Braving the wait for Rune Factory 4 with gorgeous fanart

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Sorry for the radio silence over the past week! I’m back from presenting at my very first academic conference, so I can finally take a breather and return to a regular blogging schedule. I don’t want to inundate everyone with too much Animal Crossing: New Leaf (lest you think this has converted into an Animal Crossing blog), so today I’ll talk about another game that’s been on my mind: Rune Factory 4.

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It went under my radar a couple weeks ago, but XSEED Games actually dropped a hint on their Facebook page that they might have picked up (or be working on obtaining) the license for Rune Factory 4. In a response to a fan inquiry, an XSEED employee wrote, “We’ve had an itch to work on another Rune Factory game since we loved Frontier so much, so let’s see if we can’t grab a back scratcher somehow…”

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Natsume has brought over all of the Rune Factory games besides Frontier, but the above statement certainly makes it sounds like they don’t have exclusive rights to the series. Personally, I’m a big XSEED Games fan, so I’d be more than happy to purchase the localized Rune Factory 4 from them, but in the end I really don’t care who picks it up, as long as somebody does!

Of course, with a Japanese 3DS now in my possession, I could very easily import the Japanese version of the game, but for titles like these that are likely to come out in English I generally like to support their western releases. So how do I deal with the waiting game? As you can see from the above three examples and the title of this post, with fanart, of course!

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I’m glad to see some really beautiful pieces of Japanese fanart floating around on the internet, and that so many of the characters are represented! But looking at all of this great art is just making me want the game more, if anything. Unfortunately, given the track record of Rune Factory localizations, we probably won’t see it released in English until well into next year. Good thing I have Animal Crossing: New Leaf to keep me busy! And yes, there are already Rune Factory 4/Animal Crossing crossovers in the form of fan-made clothing…

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And I’m sure there’s more where that came from!

About Anne Lee

Also known as apricotsushi. Anne can be written with the kanji for apricot (杏), and sushi was the most quintessentially Japanese thing I could think of when I was 13, resulting in my goofy, albeit memorable, nickname.