Musings on mechanical mashups: Are two or more game genres better than one?

Yeah, sure, this seems survivable. And this is the first boss fight!

One of the fun things about making video games is that sometimes you can throw a bunch of random ideas together to see what sticks.

The Rune Factory games, for example, are among my favourites simply because they mix two wildly disparate genres – farming life/dating sim and dungeon-crawling hack-and-slash – to create something interesting and unique.