Elrentaros Wanderings clearly doesn't mind comparisons to the Rune Factory series. After all, Rune Factory made a nice little home for itself, combining the farming of Harvest Moon with the combat of a fantasy action RPG. It's a place where players raise animals, tend crops, and start families amid questing and dungeons.

It's not entirely off-base, either. Elrentaros Wanderings (a.k.a. Real World or even “Rear World” in some sectors) has villagers to befriend and seeds to sow in between its fantasy jaunts, and it even has producer Yoshifumi Hashimoto, of the Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons and Rune Factory lines, and his studio, Hakama. Yet Elrentaros Wanderings is not Rune Factory. In some ways, it's not sure what it is.

Our protagonist, male or female at the player's initial choosing, awakens in the pastoral town of Elrentaros one day. It's a peaceful community of welcoming citizens (mostly), and very soon you're aiding them by exploring extradimensional dungeons, slaying monsters, and recovering rare items.

That's only half the story, however. On certain nights the main character becomes just another student at a modern-day high school peopled with alternate versions of the Elrentaros townsfolk. Unsure of which experience is reality, you can only plunge into the mysteries surrounding the village and poke around your high-school life.

It rapidly becomes apparent that Elrentaros Wanderings likes things small and breezy. Much of the game unfolds in the village, which the player can swiftly scuttle across in a few seconds. In contrast to the sprawling towns and roaming characters of a recent Rune Factory, the townspeople of Elrentaros stay rooted in place, easily found when you need to chat, shop, or bolster your relationships. The game's dungeons are similarly just a short walk away.

That quick pacing holds throughout much of Elrentaros Wanderings. The dungeons, whether they're swamps or deserts or sky temples, are divided into straightforward sections that players can race through, slashing or avoiding foes as they please. Weapons include swords, gauntlets, axes, and halberds, all with the option to simply hold down the attack button for repeated strikes. It recalls the Ys games in that speedy approach, and the player can also dash, dodge, cast spells, and launch arrows and explosives from a steadily expanding arsenal.

The relatively simple graphics benefit from some striking uses of color, though there's less flourish in the enemies. Dungeons reuse the same foes too often, and most are dispatched without much strategy. It's a while before they show more variety and branch out into giant creatures, animal mages, long-range attackers, and supporting beasties that require you to decide which to target first. Many of them are cute enough that you might want to spare them entirely. Yes, adorable enemies are common in RPGs, but really, Elrentaros Wanderings, must we hear those rabbit-archers whimper every time they flop lifelessly to the ground?

Yet you'll have to slay many creatures and make many dungeon forays to help the people of Elrentaros. Everyone needs various items from the dungeons to help them in their daily routines and deeper insecurities, and you'll find those treasures only by meeting certain challenges. That's where the game starts to lag. It's one thing to conquer a relatively basic dungeon and defeat the boss. It becomes a chore when you have to return and clear the whole thing again without being struck by a lizard swordsman or stepping on a spike trap, all just to get a crystal for Nono the taciturn fortune-teller, or some new fabric for Yulia the seamstress. Progressing in Elrentaros Wanderings is often unclear, and much of the time you'll just have to revisit dungeons and talk to folks until something moves forward.

Tackling dungeons also upgrades the protagonist, though not in terms of traditional stats and levels. You instead raise your rank by equipping new weapons and armor. Finishing tasks often get you new spells and techniques to map to various buttons. As you complete dungeons and harvest plants, you'll gain points that translate into gifts for ten of the town's young men and women. Each gift unlocks a specific stat boost or side effect, though you can only choose one partner at a time. Conveniently, that favors a strategy of saving up your points for just one or two friends and winning their maximum affection.

On that note, the romance options in Elrentaros Wanderings are subdued. Rune Factory and other Harvest Moon descendants routinely let you pursue bachelors and bachelorettes to marry them and perhaps have children. In Elrentaros, though, things stay more on the level of an RPG where building affinity with a character just results in better equipment and varied endings with perhaps borderline platonic payoff. At least it lets the hero or heroine grow relationships with the entire town population, men and women alike, though nothing here goes as far as the genre expects. The farming of Elrentaros Wanderings is similarly minute. There are no fields of crops to rotate or livestock to tend—just a patch or two of dirt where you can plant seeds and reap glowing sprouts. You're not establishing your own farm or starting your own shop. You're just helping the villagers run their own businesses.

Most disappointing is the game neglecting its real hook: the alternate realities. For every few hours you spend mastering dungeons and assisting villagers in the first stretch of the game, there's perhaps a few minutes of your modern high school life, most of which just involves saying hello to new versions of characters you already know. The game eventually gets deeper into it and trots out a villain, but it never feels like a full counterpart to the fantasy-RPG portions of the game. Hashimoto and Hakama clearly wanted Elrentaros Wanderings to set itself apart with the high-school aspect so, strangely, the game sidelines its one real advantage over its competition.

Even though it spans two worlds, Elrentaros seems underfed. The soundtrack is pleasant, while the voice acting (all in Japanese) is infrequent and pops up at apparently random intervals. It's a pretty enough game when it comes to dungeon backdrops, but it's far from graphically impressive, and even the character portraits are basic and limited in their expressions. Nothing seems to dig too deep.

There's still some appeal in making a home in Elrentaros. The characters stick to familiar archetypes in their traits and development, but they still need a hero or heroine. It's mildly heartening when you earn the trust of Yvonne and Clement, the town's only rude people, or discover why the chipper halfling LiSA is so stubbornly independent. It's still satisfying to help out a self-overloaded spirit medium, a young guardsman trying to step out of the hulking shadows of his older brother and dad, an elf archer with odd opinions about flowers and food, an overworked librarian, or a simple farmboy and his doting mother.

Yes, their stories are simple and so is any sense of reward, but perhaps there's a place for this sort of adventure, one that doesn't demand complex investments of time or technique. If all you want is to explore dungeons and talk to villagers, here's a game that cuts right to the chase.

Despite some spikes of effort, Elrentaros Wanderings simply doesn't stand out. It can't compete with its older and fuller-featured relatives; the social aspects and farm-building pale next to Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley, Story of Seasons, or Rune Factory. Even taken on its own merits it's a modestly charming adventure that rides that thin line between cheerfully light and flatly basic while ignoring its most interesting side for too long. Elrentaros Wanderings can be fun in its own low-key tradition, but there are better places to settle down.