It’s like The Animals of Farthing Wood only less likely to destroy your childhood with the absolutely terrifying stuff that those cute cartoon animals got up to. It’s a game about cheerful animals going on very human quests for artifacts and treasure. Kitaria Fables is a simple, sweet, all-ages RPG built around allowing parents and their kids to co-op their way through some of the cutest enemies this side of the Mana series. It’s no War and Peace-style epic like Trails of Cold Steel. Nor is it a thesis-in-game-form like NieR. To be sure Kitaria Fables doesn’t tell a Persona 4-style masterpiece. From that point onwards, I was able to into the game’s flow, and I loved the elegance of it all. At first, I was trying to defeat every enemy, working under the assumption that “I needed the experience.” Then, at some point, I realised that… I didn’t need to do that at all. With Kitaria Fables, it took me a while to adjust. But there are things that this genre does that are often unnecessary and, if anything, act to the detriment of the genre’s strengths, such as the joy of exploration and the experience of following along a narrative. In fact, there are almost no arbitrary numbers that tell you that you’re getting better at the game simply through repeating the same actions over and over again. There is some statistical progression in the way that you grind up and craft new equipment, which improves your character’s stats, but there are no skill trees to contend with, no pages of numbers to min-max through. Kitaria Fables doesn’t even have a leveling system, as you might expect for something that bills itself as an RPG.

It has that wonderful mix of pastoral farming and monster-slaying, but it works within itself, and rather than throwing gimmicks and systems at players, it relies on a simple grind and a steady drip-feed of progression and story beats to keep players interested. In contrast to some attempts to build a Rune Factory-like by building on and expanding the formula (such as My Time At Portia), Kitaria Fables is modest… and you could argue that it’s almost too much so. Kitaria Fables is a blissful example of this in action. Taking the tranquility of Harvest Moon and mashing it together with the inherent violence of RPGs seems counter-intuitive, and yet the developers of Rune Factory and various associated homages and pastiches have somehow refined this eclectic blend to a fine art. On its surface, you would never suspect that Rune Factory world work.

Kitaria fables wood