A humble farming and small town simulator named Harvest Moon that came out during the ’90s on the SNES set the stage for a huge wave of similar games and spinoffs. They feature a protagonist fixing up a broken down farm, growing crops, talking to townspeople, taking care of animals, maybe doing some exploring or fighting, and of course finding the perfect waifu from the eligible characters. The drama surrounding who is the “real” Harvest Moon successor still occupies message boards to this day. Elrentaros Wanderings takes the same general vein, but eschews nearly all farming, nearly all romance, and nearly all town stuff, leaving a capable but plagued combat system as the only real part of the experience. Well, how does it stack up to its farming roots?
Despite the good anime art of some of the characters, Elrentaros Wanderings feels woefully incomplete. This is not across the board panning, because some parts are actually pretty good. The way the equipment system works has the framework for something really cool. Other than some of the fighting, there are many things that get in the way of being fun that it’s tough to recommend as there are plenty of better alternatives in the farming/fighting/small town sims.
Like many, Elrentaros Wanderings starts with the player having nothing, being new to a quaint little town. From nearly the beginning, though, this shows what it is going to mostly be about: dungeon crawling. The town exists mostly to buy some small items, dump off stuff found in the dungeons, rinse and repeat. This is where some of the problems pop out. A game can be fine being just a dungeon crawler, but then it lives or dies by that fact. What makes something like Rune Factory good is that all these moving parts interact; meeting friends can help farming or fighting, players can make better gear and go find stuff in dungeons, and so on.
Everything except the dungeons in Elrentaros Wanderings is very, very barebones. Signs of how bad this is can first be gleamed by the NPC sprites that simply stand still, never moving, never turning, their blank faces staring off into the void day and night, rain and shine. Farming is non-existent, outside of throwing some seeds in a special spot and coming back in a few runs to get coins that are used to simulate buying a gift. The town exists only to funnel one into the dungeon for some quests. Even any progression on the romance system is tied to unlocking items down there, therefore any talking, flirting, or giving gifts is, for all intents, not here.
Across the board there are just random small things that continue to pile up and annoy. Perhaps most egregious of all is the lack of save slots. Why games still exist that don’t have save slots baffles the mind. The game will randomly auto save, and if it all happened to shut off before an autosave was triggered… Well, this annoyance is why choices like this are rare nowadays. To not even be able to save is something that mostly has gone away for good reason.
Okay, so how is the fighting? It is decent, actually, excluding some points to discuss. Fighting in dungeons is fairly basic. You can get various weapons, swords, bows, etc, holding the A button to automatically attack. Enemies are a little more like punching bags than would be liked, and the highest danger comes more from them swarming than any individual threat, but it’s still fun enough, other than how often players can get insta-killed for how badly enemy damage scales. Nothing ground breaking, but the equipment elevates the experience somewhat. The only real change is that one can equip up to four items that range from HP potions to magic.
While fighting, the only things that count as a reward are some equipment drops. There are zero experience points and zero leveling-up. Equipment comes in four levels of quality: bronze, silver, gold and legendary. Each one has random traits on it that can potentially be unlocked, such as a faster attack speed or a poison attack. This is by far the best part, even if it’s not that mind blowing. The issues are how bad progression is and how often soft locks can occur where the difficulty to advance spikes massively. To expand, the only stats available are actually the equipment, and levels matter far more than their quality. This is disappointing, so the super shiny legendary level 11 sword is outclassed in all ways by a bronze level 13-14 sword.
Dungeons determine what level gear drops are, and many times the available dungeons jump too high to be appropriately geared. As mentioned, the stats jump tremendously for only a few levels. One of the biggest aggravations is that players cannot take gear out short of beating a dungeon. So many times the next version of the dungeon (same layout, same enemies, only higher level) is simply too high, such as a level 21 dungeon when one’s stuff is maxed out from the previous dungeon at level 16.
The whole thing feels bad. It’s like playing something that could have been really good but wasn’t really completed. Every single aspect drags the experience down. From simple things like not being able to save or having a save slot, to not being able to easily gear up for next dungeons, to the lifeless NPCs – they all combine to give the feeling of an uncanny valley. Elrentaros Wanderings constantly reminds of how good it almost was, but also of how many things detract, leaving it feeling like players stumbled upon some alpha version of a title that had potential but was lost in the recesses of the internet.
