While it’s likely that a tight budget was the driving force behind a lot of these writing decisions, it really says something about how badly female characters are treated in media that a game choosing not to differentiate much between genders has some of the best writing I’ve seen in a long time.Ĭontrast this with a game like Stardew Valley, a farming sim that soured my entire experience within an hour of playing it. The dialogue is largely ungendered, allowing the player to immerse themselves more fully in the role they’re playing, with the gender of the character being secondary to the personality and actions of the player character. The rest of the villagers will only ever refer to your avatar by their first name, and when playing as Frey, will rarely make any reference to your avatar being female at all. While two characters will refer to your avatar as “Prince” or “Princess” throughout the game, for at least one character you have to explicitly grant them permission to use the title, otherwise they’ll refer to your avatar by their first name. The few dialogue changes that exist are so rare that they’re difficult to stumble across in the game’s vast word count.
Frey’s dialogue isn’t altered to seem more feminine in contrast to Lest, and the other characters treat her and talk to her the way they speak to Lest, whether they’re simple interactions or flirty exchanges. Whatever dialogue Lest has, Frey will echo it word for word. Frey and Lest have the same bold, passionate personality, and their dialogue reflects that throughout the game.
Aside from who you can and cannot romance, there are few differences when playing as Frey, the female main character, and Lest, the male main character. You can romance your local adorable bachelors and bachelorettes, gifting them treats, taking them out on dates, and marrying them.īut what makes Rune Factory 4 stand out from other farming sims I’ve played is what little differentiation the game shows between the male and female avatars in its interactions and dialogue. It has all the trappings of a standard farming sim: you buy seeds to grow crops behind the castle, sell them to make gold, and buy different cooking implements and crafting tables to create dishes, weapons, and clothes to aid you in your quests to help save the guardians of the land. In Rune Factory 4, you take the role of an amnesiac character who crash lands in the town of Selphia and is adopted as the local prince or princess by the dragon guarding the castle. The games also include linear stories in which the player typically has to defeat difficult monsters using gear they find during exploration or that they craft themselves from materials. Much like in Harvest Moon, in each game the player has a farm in a village where they can romance the various townspeople and grow their wealth.
#Rune factory 4 romance series
Rune Factory is a fantasy spin-off of the Harvest Moon series developed by Neverland Co. Looking For Better Government in Ni No Kuni 2.Marketing Representation in Dragalia Lost.Rune Factory 4 is a game that takes a different approach to its player characters that doesn’t rely on tired stereotypes, making for a very similar experience regardless of which avatar you choose to play as.
It often leaves me feeling like I have to choose a male avatar if I want to experience the story in its purest form. This is especially evident in games where players are given the option between male and female avatars, when writers sometimes differentiate between genders in stereotypical ways. And although inclusivity and diversity in gaming has steadily grown over the years, it’s still common for a game to make me feel like it only tried to meet a severely low bar and immediately stopped there.Īs a genderfluid female-identifying Latinx player, it’s already tough for me to find representation of myself in video games, especially when the games are written from the perspectives of cisgender straight men, even when women are the lead characters. Like most games, though, they’re made by predominantly male teams. Series like Harvest Moon and Story of Seasons are a good mix of the things I enjoy most about gaming: micromanaging resources and romancing the hot neighbor. For as long as I’ve been playing video games, I’ve loved farming sims and visual novels more than any other genre.
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