So as I alluded to in my last post, the end of Spring holiday held its share of disappointments (I’m talking about Rune Factory Frontier here).

First, there was a festival celebrating the opening of the beach, which shook everything up. Lute wasn’t in his normal spot, and by the time I found out where he was (near the church, apparently) it was too late and he’d gone home. So my big forge room remains empty for another week.

Second, Day 30 was actually the first day of Summer, not the last day of Spring, so I lost some crops as they withered to dead grass.

Third, there was a contest at the festival, which I participated in…and failed at, much to the amusement of all the available young ladies present. *sigh*

But life goes on! This week, and today is Wednesday or Thursday of Week 1 of Summer in Rune Factory Frontier land, I’ve already expanded the kitchen area, and I’ve *already* harvested a crop of onions. How so fast?

The power of Runeys. I haven’t mentioned Runeys yet because I’m still figuring them out. Runeys are these kind of spirit things that float around in the world, and if you have a balanced Runey population, your land will become prosperous and things will grow more quickly. You collect Runeys via the (wait for it) Collector (hmm, or is it called a Gatherer?) which feels like a Ghostbuster Ectoplasmic Vacuum kind of thing. So I collected a bunch and set them free around my farm and now I can harvest animal fodder every day, and my onions went from seed to harvest in less than a week. Yay!

Runeys appear over mature croplands, apparently… but they also eat each other, so there’s some kind of balancing thing going on that I haven’t fussed over much yet.

However inside dungeons, instead of Runeys appearing from mature crops, you get these Rune Point Stone things that replenish your supply of Rune Points. I’ve got 2 patches of strawberries growing on Whale Island’s dungeon, so I pop over there, harvest berries, top off my Rune Points and I’m good to go for a while longer. More work!

Anyway, we’ll see how things go during the next holiday; hopefully Lute will be back and I can get both a better Forging Station and better Kitchen Equipment. We’ll see if the money holds out.

So far this week, not much dungeon diving. I did tame a new monster: an ant… so now I have a sheep (I can harvest wool from him) a cow (milk), a squirrel, (who runs around my farmland harvesting ‘wild’ weeds, which can be valuable), a goblin, (who harvests veggies), and the ant will be my combat partner, at least for now (He can harvest veggies too, if need be). These monster pets aren’t particularly efficient yet but I’m hoping they get better with practice. For now they just save me some time, but I still have to do some collecting/harvesting myself.

And finally, the purpose of this post. If you have a Wii, and my inane blatherings about this title have piqued your interest, Amazon has it on sale (today only, I believe) for $29.98. It lists for $50, but I think I paid about $40 at Best Buy a couple weeks ago.

I found a great website devoted to these games: http://www.ranchstory.co.uk/?games/Rune_Factory_Frontier. Gamefaqs has a lot of info too, and honestly for Gamefaqs, the community is decent, but I prefer visiting ‘indie’ websites when I am able to.