I don't even know what Rune Factory is, but is sounds amazing! *grabby hands*
farming sim expert coming through
Rune Factory is a sister series to the Bokujo Monogatari (Harvest Moon and or Story of Seasons in the west) video games. It's basically fantasy anime meets dungeon crawler meets dating sim with some farming sim aspect. You play as a young man (or sometimes a young woman) who has found themselves in this small village with no memory of who they were before. Someone usually takes you in, and then provides you with a farmstead to live and work on.
There's always some magical "end of the world" type hooha going on in the lands surrounding the village, so it becomes up to you to go dungeon crawling, fight and tame monsters, and bring peace to the land. But in the meantime, you can grow some sweet veggies, befriend the extremely quirky and troperific townsfolk, and maybe find love along the way.
It's uh, GREAT, lmao. RF 1, 2, and 3 are available on the nintendo ds. RF 4 was originally on the 3DS, with a re-release for the switch that came out this year. RF 5 will be coming out on the switch next year as well. And there are two console games, Frontier for the wii, and Tides of Destiny for the wii and ps3.
Great series, would very much recommend looking it up. Unfortunately, RP wise, they tend be extremely short lived, because there's nothing about them that makes them stand out from other fantasy roleplays (at least in my opinion and experience), and the series as a whole is pretty niche (more so than Harvest Moon already was).
That said, I myself have also been itching for a true RF rp, just if not for that pre-set lore and world building aspect, for those really campy, anime shenanigans, and for something that doesn't take place in the modern day (much like HM, RF takes place in a fantasy world with some modern day elements but is generally set somewhere in the past). Just ya know, something to hold me over until RF5 comes out lmao.