Rune Factory 4: A casual RPG that might be a bit too casual for me

I'm a casual gamer. I rarely strive for excellence in any game and am one of those players that if the standard move set works against enemies I really won't even try to dive too much into whatever the alternate moves happen to be. This has been true in Path of Exile for me where I have these 3 moves that I have used since they became available to me and I rarely even attempt to use anything else even though I have been using those skills for 25 levels now. The other skills I have tried to use do far less damage than the ones I have already built up so why bother?

I get tired of POE2 pretty quickly and have been looking around for another game to play. I purchased Astro-Bot, which is a fantastic game, but it just doesn't stay interesting for hours and hours like a good RPG can.

JRPG's are aplenty out there and some of them manage to break through to the English language market. This particular one, which was a very tiny download, was something I was willing to try and I do still look at it every now and then but feel as though it might actually be a bit too niche for me.

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I paid nothing for this game and I sat down to give it a shot last night with not much else to do. I kind of have a rule with JRPG's: If it isn't too complicated with cryptic combos and what not, I will suffer through the story if they have a button that makes it possible to speed it up. This had that so I went ahead and got in there.

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You start the story out in an airship like so many of these games do and a ton of dialogue happens that is partially humorous.. .kinda. It was actually reminiscent of SNES Final Fantasy games so I kept it going. You fall down to earth and hit your head or something and end up with amnesia and don't know who you are. Thankfully you land inside of a castle and they take you under their wing but not for free, you have to do some gardening as well.

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I've played a few games where monitoring and cultivating a garden was a big part of the gameplay and I suppose it was reasonably entertaining. The one I can think of off the top of my head would be Rice and Ruin and while I didn't complete that game, I did play it a lot longer than I thought I was going to.

This seems to follow in line with a lot of those games as well. It is Extremely casual and I would say that it may actually border on being a bit too casual. I've been playing it for a couple of hours so far and up to this point I have swung a weapon a grand total of about 8 times. The rest of the time I have spent walking around the castle, talking to villagers, and of course, gardening.

I can't say that I am in love with it but hell, it takes like zero of your attention to play it so I am going to keep going. Rice and Ruin functioned in this same way and although it bored me at first, I ended up quite liking it. I may actually go and re-install it because of writing this.

Apparently this game is $30 on Switch but I got it for free with my PS-Plus membership. Is it a good game? Well, I can't really say so far. I think that this kind of falls into that Japanese person who loves Anime sort of fanfare. You can tell because rather than it being a side mission, gardening and fishing seem to be major parts of the game. I don't know what it is about gardening and fishing, but that seems to sneak into almost any JRPG.

But so far, this game hasn't exactly hooked me, but for days that I just want to lie down on the sofa and have a controller in my hand to do a thing or two every now and then, I suppose it is ok. I wouldn't pay any money for it though.

It's just kind of old-school RPG fun with newer elements that I can't believe anyone ever actually put into game thrown into it.