Elrentaros Wanderings clearly doesn't shy away from comparisons to the Rune Factory series. After all, Rune Factory has created its own little home base, combining Harvest Moon farming with the combat of a fantasy action RPG. It's where players raise animals, grow crops, and raise families while completing quests and dungeons.
It’s not entirely wrong, either. Elrentaros Wanderings (aka The Real World or even “The World Behind” in some circles) has villagers to befriend and sow seeds among its fictional misadventures, and it even has producer Yoshifumi Hashimoto, of the Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons series and Rune Factory and his studio, Hakama. But Elrentaros Wanderings isn’t Rune Factory. In some ways, it’s not even sure what it is.
Our protagonist, male or female depending on the player's initial choice, one day awakens in the pastoral town of Elrentaros. It's a peaceful community that welcomes (mostly) citizens, and you'll soon be helping them by exploring space dungeons, slaying monsters, and recovering rare items.
However, that's only half the story. On certain nights, the protagonist becomes another student at a modern-day high school filled with alternate versions of the townspeople of Elrentaros. Unsure which experience is real, you can only dive into the mysteries surrounding the village and explore your high school life.
It’s clear that Elrentaros Wanderings likes things small and cool. Much of the game takes place in a village that players can quickly traverse in seconds. Unlike the sprawling towns and wandering characters of the Rune Factory, the townspeople of Elrentaros are always in place, easy to find when you need to chat, shop, or strengthen your relationships. Likewise, the game’s dungeons are just a short walk away.
That fast pace carries through much of Elrentaros Wanderings. Dungeons, whether swamps, deserts, or celestial temples, are broken up into simple sections that players can run through, slashing or avoiding enemies at will. Weapons include swords, gauntlets, axes, and halberds, all of which have the option of simply holding down the attack button to continuously attack. It's reminiscent of the Ys games in that fast-paced approach, and players can also dash, dodge, cast spells, and launch arrows and explosives from an ever-expanding arsenal.
The relatively simple graphics benefit from some striking use of colour, although the enemies are less flourishing. Dungeons reuse the same enemies too often, and most are dispatched without much strategy. It takes a while before they show more variety, branching out into giant creatures, animal mages, ranged attackers, and support beasts that require you to decide which one to target first. Many of them are cute enough that you might want to spare them altogether. Yes, adorable enemies are a common sight in RPGs, but really, Elrentaros Wanderings, do we have to hear those bunny archers whimper every time they fall lifelessly to the ground?
However, you'll have to kill a lot of creatures and make a lot of dungeon raids to help the people of Elrentaros. Everyone needs various items from the dungeons to help them with their daily tasks as well as their deeper insecurities, and you'll only find those treasures when you encounter certain challenges. That's where the game starts to fall behind. It's one thing to clear a relatively basic dungeon and defeat the boss. It becomes a chore to have to go back and clear the whole thing again without getting attacked by a lizard swordsman or stepping on a spike trap, all just to get a crystal for the quiet fortuneteller Nono, or some new fabric for Yulia, the seamstress. Progress in Elrentaros Wanderings is often unclear, and most of the time you'll have to go back to dungeons and talk to people until something progresses.
Solving dungeons also upgrades your main character, though not in terms of traditional stats and levels. Instead, you increase your rank by equipping new weapons and armor. Completing quests often earns you new spells and techniques that map to different nodes. As you complete dungeons and harvest crops, you earn points that can be converted into gifts for the town's ten young men and women. Each gift unlocks a specific bonus effect or stat boost, though you can only choose one partner at a time. More conveniently, that gives way to the strategy of saving your points for just one or two friends and winning their maximum affection.
On that note, the romance options in Elrentaros Wanderings are toned down. Rune Factory and other Harvest Moon successors regularly let you pursue bachelors in order to marry them and possibly have children. In Elrentaros, however, things stay on the level of an RPG where building a relationship with a character only yields better gear and varied endings with perhaps borderline platonic rewards. At least it allows the hero or heroine to develop relationships with the entire town, both male and female, though nothing here goes as far as the genre would expect. The farming in Elrentaros Wanderings is similar. There are no fields to grow crops or raise livestock to tend—just a patch or two where you can sow seeds and harvest glowing sprouts. You don’t set up your own farm or open your own shop. You’re just helping villagers run their own businesses.
Most disappointingly, the game ignores its real appeal: alternate realities. For every few hours you spend clearing dungeons and helping villagers in the first part of the game, there are probably a few minutes of your modern high school life, most of which just involves greeting new versions of characters you already know. The game eventually delves deeper and kills a villain, but it never feels like a complete replica of the game's fantasy RPG sections. Hashimoto and Hakama clearly wanted Elrentaros Wanderings to differentiate itself from the high school aspect, so oddly enough, the game has stripped away its one real advantage over its competitors.
Despite spanning two worlds, Elrentaros seems underpowered. The soundtrack is pleasant, while the voice acting (all in Japanese) is sporadic and comes at seemingly random intervals. It's a pretty enough game when it comes to dungeon backgrounds, but it's far from impressive graphics, and even the character portraits are basic and limited in presentation. There doesn't seem to be much depth to it.
Building a home in Elrentaros still has some appeal. The characters follow familiar archetypes in their traits and development, but they still need a hero or heroine. It’s a relief to gain the trust of Yvonne and Clement, the town’s only roughnecks, or to discover why LiSA is so stubbornly independent. It’s still satisfying to help an overworked medium, a young guard trying to step out from under the enormous shadow of his brother and father, an elven archer with odd ideas about flowers and food, an overworked librarian, or a simple farm boy and his doting mother.
Yes, their stories are simple and so is the sense of reward, but perhaps there's a place for this kind of adventure, one that doesn't require a complex investment of time or technique. If all you want is to explore dungeons and talk to villagers, this is the game to get straight to the chase.
Despite some effort, Elrentaros Wanderings simply doesn't stand out. It can't compete with its older, more fully-featured cousins; the social and farm-building aspects pale next to Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley, Story of Seasons, or Rune Factory. Even on its own merits, it's a modestly charming adventure that walks the fine line between lighthearted fun and basic simplicity while ignoring its most interesting aspects for far too long. Elrentaros Wanderings may be fun in the casual tradition, but there are better places to settle.
