In a massively multiplayer online game, the crafting is a side activity to all the adventuring. It's something to do during your downtime. A diversion. Idle handiwork. Doodles in the margins. This is the most realistic portrayal when it comes to the traditional male pastimes of adventuring, conquest, and destiny. The farmboy goes on to become a great warrior, or whatever, so the farmboy stuff is just sort of moved beyond. Moisture farming has nothing on blowing up Death Stars. Besides, part of the adolescent dream is never again having to do chores.

Rune Factory: Frontier for the Wii reverses that priority. It's an idyll, a sweetly epic pastoral with a bit of adventuring on the side. In its own way, it's more compelling than the usual portrait of the adventurer as a young man.

Read the review after the jump.

Rune Factory: Frontier is like a Final Fantasy game that never leaves home. It's like a city builder about a farm instead of a city. It's like Monster Hunter, but much more forgiving and agrarian. It's like Viva Pinata, but without cartoon candyland animals. It's like The Sims, but as a JRPG on a farm. It's like Animal Crossing with actual gameplay. It is a more prosaic and parochial version of Dark Cloud.

At its best, Rune Factory is a strategy game about developing a farm in a quaint little fantasy town that happens to have a couple of dungeons in the neighborhood. One of the dungeons actually hovers overhead, which isn't where you normally find dungeons. But like many things in this game, you can best understand it by the fact of its Japanese-ness. The dungeons are the diversions. Your main quest is to plant crops, raise animals, cook, fish, tinker, and ultimately settle down and have a family. Days pass, seasons come and go, each with thirty days. Every day, you get up at 6am and spend your limited pool of stamina (called rune points, because this is a Japanese game with the usual esoteric fantasy shenanigans). You till fields, sow seeds, water plants, harvest crops, sell them for cash, use them in recipes, and then do it all again next season. And somewhere down the line, you're going to have to woo one of the young ladies in town by giving her gifts and maxing out her little heart meter.

Rune Factory is an exceptionally generous game for the number of available activities, most of them tied into an elaborate crafting system that feeds into making the most of your stamina. Err, rune points. You'll start out just growing turnips, exhausted well before noon. But you'll eventually forge magical swords, prepare elaborate dishes to help you push deeper into dungeons, brew powerful potions, and even mess around with a the ecology of faeries, plucking glowing spirits out of the air and redistributing them to keep nature in balance (just remember that it's Japanese). And that's just on Monday.

To many conventional gamers, this might all seem like a grind without a point. At least in World of Warcraft, you're going up levels. That sense of progression isn't so obvious in Rune Factory, where the skills that level up are shoved a few screens deep so you might not even notice them. But keep in mind that it's only a grind if you don't enjoy what you're doing. There's something relaxing about the simple act of watering a plot of land, watching the seeds progress day by day, from little spouts of green to leafy bushes to vines bursting with ripe red tomatoes. A bed of flowers is a grand thing. Rows of corn are majestic in their own cute little way. Rune Factory is about seasons passing, cycles, the natural order. It's about stuff games aren't usually about. The dungeon hacking is almost apologetic in its simplicity. It's there, but only because guys like me expect it. Plus, how else are you going to get iron, copper, and silver in a game like this? If we wanted to play Harvest Moon, the series this game was based on, we'd just play Harvest Moon. This is the more manly way to play Harvest Moon, because you get a sword, as befits a manly adventurer rather than a stay-at-home farmer.

The problem with Rune Factory is that it's full of hidden gates, beyond which you cannot pass unless you trigger an event, often by accident. Early on, this means a lot of pointless busywork, running around talking to all the cutesy characters in town. Now that's a grind! It's a bit like a JRPG take on Mayberry, exchanging obligatory pleasantries with anime waifs.

"Good afternoon, [insert whatever character name you came up with here]," they say. "How are you today?"

"For the love of god, please just tell me if I've unlocked something! Do you have an axe upgrade or a fishing pole or some new gameplay mechanic to give me? Because if you don't, bugger off and quit wasting my time, because there are crops to be watered and tree stumps to be pulled up and animals to be brushed! Listening to your inane JRPG jawing does nothing for me!"

I say that second part out loud, to the television, while my character in the game says something more pleasant and arguably relevant.

After about fifteen hours with Rune Factory, just shy of my first winter, I think I might be finished. The farm life is relaxing, but I just stumbled across something that I could have easily missed for another fifteen hours. I've run into dead ends in the two dungeons I can reach, and it seems the story isn't progressing. So I've been just growing stuff, accumulating money, improving my crafting skills. It beats more Bejeweled Twist.

But the manly adventuring stuff had pretty much stopped. In one dungeon, I couldn't get past certain mounds of rocks until, I presume, I upgraded my hammer, which I couldn't do until I upgraded my house, which I couldn't do until I made a lot more money. In the other dungeon, I came across a doorway at the far end with a sign telling me to visit at night. So I stood outside the doorway while night fell. Nothing happened. I waited until well past midnight. Nothing. It was only by going online and perusing a couple of message boards that I discovered I had to actually enter the area at night. Waiting for night to happen doesn't trigger the event.

If there are more scripting "gotchas!" like that waiting for me, I don't think I'm going to be interested in any sort of longer-term commitment to Rune Factory. Of course, we'll see how long I can resist the pedestrian delight of watering a field of carrots and bell peppers. You might think I'm joking, but I'm not. One of the highest praises I can offer Rune Factory is also the main reason a lot of you won't like it: there aren't many games like this out there.