something more was going to come of it later. But we're actually supposed to pull out the sickle and start cutting.

I mean, it does place us in front of some tall grass, but it's a little away from Mist's house, so I didn't realize that was even the grass she was talking about...

While cutting, we'll eventually find a weird staircase leading underneath the ground. This is the entrance to the Green Ruins, another dungeon for us to explore! Even though we've hardly even done anything on Whale Island yet. There's a ton here we can do, but we're not going to do it right now. For now, we're just going to be glad we opened this place up and leave. From now on, the tall grass across the street from Mist's house will always be gone and we can easily enter the Green Ruins whenever we want.

Day 6: The Library

With all of our farming tools acquired and another dungeon open, the game is really starting to open up. There's just a few more things we're going to do in this beginning week to get everything started off.

When we wake up the next day, we find a young woman collapsed in front of our house. She begs for water, which we respond to with sprinkling her with the watering can. She gets kind of mad, but I guess she can't be that mad since she's nearly unconscious. We take her to Lara in the inn.

In the infirmary, Lara takes care of the woman. When she's come to, we find out her name is Selphy. She actually starts to introduce herself as "Selphius Josephine" something but quickly corrects herself to just say Selphy. When Lara asks her how she got into this situation, she starts talking to herself, remembering what led up to her being passed out in front of her house. The first thing she says is that she "ran away," though I think it's supposed to be like Lara and Thaao didn't really hear that part.

And this is the first we're really starting to see of a character's story. There are actually twelve young ladies who can eventually live in Trampoli, and each has their own optional storyline to uncover aside from the main story. Once you learn more about each, you can even date them, and even propose, get married, and start a family with having a child together! It's all completely optional, but it's a very fun part of the game. It's also just really fun to uncover the stories of the twelve girls, even if you don't decide to date or marry in the game.

Anyway, we learn that Selphy just happened to forget to eat for an entire week, which led to her passing out. Lara freaks out and starts yelling at her, then demands she stay the entire day and night in the infirmary, and even must stay for a while to recuperate after that. Selphy starts to complain, but Lara gives her a cold, "Did you say something?" that scares her into keeping quiet.

We head up to Whale Island where we find some of our turnips have finally grown! Instead of harvesting them, however, we're going to just leave them here. Now that they're fully grown, they'll never need to be watered again, as the ... power of the dungeon keeps them alive or something.

The power of the spirits of the Earth form an energy known as Runes, and when a lot of Runes gather in one place, they'll form a Rune Crystal. This floating, glowing orb above our turnips is an example of this. When an Earthmate brings life to the earth in a way such as growing crops, many Runes will gather.

Runes Crystals are vital to survival in the game because they're one of the main ways to restore RP, which functions as a sort of stamina, when you're away from home. Making it through long dungeons will likely require you to stop and pick up some Rune Crystals along the way. Planting crops near each other in a dungeon to purposely gather lots of Runes in one place to create Rune Crystals is known as creating a "Rune Factory," which is where the name of the game comes from.

To quickly go over the RP system: Thaao has 500 Rune Points, or RP, which are expended to do pretty much anything. Swinging the hoe, sprinkling water from the watering can, using weapons, whatever, it all costs RP. Once RP is gone, doing any action that would normally cost RP will start to drain HP. HP is Thaao's vitality, so when it runs out, he'll pass out and become sick, which can cause all kinds of additional problems. When RP is depleted, huge chunks of HP are spent to perform actions, so it's very important to pay attention to. While fighting in the dungeon, traps and enemies can also wear down on Thaao's HP, so it's not only there for just when RP runs out.

As we level up our skills the, amount of RP it costs to perform actions decreases. At first, it costs a lot of RP to use the hoe or watering can, but the more we do those things, we gain experience toward our Farming level, which makes those actions cost less RP.

Picking up a Rune Crystal restores 125 (25%) of Thaao's RP, which is quite a bit! But when swinging a sword can cost something like 16 RP each time, that can drain quite quickly. When the game starts, it's very difficult to make much progress in a dungeon at all. But by planting Rune Factories and raising skill levels, you'll slowly be able to get deeper and deeper into a dungeon, which will allow you to find new items and monsters and uncover more of the story.

Another thing we can do in Whale Island is to smash rocks with the hammer. This is yet another thing to drain our RP, but we'll be able to find ores like Iron and Copper which we will be able to use later.

Travelling a bit further into Whale Island, we come across this cute little purple elephant thing. Unlike other monsters, this one doesn't seem to be hostile, and we just watch it walk around in circles around us for a while. It eventually walks away, and this short little cutscene is over.

Returning home later, we find that this cute little guy has decided to make a home out of the front of our barn. He doesn't actually stay in the barn proper, so we don't have to worry about him taking up space we could use for pet monsters, and he doesn't require any kind of care or food. But he also doesn't really do anything. He just stands there.

Spring 7: The Forge

Finally, the last day of our first week has arrived! Weeks in Rune Factory are six days long. The week starts on Monday, but after Friday, instead of Saturday and Sunday, there is a single weekend day called "Holiday." There are an even 5 weeks in every month to make each season exactly 30 days long. We've finally reached our first Holiday, which is pretty much going to finish up our little introduction week to the game.

Spring 7 is also the day that someone was supposed to move in to the clock tower, but we can't meet them early in the morning. So instead we just run around aimlessly waiting for some time to pass. I took a screenshot of Eunice cleaning down some tables in the bar in the morning because it was really cute. There's actually a lot of little animations for the characters as they do various things like this. There's even a little 'squeak squeak' sound effect as she wipes the cloth on the table.

Eunice actually really loves cleaning. It's pretty much all she ever does, and she'll even talk about cleaning quite a bit. She'll constantly give you tips on doing laundry and stuff even though you can't do laundry in the game.

We wander into the abandoned library that is next to the church and hear a crash in another short animated scene.

It seems someone fell down behind the reception desk. They reach up from behind it and grab their green hat before standing up.

And here we find Selphy. Since Lara made her stay in Trampoli as part of her healing, Sister Stella allowed her to use the old library as temporary residence. Selphy just so happens to really love books though. She's gone frantic completely rearranging the entire place. It was actually pretty tidy before, but now that she's "organized" it, there are just piles of books everywhere. For her, it works out because all the books she wants most are in the easiest-to-reach places.

We're able to stop by and read books from the shelves, and Selphy will even sell us books that she finds useless while perusing the library's stacks. Even if she hadn't wanted to stay before, this place is like a heaven to her, so she's probably going to be here for quite a while now.

The books that Selphy decides to sell are all recipe books. Some are for cooking, but others are for things like mixing medicines or crafting items at a forge. This is how we'll learn how to make all kinds of items.

We pick up "Let's Make Wepaons!" which has some basic recipes for weapons in it, "Make a Magic Cane," which has recipes for making magic staves, and "Jewelry Workshop," which has accessory crafting recipes in it.

On Holidays in the town square, we can find an aspiring painter named Lute. While he's waiting for his big break as an artist, he also works as a traveling peddler. From Lute we can buy various amenities and decorations for our home. We can even buy some of his paintings!

Since we're pretty rich from selling all our bamboos, weeds, and that really fancy drink that Rita gave us, we go ahead and pick up the Handy Forge, Handy Kitchen, and Handy Laboratory, which together will allow us to cook, forge tools and weapons, craft accessories, and mix medicine. Our Handy Kitchen also has space for two cooking tools, so we pick up a frying pan and a pot from Lute as well.

With that, we've spend all of our money, however, so we're unable to get any more recipe books from Selphy for now, making our frying pan and pot kind of useless.

Over the course of talking to people in town every day, we've actually acquired a couple of other recipe books, too. Rita gave us a basic cookbook, and Ganehsa gave us a book that helps us upgrade our farming tools a little.

The very first thing we do is upgrade the watering can. Right now it can only hold 12 "waters," which is only enough to water 12 squares. It's really inconvenient. Using Iron to make a Tin Can (??) will allow us to hold 15 waters, and give us the ability to water up to three squares at once time!

To make something at any of the crafting stations, you just pick a recipe and click on it. It will automatically fill in the required items for you, and then you can press the + button to start making it. If you want, you can hand-pick the items that you'll use -- which is handy because items all have their own quality level, and you may want to make sure to use your high-quality items or make sure to save them, rather than just using whatever the game picked for you.

You can also forego a recipe and put some items together as ingredients and go for it. If your combination doesn't result in anything, though, you will lose your items and waste your RP. Crafting an item that exists as a recipe before you actually obtain the recipe is possible, but it will drain way more RP than if you were to use the recipe like normal. You also can only craft recipes up to a certain level above your current crafting level. If the level of the recipe is too high compared to your level, you'll just fail and lose RP.

Once you start a recipe, a bar will appear on the screen. There are three sections of the bar: the red and yellow section on the side, which is the 'failure' area, the blue section in the center which is the 'success' area, and the green sections on the sides of the blue section which are 'critical success' areas. A little indicator will slide across the bar, and your goal is to stop it in one of the two success areas.

The resulting item will have the quality level of the lowest-level ingredient that was used to make it. But if you happen to hit one of the green areas, you will craft "with expertise" and it will gain an additional one level.

We've collected various ores and items over the course of the week, including many items dropped exclusively by monsters, which I've been fighting with the hammer this whole time (which is... cumbersome, to say the least), so we're able to make quite a bit of nice items here. I even made sure to collect up some copper so we can get some of the stronger weapons right away.

To make long swords, you have to upgrade from a short sword, but I accidentally upgraded both of the short swords I made into Scimitars (a slightly stronger-than-the-basic-one short sword) without noticing, and I didn't have enough materials to make another short sword, so we didn't get to have a long sword just yet. We also didn't get to make a battle axe because it requires an item we haven't gotten to drop from a monster yet. I don't remember which one. Sharp Talon or Sharp Fang.

Other than that, we're able to upgrade all our farm tools to the next level and make at least basic versions of every type of weapon, other than magic staves, as they require elemental crystal items that are much harder to find than the simple stuff we've been collecting thus far.

After running around to buy stuff and go back home to use it, we can finally meet the person who moved into the clock tower -- Kanno!

This guy is soooooooo cute with his big nose, droopy mustache, cute little glasses... he also reminds me of Josef from UNLIMITED:Saga.

Weird old man crushing aside, Kanno is here because he researches magic that uses Runes, and Whale Island caught his interest. We can ask him all about Rune and Magic stuff.

Also he's cuuuuuuuuuuuute.

Even though we have all this cool new stuff to go rampaging through dungeons and do more extensive farm work... we spent our last G on amenities and recipe books, and spent all our RP on crafting, so now we're about dead, and we can't even afford the measly 10G to go take a bath. We'll just have to sit and suffer in our sweat and go to bed.

And so that finally ends our introduction week in Rune Factory Frontier! I realize it was a super long entry, but it seemed pointless to break it up into pieces since it all goes together really. And that would be even more boring to have a bunch of introduction entries I think...?

Now that we have an arsenal of weapons, a few little Rune Factories, two open dungeons, upgraded tools to work with... a lot more of the game has really opened up to us, so things will move along much more quickly from here on out, and we're a little more free to choose what to focus on now, since we've gotten all of the necessary beginning-of-the-game stuff out of the way. I hope you'll stick around and continue on this journey with me!

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