The game has it's fair share of technical problems when it comes to the jump to 3d, but it's still rune factory. Not much innovation as a sequel, but if it ain't broken, don't fix it. Addicting, fun, with great character designs and some catchy music. Fingers crossed for a patch that fixes most of the technical issues.
the worst game i've played in the series. however this is a great series and while the game suffers from graphical and loading issues i can't defend due to the existence of frontier and oceans prior, it still has loveable characters and the rune factory gameplay loop i've come to love. scarlett best girl only bc misasagi isn't an option
Yes it is a buggy mess, yes it is graphically challenged. But if you disregard these things, this game has some of the most charming characters, fun combat, and an endless plethora of things to do which will keep you busy for hundreds of hours. But that’s like any Rune Factory game, and that’s what I love about not only this game but this series in general, for the most part.
In other words, if “Switch graphics” and some bugs every now and then don’t bother you too much, and you enjoy games of this genre or something similar, than this is a must-have.
In other words, if “Switch graphics” and some bugs every now and then don’t bother you too much, and you enjoy games of this genre or something similar, than this is a must-have.
Don’t know how it compares to previous entries but you can be gay in this one so there really isn’t any competition
Probably my favorite game in the series, would give this a higher score if there was a PC version that fixed a lot of the issues on Switch.
rating this 3.5/5 feels kind of awful, because i had a lot of fun with this game, and i'm definitely going to keep playing it even with the main story being over. it has so many charm points and as always the core gameplay of rune factory is super satisfying, but there were also a lot of things i didn't like about rf5 or things that i thought could be done better.
to get it out of the way: the optimization is so so so bad. even as someone who usually doesn't mind load times, i thought it was too much. there was a loading screen during the ending cutscene that took so long that i thought the game had crashed. it's laggy and slow and stuttery, especially on festival days when confetti is raining. sometimes it takes a weirdly long time for anything to load when you exit your 'house' to the point where you walk up to your field and have to actually wait for it to load in before you can start farming. these should seriously not be issues. alongside that, the game crashes way more often than i've ever experienced with any other switch game.
as for other complaints:
the story was sweet but felt bare bones and hardly fleshed out, though the pacing was fine. it had some strong moments and i wouldn't say it was bad at all, but there was no 'pull' there for me or any actual emotional investment overall.
the characters are all likeable, but no one really stands out. while i don’t want to compare the two much, compared to rune factory 4 i didn't feel nearly as attached to any of the characters, especially ones you can have a romance with, and i didn't feel any kind of love towards them. i enjoyed them as characters and i think the main character has really nice organic relationships with everyone, but in a similar way to the story, there was no actual hook, there was nothing that would inspire especially strong feelings.
additionally, while i did like the designs for the characters, there was a strange disconnect between the portraits and the 3d models. i understand that the sprites are done in the typical rune factory artstyle, but some characters i felt looked surprisingly different, or that i would be able to greatly prefer the look of someones 3d model over their sprite or vice versa, which felt strange.
while i touched on the story pacing, i think the pacing of the actual game itself was pretty weird. for example some recipes you would get for crafting would have much higher stats than other recipes of a higher level that you get later on, which makes no sense. you can get strangely advanced requests early such as having level 5 friendship with everyone, which for some reason includes the rf4 npcs and i think even npcs you haven’t gotten yet? i'm not sure if this is true of every request, but for at least some, it doesn't track the objective if you haven't picked the request up yet, so you can end up having to redo something you've already done without realizing there would be a quest about it. it seems like it can't track multiple objectives at once, such as a request of x amount of three different vegetables, so you won't know how many of which vegetable you're missing. the repeatable requests are the exact same 3 quests cycled through, which i thought would expand after a certain period in the story which put emphasis on the nature of those requests, but i guess was just unrelated to the actual gameplay at all. the rewards for these requests are also the same few items, just an infinite amount of potions and roundoffs.
the pacing of combat is typical to a rune factory game so i won't criticize it for that even though i'm not a fan of several aspects, but there were other parts of the combat i didn't like. there should straight up not be insta-kill enemies in a story required dungeon, even if you can make food/upgrade weapons to ward against it. i don't know who thought putting a cinematic intro to every boss you can repeatedly fight against was a good idea, you can skip them but it's baffling that it even plays after your first story-based encounter. the bosses going immune sometimes is fine, but the immunity period is too long and feels obnoxious. the amount of time that stuns take to wear off is straight up the worst thing about the combat, it needs to be cut down to at least a third of the time it takes, and i mean that for the enemies as well as the player. it's such a ridiculously long time.
moving on from that, i have some smaller complaints like: npc dialogue expanding as you gain hearts with them is good, but the pool feels too small to start off with- the dialogue immediately repeating a lot does not feel like a good start to the game. even if you go to shops during their opening hours sometimes the characters just aren't there, so you can't do anything. the farm dragons was a really, really weird choice which feels completely divorced from anything that's happening in the game and i don't even understand the point of them since they don't mimic seasons (why are there no season specific fields...). the 'farm camera' being on by default nearly made me stop playing until i realized it was something you can toggle off, it's awful. i didn't like the design of the town itself, it felt too big for your default run speed, while also feeling very barren because of its size, and the shops and services section of the town is organized really strangely to me- you have three shops grouped together in a row and then all the other buildings are thrown around wherever, it doesn’t feel right. the flower shop being locked behind a character that only comes to your town late into the game (i think the 7th or 8th dungeon?) is stupid, sorry to say that so plainly, but i don’t understand how that was an intentional choice they made. the placement of furniture is frustrating and clunky and you can never get things to line up well because all the furniture is like allergic to even the idea of being placed somewhat close together. it would be more convenient if you had a choice in activating the side quests you can see on your map, if you have several you can do at once and want to do one about a specific character, you can get thrown into another characters event on the way there because it immediately triggers as soon as you’re near it. dialogue lines repeat to much- what the shopkeep does when you’re shopping for example, but the main character especially just talks all the time despite having three lines of dialogue any time you’re farming or fishing, i really don’t like that. the item limit on the floor hasn’t been increased at all and the auto-pickup only works when you run over the items, so grinding out lumber + stone is still a massive pain for no reason.
obviously this is a huge amount of complaints and i'm sure a bunch of them seem really petty, but that's just how off-putting they are in the context of the game. despite all of that, it is genuinely a good game:
there is definitely depth to the characters you interact with and they feel like they were written as real people who exist outside of the main character, they have their own tropes but still manage to feel like organic people that you (or the main character) can have an actual connection to. while there are a lot of story moments where the main character has to handle everything, there are moments outside of that (especially with scarlett which was a pleasant surprise), and a small arc that attempts to give the main character time to exist as their own entity rather than just a plot-pusher, which i liked a lot.
as i said before the character designs are nice, even for characters i don't find appealing or eye catching, i can still appreciate the idea around their design. i spent the first few hours of the game feeling amazed at the 3d character models and how lively and intricate the outfits were.
in general every part of the game i didn't complain about is very solid, which is why i would love to rate it higher, and is why i would still recommend the game to anyone who enjoys farming sims. it's such a shame that some weird faults that shouldn't exist can make such an impact, but they're not at all game-ruining and it's still a very 'feel good' kind of game that you can see the earnestness of while you play it, so it gives a very sweet and comfortable feeling- that would be the sum of my feelings towards it.
BTW LET ME DATE MISASAGI
to get it out of the way: the optimization is so so so bad. even as someone who usually doesn't mind load times, i thought it was too much. there was a loading screen during the ending cutscene that took so long that i thought the game had crashed. it's laggy and slow and stuttery, especially on festival days when confetti is raining. sometimes it takes a weirdly long time for anything to load when you exit your 'house' to the point where you walk up to your field and have to actually wait for it to load in before you can start farming. these should seriously not be issues. alongside that, the game crashes way more often than i've ever experienced with any other switch game.
as for other complaints:
the story was sweet but felt bare bones and hardly fleshed out, though the pacing was fine. it had some strong moments and i wouldn't say it was bad at all, but there was no 'pull' there for me or any actual emotional investment overall.
the characters are all likeable, but no one really stands out. while i don’t want to compare the two much, compared to rune factory 4 i didn't feel nearly as attached to any of the characters, especially ones you can have a romance with, and i didn't feel any kind of love towards them. i enjoyed them as characters and i think the main character has really nice organic relationships with everyone, but in a similar way to the story, there was no actual hook, there was nothing that would inspire especially strong feelings.
additionally, while i did like the designs for the characters, there was a strange disconnect between the portraits and the 3d models. i understand that the sprites are done in the typical rune factory artstyle, but some characters i felt looked surprisingly different, or that i would be able to greatly prefer the look of someones 3d model over their sprite or vice versa, which felt strange.
while i touched on the story pacing, i think the pacing of the actual game itself was pretty weird. for example some recipes you would get for crafting would have much higher stats than other recipes of a higher level that you get later on, which makes no sense. you can get strangely advanced requests early such as having level 5 friendship with everyone, which for some reason includes the rf4 npcs and i think even npcs you haven’t gotten yet? i'm not sure if this is true of every request, but for at least some, it doesn't track the objective if you haven't picked the request up yet, so you can end up having to redo something you've already done without realizing there would be a quest about it. it seems like it can't track multiple objectives at once, such as a request of x amount of three different vegetables, so you won't know how many of which vegetable you're missing. the repeatable requests are the exact same 3 quests cycled through, which i thought would expand after a certain period in the story which put emphasis on the nature of those requests, but i guess was just unrelated to the actual gameplay at all. the rewards for these requests are also the same few items, just an infinite amount of potions and roundoffs.
the pacing of combat is typical to a rune factory game so i won't criticize it for that even though i'm not a fan of several aspects, but there were other parts of the combat i didn't like. there should straight up not be insta-kill enemies in a story required dungeon, even if you can make food/upgrade weapons to ward against it. i don't know who thought putting a cinematic intro to every boss you can repeatedly fight against was a good idea, you can skip them but it's baffling that it even plays after your first story-based encounter. the bosses going immune sometimes is fine, but the immunity period is too long and feels obnoxious. the amount of time that stuns take to wear off is straight up the worst thing about the combat, it needs to be cut down to at least a third of the time it takes, and i mean that for the enemies as well as the player. it's such a ridiculously long time.
moving on from that, i have some smaller complaints like: npc dialogue expanding as you gain hearts with them is good, but the pool feels too small to start off with- the dialogue immediately repeating a lot does not feel like a good start to the game. even if you go to shops during their opening hours sometimes the characters just aren't there, so you can't do anything. the farm dragons was a really, really weird choice which feels completely divorced from anything that's happening in the game and i don't even understand the point of them since they don't mimic seasons (why are there no season specific fields...). the 'farm camera' being on by default nearly made me stop playing until i realized it was something you can toggle off, it's awful. i didn't like the design of the town itself, it felt too big for your default run speed, while also feeling very barren because of its size, and the shops and services section of the town is organized really strangely to me- you have three shops grouped together in a row and then all the other buildings are thrown around wherever, it doesn’t feel right. the flower shop being locked behind a character that only comes to your town late into the game (i think the 7th or 8th dungeon?) is stupid, sorry to say that so plainly, but i don’t understand how that was an intentional choice they made. the placement of furniture is frustrating and clunky and you can never get things to line up well because all the furniture is like allergic to even the idea of being placed somewhat close together. it would be more convenient if you had a choice in activating the side quests you can see on your map, if you have several you can do at once and want to do one about a specific character, you can get thrown into another characters event on the way there because it immediately triggers as soon as you’re near it. dialogue lines repeat to much- what the shopkeep does when you’re shopping for example, but the main character especially just talks all the time despite having three lines of dialogue any time you’re farming or fishing, i really don’t like that. the item limit on the floor hasn’t been increased at all and the auto-pickup only works when you run over the items, so grinding out lumber + stone is still a massive pain for no reason.
obviously this is a huge amount of complaints and i'm sure a bunch of them seem really petty, but that's just how off-putting they are in the context of the game. despite all of that, it is genuinely a good game:
there is definitely depth to the characters you interact with and they feel like they were written as real people who exist outside of the main character, they have their own tropes but still manage to feel like organic people that you (or the main character) can have an actual connection to. while there are a lot of story moments where the main character has to handle everything, there are moments outside of that (especially with scarlett which was a pleasant surprise), and a small arc that attempts to give the main character time to exist as their own entity rather than just a plot-pusher, which i liked a lot.
as i said before the character designs are nice, even for characters i don't find appealing or eye catching, i can still appreciate the idea around their design. i spent the first few hours of the game feeling amazed at the 3d character models and how lively and intricate the outfits were.
in general every part of the game i didn't complain about is very solid, which is why i would love to rate it higher, and is why i would still recommend the game to anyone who enjoys farming sims. it's such a shame that some weird faults that shouldn't exist can make such an impact, but they're not at all game-ruining and it's still a very 'feel good' kind of game that you can see the earnestness of while you play it, so it gives a very sweet and comfortable feeling- that would be the sum of my feelings towards it.
BTW LET ME DATE MISASAGI
I have not been this disappointed since the last time I was this disappointed.
pretty much binged all the old RF games but cant even get around to finishing this one because of how disappointing it is. probably one of the roughest transitions to 3d I've ever seen in a videogame series
characters have almost no dialogue compared to previous entries where they would have new conversations EVERY. SINGLE. DAY for at least two ingame years, the game looks ugly, the town's design is a mess, the game has heavy performance issues and everything takes too long compared to how quickly days went by in 4
characters have almost no dialogue compared to previous entries where they would have new conversations EVERY. SINGLE. DAY for at least two ingame years, the game looks ugly, the town's design is a mess, the game has heavy performance issues and everything takes too long compared to how quickly days went by in 4
A game made for a modern console in 2021 that somehow looks and performs worse than other games in the series from two console generations ago. It's somewhat decent as a farming game, messy and frustrating as a life sim, and absolute dogshit as an ARPG, but for some reason I mostly enjoyed my time with it anyway. The fact that it's the first Rune Factory game that let me be gay went a long way toward papering over some of its issues for me, but it's also that Rune Factory remains one of the few (if not the only) farming RPG series where the townspeople have personalities strong enough that they're actually fun to talk to and hang out with.
Not sure I could ever describe this as a good game (I'm not even going to get into how bad its storytelling is, or how badly it handles its own worldbuilding) but I don't regret the nearly 100 hours I put into it. But jeez louise, have a better handle on what you're doing for RF6.
Not sure I could ever describe this as a good game (I'm not even going to get into how bad its storytelling is, or how badly it handles its own worldbuilding) but I don't regret the nearly 100 hours I put into it. But jeez louise, have a better handle on what you're doing for RF6.
Its junk. A farming game with no real reward system. Making buff foods is useless when the combat is so simple. Furniture is pointless when you LITERALLY LIVE in an attic the entire game. Yes, you, your wife or husband have sex right above where your boss sleeps.
It's a dogshit action game and a very middling farming game. Aside from the obvious Stardew, Rune Factory 4 and even Story of Seasons Mineral Town have this beat.
Oh yeah, it's also hideous and runs God awful despite looking worse than PS2 games. Devil May Cry 3, Persona 4 and Killzone in 480p literally look better than this.
It's a dogshit action game and a very middling farming game. Aside from the obvious Stardew, Rune Factory 4 and even Story of Seasons Mineral Town have this beat.
Oh yeah, it's also hideous and runs God awful despite looking worse than PS2 games. Devil May Cry 3, Persona 4 and Killzone in 480p literally look better than this.
Did I mention how many times I've been rejected by Ryker and Murakamo? So many times 🥺
The variety of activities is great, but the controls and dated graphics really made this one hard to play. I wanted to like it more than I did!
Seems like this is one case where the switch port is about as bad as the PC version, too…
Seems like this is one case where the switch port is about as bad as the PC version, too…
A downgrade from its predecessor in almost every way, this farming-/adventure-sim is unlikely to offer more than a briefly enjoyable experience.
+ solid variety of old and new activities
+ ability to see and trigger town events by choice
+ overall quality of life improvement with some caveats (farming controls, slow animations, etc.)
- very short and badly presented main plot
- generic cast with limited involvement in the story
- cheap graphics and level design making the world seem rather lifeless
+ solid variety of old and new activities
+ ability to see and trigger town events by choice
+ overall quality of life improvement with some caveats (farming controls, slow animations, etc.)
- very short and badly presented main plot
- generic cast with limited involvement in the story
- cheap graphics and level design making the world seem rather lifeless
It has issues but some of the reviews here are way too harsh
marvelous i am tracking your IP right now you better fucking run
Huge dissapointment story sucks and is over way too quickly, characters feel bland both villagers and marriage candidates, combat gameplay feels horrible as you have to dodge out of most attacks just so you can do another quickly.
The daily lines villagers have repeat way too quickly compared to previous games, theres no special dialouge for taking villagers with you to main story moments, the side stories are really only marriage candidate events and theyre both short and bad.
not to mention the performance issues this game has and the abundence of long loading screens.
Some villagers are fine BUT I CANT MARRY THEM.
Even on hard the game is way too easy, if you dont craft at all the game gives you so much free good shit. A huge enjoyment of mine in 4 was hell mode so 5 being so extremely easy is Sad.
Post game also bad just because theres not nearly as much dialouge/side events compared to older games so it feels samey. The days being way longer also dont help with that at all i just ended up sleeping super early the majoirty of the time.
Anyways actually stopping now this isnt good for me but if i could marry radea the game would be a 10/10 until then its a 5/10.
17/4/22 edit
Ok so my previous review was me being super dissapointed that i reviewed too early and it got a 5/10 but now that ive played a lot more while getting most characters to affection 10 its bumped to a 7/10 still sucks that the dialouge pool is super limited until you get affection high.
Radea still best girl tho and i will never forgive marvelous until i can marry her.
The daily lines villagers have repeat way too quickly compared to previous games, theres no special dialouge for taking villagers with you to main story moments, the side stories are really only marriage candidate events and theyre both short and bad.
not to mention the performance issues this game has and the abundence of long loading screens.
Some villagers are fine BUT I CANT MARRY THEM.
Even on hard the game is way too easy, if you dont craft at all the game gives you so much free good shit. A huge enjoyment of mine in 4 was hell mode so 5 being so extremely easy is Sad.
Post game also bad just because theres not nearly as much dialouge/side events compared to older games so it feels samey. The days being way longer also dont help with that at all i just ended up sleeping super early the majoirty of the time.
Anyways actually stopping now this isnt good for me but if i could marry radea the game would be a 10/10 until then its a 5/10.
17/4/22 edit
Ok so my previous review was me being super dissapointed that i reviewed too early and it got a 5/10 but now that ive played a lot more while getting most characters to affection 10 its bumped to a 7/10 still sucks that the dialouge pool is super limited until you get affection high.
Radea still best girl tho and i will never forgive marvelous until i can marry her.
Fun :)
feels a lot cheaper, clunkier and less engaging than 4 by a lot
if you havent played a RF game play 4 first. this games still a really good time but i kinda wish it could run with some extra legroom yknow
also Ryker my beloved
also Ryker my beloved
EDIT: original review below. i played it on pc with lightning-fast loadtimes and no performance issues, and guess what? this game still kinda sucks. it made the game playable, but it didn't make it good. my kingdom for another good fuckin rune factory game.
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oof, this is a tough one to write. rune factory 4 is one of my favorite games, ever.
i knew rf5 wouldn't live up to rf4. the only way to do that would be to make a game that is rf4 with a different story/characters/setting/etc. a huge reason rf4 works so well is because everything is very quick. you can knock out an entire day's tasks in five minutes if you want to.
this game, on the other hand, suffers from long load times and really intense performance issues on the switch. i'd love a buttery-smooth pc port, and i don't normally mind jank, but it really hurts this game's pace given the repetitive nature of farming sims.
i will pick this back up, i love rune factory too much to ignore it forever, but the switch to 3d environments was something i was dreading after the ps3 game, and i was right to feel that way. the combat is sloppy and also hurt by the framerate issues. the environments are huuuuge for no reason whatsoever.
here are a couple nice things about it: i have decent first impressions of the characters. i think i will be able to grow to like them once i get to know them more. also, the intro cinematic is clearly going for a persona vibe and it totally succeeds, i watch it every single time i boot up the game. and lastly, the north american release marked the addition of actual same-sex marriage in this series. no more having to switch your character sprite and being stuck with the wrong pronouns or whatever. wooooo
that said, you still select your gender at the beginning by answering a question either masculinely or femininely, lol. baby steps i guess.
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oof, this is a tough one to write. rune factory 4 is one of my favorite games, ever.
i knew rf5 wouldn't live up to rf4. the only way to do that would be to make a game that is rf4 with a different story/characters/setting/etc. a huge reason rf4 works so well is because everything is very quick. you can knock out an entire day's tasks in five minutes if you want to.
this game, on the other hand, suffers from long load times and really intense performance issues on the switch. i'd love a buttery-smooth pc port, and i don't normally mind jank, but it really hurts this game's pace given the repetitive nature of farming sims.
i will pick this back up, i love rune factory too much to ignore it forever, but the switch to 3d environments was something i was dreading after the ps3 game, and i was right to feel that way. the combat is sloppy and also hurt by the framerate issues. the environments are huuuuge for no reason whatsoever.
here are a couple nice things about it: i have decent first impressions of the characters. i think i will be able to grow to like them once i get to know them more. also, the intro cinematic is clearly going for a persona vibe and it totally succeeds, i watch it every single time i boot up the game. and lastly, the north american release marked the addition of actual same-sex marriage in this series. no more having to switch your character sprite and being stuck with the wrong pronouns or whatever. wooooo
that said, you still select your gender at the beginning by answering a question either masculinely or femininely, lol. baby steps i guess.
Well, I think I'm done with this now. I only really played it for one in-game month, but that amounts to like 20hrs, so I think I'm good.
Rune Factory 5 is, on a technical & narrative side, a complete mess. Heavy frame-rate problems and quite ugly graphics plague the game world. Character dialogue starts to repeat one in-game week in, the overlaying narrative doesn't really amount to anything.
The gameplay loop is quite mesmerizing and relaxing tho, and, in the end, the entire package hooked me enough to spend these 20hrs. What it was I really don't know. Maybe a compulsion loop. Probably a compulsion loop.
Rune Factory 5 is, on a technical & narrative side, a complete mess. Heavy frame-rate problems and quite ugly graphics plague the game world. Character dialogue starts to repeat one in-game week in, the overlaying narrative doesn't really amount to anything.
The gameplay loop is quite mesmerizing and relaxing tho, and, in the end, the entire package hooked me enough to spend these 20hrs. What it was I really don't know. Maybe a compulsion loop. Probably a compulsion loop.
I decided to scrap my old review and rethink my feelings about this game. It’s definitely far from perfect, heck I even knocked a whopping half a star from the previously 5-star rating! I want to see the Rune Factory series continue growing and evolving as my favorite franchise of all time. And for that, I’m going to critique the game, pointing out the flaws in this 5th installment.
Let’s knock out the most obvious issue with the game. The framerate. I personally don’t really care for framerate as long as it doesn’t negatively impact the gameplay. For the most part I think the framerate is… acceptable. By my standards anyway, which are fairly low, mind you. I'm not very hard to please really, if the gameplay is fun, that's all that matters. That being said I'm not going to pretend like the issue doesn't exist. The game is plenty laggy and stuttery, and it does become bothersome after a while. Especially since sometimes it seems like the game can’t read the inputs properly due to the lag. This didn’t occur to me very frequently, but sometimes when I wanted to use the combination of buttons (say R+X) it’ll only read the R input, resulting in a dash instead of ability, or the opposite where I just happened to press the buttons in a quick succession and they read as if I pressed them together. It can be annoying. The lag is even present in the dialogue. Try fast-forwarding the dialogue and it’ll halt for a bit a certain points because the game has to load the character sprites on-screen which isn’t as quick as In Rune Factory 4. The loading times for transitions don’t actually bother me too much (except for the ending when the game took alarmingly long time to load), however after a brisk game that was Rune Factory 4 that features quick loading and transitions, you wish that this game got more time to polish and optimize its code.
One of the actual issue I have with this game is the combat. I haven’t really played a lot of similar action games with lock-on such as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time or… Dark Souls. Of course in transition from 2D to 3D, the lock-on was added as it’s a staple of such games and makes the combat less clunky, it’s pretty much a necessity. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t implement it very well. Sometimes I want to lock onto the enemy that’s close by, that I’m looking at, but instead the game decides to lock onto some completely unrelated enemy in the back, which makes this mechanic rather unreliable and unpolished. I also think dashing and performing dashing attacks isn’t as satisfying as in previous game, dashing is a little slower as well as performing dash attacks and they make you stop when you perform them instead of propelling you further or something like that. I should mention that when you dash from a close attack, the time will slow down slightly, and allow for a special dash attack. I generally think these perfect dash attacks are actually kinda useless, I didn’t find myself triggering perfect dash very often to begin with, and executing these dash attacks would propel me forward… usually away from the enemies making these attacks useless. I guess you could try dashing into a group of enemies, but don’t you usually want to dash away from enemies to avoid their attacks? That’s what the dashing is for afterall. I think this general combat style isn’t really my cup of tea, I think it’s a decent enough combat, but it doesn’t feel as fun as in RF4. I think this is more of a me thing though, and I should play more of these 3D action combat type of games. The bosses are kinda cool because you’re usually incentivized to use your dashing at the correct moment so you don’t take damage, and learn their attack patterns. However they can be easily cheesed with the new addition to the combat - link attacks. After your NPC partner hits enough enemies, or you heal them a few times or w/e you can execute a devastating link attack that can chip off quite a bit of the bosses’ health. There are only a couple instances in the game where you can’t bring NPCs and experience the combat against bosses without the opportunity of the yummy cheese, and experiencing their attack patterns as intended. The boss before the very final boss of the main story before the ending is a very quick guy, making the fight actually intense and very challenging, actually felt kinda souls-like. Not in terms of difficulty, but in terms of intensity, making it a satisfying boss battle.
Let’s talk about 3D in the 3D game that is Rune Factory 5, and how Rune Factory translates into 3D. Though technically this isn’t the first RF game to be fully 3D (remember Frontier or Tides of Destiny?), but this is the first numbered game that is fully 3D, and it’s been a decade since last 3D RF game. Visually, I think the game actually looks pretty good. I think it’s a step up from the previous games, which looked good in their own right, and allowed the devs an opportunity to expand the landscapes, making them more interesting and doing things not possible in 2D space. I think the outside areas look terrific, such as Phoros Woodlands and beyond and Kelve Volcanic Region featuring great variety in landscapes. The first few dungeons are also pretty well designed, such as Belpha Ruins having unique traps. However, towards the end the dungeons are much less creative. Again, there’s inevitably going to be comparisons between these and the predecessors. Let’s compare Floating Empire and SEED Flying Fortress. Floating Empire is a multi-phase dungeon, with each branch offering a unique mechanic, such as wind, switches for colored gates and teleporters. SEED Flying Fortress… is a bunch of circles. Literally. The second floor of the fortress also features a pretty annoying switch puzzle where you have to turn on or off only certain switches to progress, and the switches aren’t marked on the map, so you have to remember which color switch is where. These two dungeons are pretty similar aesthetically, even though SEED Flying Fortress isn’t actually a last dungeon. But it gets sadder. The actual last dungeon, Calamity’s Edge is literally just a straight line. But we’re not done yet. Cloudheim features the most pointless time waster of a “gimmick”, little clouds that you have to use to get from one big cloud to another. Was it hard to implement a normal path from one cloud to another? Or just teleports, because this dungeon does feature teleports that are activated with switches. This isn’t a fun or engaging mechanic, if you don’t catch the little platform in time, you’ll have to just… stand still. This makes doing repeat playthroughs of this dungeon less enjoyable. Even the post game dungeon isn’t very interesting. It’s basically a reuse of the previous dungeons with pretty much the same layout. Only the very last room features new assets and stands out from rehashed content from prior, but the layout is still pretty basic. For comparison, RF4’s post-game dungeon while did have some theme reuse, the layout was still different instead of copy-pasting the dungeons in their entirety and tweaking them just slightly, plus it did mix in some unique themes not present in previous dungeons. Overall, the use of the third dimension in this game is a hit or miss. The models and textures generally look pretty good, and some landscapes and dungeons are good, others not so much with either basic or reused layouts or annoying mechanics.
Rune Factory 5’s characters are pretty fun, I think I may prefer them to Rune Factory 4 characters, I dunno. The characters strike a nice balance between realistic and quirky, like RF4 and unlike RF3, which while still fun were perhaps too quirky and over the top. And with characters come character interactions. At first you have special date events marked on the map. The ability of being able to choose the order of these events sounds fine, at least in theory. In practice however, I oftentimes ended the event in a location that would start another event, which is honestly kind of annoying. I think they should’ve implemented a cooldown, like a day or so. Still, the events are generally better handled than those of RF4, now the event triggers are clearly marked on the map, and you can actually still take participating folk out on adventuring in most cases. At one point these date events end and normal town events start occurring, which… end abruptly. It actually feels like there’s less events in the game due to less spacing between them. Rune Factory 4 didn’t actually feature a lot of town events, but they were well spaced out or required some sort of trigger, since I could still get some of them even after the first year of in-game time has passed. I think Rune Factory 5’s events also should’ve been spaced out more to make them feel more special, instead of something mundane.
Now let’s talk about farming. The farming mechanics of planting, harvesting, cutting wood and mining rocks are pretty much the same as in the previous games, they’re pain-free and decently enjoyable activities. One minor negative for mining and wood cutting is that it isn’t as fast paced as in previous games, meaning you’ll take slightly more time before each swing. Even upgrading tools doesn’t help, compared to how it worked in RF4, where you upgrade from cheap tools and you can mine or cut faster. Perhaps it’s due to the framerate, I can’t be certain but it seems like the devs are aware of that and offered a small compromise. With upgraded tools you’ll have a chance getting double wood or material stone, and for stone you can get RP runes which can be beneficial, but at the same time I do wish that this job was sped up just a bit. The game introduces a new farming mechanic - farming dragons. Almost, these are basically free farm expansions that you get through story instead of spending SEED points you get for doing SEED Ranger activities, as those farming dragons carry fields where you can plant more crops. Not only that but the dragons themselves can be fed crystals to give various benefits to the fields, such as generating rain, watering all the crops, making them grow faster, making them more resilient, making crops yield more harvest and expanding fields even further. The benefits the dragons provide are definitely welcome, but I do miss something previous games had. Seasonal fields. In previous Rune Factory games, you could find a summer field or an autumn field and so on and plant seasonal crops on them without worrying about current season in-town, which would make them grow faster. I couldn’t tell if the dragons themselves act as seasonal fields or all of them are identical, I didn’t actually test it out, and it’s not written anywhere in the game or the manual, so I guess they aren’t? But it kinda doesn’t make sense at the same time, like you’d think an Ice Dragon would substitute to winter field, because, y’know, ice? If they do act the same as seasonal fields, then its not clear which dragon is which season. Ice should be obvious, and maybe Fire Dragon for autumn? If we go in that order, Wind Dragon should be spring, but what about Earth Dragon and Terra Dragon? Is Earth for summer, and Terra for… everything? Basically, what I’m saying is that I really miss traditional seasonal fields where I could plant seasonal crops without worrying about growth speed. The dragons are still pretty cool because of the crystal rewards making them more convenient. I guess you get some, you lose some.
I don’t have a lot to say about story. I’m not really a writing expert, trying to find deep meanings or w/e, I’m just more of the gameplay guy so it’s harder for me to judge other aspects. But I think it’s pretty decent. Probably not amazing but pretty solid nonetheless. I don’t think the main story is a particularly strong aspect of any Rune Factory game really. That being said, there was one moment in the story that felt pretty urgent and it was nothing like I’ve experienced before. At one point in the story, pretty much every NPC is rendered KO, and you have to delve into a new dungeon to restore everything to order. Not only the did it feel urgent, but the dungeon itself proved to be surprisingly challenging, because it sucked RP out of the protagonist, which is required for rune abilities and such, requiring a bit of preparation, and you can’t bring NPCs with you, so I brought tamed animal buddies with me instead. It was kinda tense and easily the most memorable moment I’ve experienced in Rune Factory 5, or any game from what I can remember, and I don’t remember any other game evoking the same feeling of urgency. Perhaps it wasn’t actually urgent, but it just felt right to restore everyone ASAP, not even games where you supposedly hold humanity’s last hope like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion could pull that off.
Now I’ll point out some random positives/negatives:
-First, festivals and events. They’re mostly returning from previous games, I mean obvious are seasonal harvest festivals, but there are also new contests, such as Buff-A-Way which makes a good use of this game’s dashing mechanic. The only negative I have regarding events is one specific event is much worse in this game than in RF4, Eating Contest. In RF4, you and other participants are tasked on wolfing down food that spawns, with giant fruits and dishes giving more points, but there are also failed dishes. You’re supposed to mash the button to eat delicacies, and the free movement added some chaos, but also strategy, like how you can throw failed dishes at other players and subtract their points. In RF5, you and the other participants are fixed to respective tables and have to switch between dishes by pressing left and right and mash the button to eat the dish. The problem, is that getting first place requires way too much button mashing, my thumb hurt quite a bit after playing the minigame, RF4 didn’t require as much button mashing to eat food and being free to move made the event far more memorable and intense, RF5’s iteration is straight up bad in my opinion.
-Another minor criticism I have is non-unique town NPCs don’t offer as many useful tips as in previous games, which makes interacting with them practically worthless, as they tend to complain about slimy boogers or patrolling around hot springs. In RF4 I kept discovering new tips even after 500+ hours of playtime combined on 3DS or Switch. Even if those tips are about mechanics I knew about, such as pressing X to hide message box, it was still really nice that the game offers so many tips and so much dialogue that talking to those NPCs was usually a pleasant surprise, not to mention that some of those tips are humorous, like the guy who said Y to skip dialogue text saying a lot of unrelated things, making you want to skip text, which gives the game and the townsfolk so much personality. In RF5 those NPCs really feel like nobodies that you should ignore as they always say something repetitive. They could’ve included some of the more obscure mechanics or tips. Hell, even unique NPCs offered some tips, like Forte telling you how powerful rune abilities can be or Vishnal telling you about stashing items with Y (which I actually didn’t know about early on and it was very helpful and convenient). Yes, a few of the tips are now obsolete, such as Y for stash since what the buttons do are displayed in the menus. But there are still things that are explained nowhere in the manual or in-game. For example, in RF4, one tip you can get is enhancing a weapon with 4-leaf clover will raise chances of getting a rare item. Yes, you can probably figure this out on your own, but it was nice to have a confirmation that there is such a thing. I always assumed that enhancing the tool with 4-leaf clover would enhance the luck of the tool, like how enhancing a hammer would make mining gems easier, but maybe that’s not how it works, as the tip only mentions enhancing a weapon. But how do I know this wasn’t cut in RF5? While you could argue that encourages experimentation, I think having town folk give more varied tips gives them much more personality, with random named NPCs giving more tips giving a reason and excitement to engage with them, instead of them complaining about those slimy boogers! I think one tip that would’ve been incredibly useful is where to get apple/grape/orange tree seeds, I still haven’t found a single apple tree seed in my 200+ hour playthrough. Yes I’m aware of the tree seed spots and neither give me apples. That must be an insanely bad luck since I check them regularly, I read someone had a similar issue but with orange seeds. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if it’s straight up busted. But anyway, more varied tips for obscure mechanics or just general dialogue would be nice.
+Same-Sex marriage. I won’t lie when I say that my jaw absolutely dropped when I saw that announcement. I was already pretty happy with just the release date announcement, but the addition of same-sex relationship definitely made my day. This wasn’t in the original japanese release, but was added with a patch. Better late than never, eh? I hope this becomes a staple of Rune Factory series going forward. I mean, they made up a special way to get children specifically for same-sex couples, so it must be an established lore for further entries, right?
+Auto item pickup toggle. This is actually a very convenient feature, now I don’t have to manually pick up loot from monsters or ores or chopped wood, I can just run into the items and pick them up automatically. And since it’s a toggle, you can switch it off if you don’t want any random garbage. I approve.
-Bugs. I didn’t notice a lot of them, I encountered two crashes, which were probably from extended play session, but I’m not sure. Thankfully the game autosaves, and I save frequently, so it wasn’t a huge deal for me personally, but it’s still not a great issue to have. A couple times where NPC companions were holding nothing in their hands which is silly. A couple of out of bounds, which a normal player probably wouldn’t encounter. Thankfully you can teleport even midair so it’s not a huge deal either. The most annoying and frequent bug that I’ve encountered however is a sound glitch, where a sound effect would get stuck on repeat, and to get rid of it you have to reload a save. Not fun. Another issue that seems to be a result of some sort of memory leak (q-mark) is that changing between warp points on the map produces more choppier scrolling after extended play time. Weird.
-My personal disappointment, Seed Dungeon got cut. I liked the randomized nature of the seed dungeons, and I always found it fun to open multiple chests with random loot. I kinda hoped Rigbarth Maze would be like seed dungeons/mazes of RF4 because you spend a lot of ranger points to unlock it and it’s a maze??? But nope, it’s more like Rune Prana of RF4. Perhaps it would’ve been difficult to make this idea work in 3D space, but I’m sure not impossible.
-You can’t throw stuff into water (deep water with fish, not like hot springs) or just anywhere. If you accidently threw an item in the water in RF4, you would use a fishing rod to catch that item back. I think RF5 could’ve made use of the catching ability if you accidently threw an item somewhere unreachable, punishing the player with RP cost and teaching them to be more careful about throwing stuff around. Also, in RF4 throwing a gem or some other item into a small pond would give the player a seasonal headdress, which was a cool secret. Now I don’t know how to get these same headdresses in RF5. I feel like this is one of those instances where a tip from an NPC could’ve been very helpful. HINT HINT.
-Using a stick for navigating menus. I don’t know how they fucked that up but it didn’t feel as good as in Rune Factory 4 on 3DS or Switch. I could swiftly navigate menus with a stick because it was just that good, but in Rune Factory 5, it just doesn’t feel very good, like sometimes the stick moves the cursor somewhere I didn’t intend to, it feels like it takes the slightest inputs wrong or is just plain imprecise. I don’t know how to describe it proper, but it just didn’t feel very good, so I had to use the ol’ reliable D-Pad/Directional Buttons. I think it’s just a matter of preference, if you used D-Pad in RF4 for navigating menus, then this won’t be a problem for you.
+Can now switch between different storages (fridge, storage box etc.) from any storage with L/R which is rather convenient. You can also put items into shipping box directly from the storages with the same L/R. You don’t need to take those items with you to the shipping box anymore. And the shipping box can be used to transfer items from other storages into your inventory as well.
+You can also use L/R to switch between different recipe types, like in crafting table you can switch between hat recipes to armor recipes and so forth, adding a little bit more convenience here as well.
-Can’t change the quantity of crafted items as quickly. In RF4, you choose Pcs. and you can hold up or down to make more or less items. In RF5, you have to place your cursor on left or right arrow and press A to adjust. You can’t even hold A to make it faster, so you really have to hammer that A button if you want to make many of the same item at the same time.
+Crafted items that stack (like potions) now automatically stack in your inventory instead of creating stacks of 1 and filling your inventory, which didn’t really make sense. You still can’t make more items than spaces in your inventory, even if those shouldn’t take all spaces due to stacking, but it’s still slightly move convenient. It’s a progress in the right direction.
+One of the best quality of life improvements in my opinion, you can now throw all of the lumber and material stone into lumber/stone box with a single dialogue prompt, instead of having to throw stacks into the box for a while which isn’t fun in RF4. Now getting all that material stone and lumber is less of a hassle and is slightly easier because you can get double stone/lumber with better tools. Also, fertilizer bin offers a similar prompt to toss all weeds and weathered grass on hand into it. I think adding an additional dialogue option to throw all grass into fertilizer bin would make it even better, since colored grass and antidote grass also count for fertilizer, but it’s still a decent improvement. (also applies to fodder bin)
-Platinum tools are now kind of pointless? The descriptions state that they’re good because of shorter charge time, but I didn’t notice a difference between gold and platinum, if there is, it isn’t as noticeable as in Rune Factory 4, where platinum tools charge VERY fast.
+You can occasionally catch 2 fish at once, which is pretty cool. And on the topic of fishing, even if there’s no visible fish around, you can wait a little bit and the fish will appear for you to catch, so you don’t have to potentially wait eternity for the fish to come or have to choose a more suitable spot, though it doesn’t seem to work everywhere, but I’d say it works 90% of the time.
+Good music. Previous games also had good music and this game is no exception. Yes, there are a few tracks reused or remixed, but those songs are good as well, so I can’t complain. And that was a case in RF4 as well, so its nothing new.
-Requests are lacking in variety. You’ll get requests for getting rid of ribbitees or insects or griffins, but no other enemy or even a boss it seems. For other types of requests, a few basic fish or dishes or shipping basic crops. Even the rewards aren’t really worth it, with you getting medicine/potions instead, or a little bit of money if you turn in the board request at Terry’s Detective Agency, but it’s still a pitiful reward. Rune Factory 4 usually gave a randomized reward. These were kind of a gamble, but the randomness still gave them a good variety, like exchanging a common item for a rare item. I mean it makes sense that you get low reward for low-level tasks, but doesn’t that make you wish for actually high-level tasks? Like kill a boss or bring a rare kind of item or multiple items. Now almost everyone’s asking for a cold medicine. Is this a diegetic story telling about how everyone’s susceptible to common cold and the towns’ doctor can’t cure it? Is there a pandemic we aren’t aware of??? There technically are higher level requests in the form of wanted monsters that give you consistent rewards, but I would've still liked more varied requests from NPCs themselves. If you can't tell, I would've liked a bit of randomness, makes things more exciting.
I’d go on, but I hope you get the idea, that there are genuine improvements that I like, but also some cut or simplified content that's occasionally quite disappointing.
There’s a running theme in this game. Bad framerate. Lackluster dungeon design. Somewhat unpolished combat or other mechanics. Heck, even cut or reduced content. Throughout the game I couldn’t shake the feeling that the game was, in a way, rushed. So, while I was writing this, I noticed that this game received an update patch, 1.0.2. The update itself isn’t really notable, but it reminded me that you can check program info for intellectual property notes. That’s where I saw it. “Made with Unity”. That… actually explains a lot. The engines like Unity or Unreal Engine aren’t known for performing well on a relatively weak Switch, unless you have something simple and 2D. Of course, those engines are just tools, and it’s up to developers on how to wield them. However, Unity paints a bigger picture than just performance issues. Perhaps Hakama didn’t have access to the 3D engines used by Frontier or Tides of Destiny or didn’t want to spend time converting them for Switch hardware. So, they decided to move to Unity which is accessible and fairly easy to develop on (I think? Back me up on this fellow indie devs). If you think about, it probably wasn’t an easy task to practically remake all the Rune Factory mechanics in Unity, and if it was, it was time consuming. In which case its actually impressive, while there were a few cuts for sure, the general mechanics are the same, but also in 3D. I’m sure the pandemic didn’t help matters either, the initial Japanese release got delayed from 2020 to 2021 release date. At the same time it doesn’t feel like it was rushed in a way where it feels unfinished, it’s very functional, playable and still pretty fun, even if the performance leaves a lot to be desire. And it seemed the developers still had some fun with RF5, bringing new wacky shenanigans, and the voice actors from voice actor commentary were ecstatic to about being a part of the production and about the game’s release. I won’t be theory crafting speculating how badly the game was rushed or if at all, regardless I think the end result of a game is still pretty good even if obviously flawed.
When I like a game, I usually like to defend it, like how I liked The LEGO Movie 2 Videogame or Shrek The Third videogame and gave them higher than average ratings, but I decided to critique this game and point out as many flaws as I could where developers could improve going forward. I really care about Rune Factory series, I want to see it continue growing stronger and release games that manage to outshine previous games. I started this series with Rune Factory 2. I really enjoyed that game, even though I didn’t get to advance to the second generation because I was slacking on wood cutting and the school required a sizeable amount of wood. It just managed to be this fun that I didn’t advance the story and I’ve never experienced anything like it. Then I played Rune Factory 3, and it was even better and more fun than Rune Factory 2, with a much faster paced action with memorable characters and setting. I experienced these excellent games through emulation, but then I get an actual 3DS and buy Rune Factory 4, and it somehow managed to be even better than Rune Factory 3, I sank a looooooooooot of time into it, including Special rerelease on Switch, it was that good. But is Rune Factory 5 better than 4? I’m sure many fans would agree that it is, in fact, not better than Rune Factory 4, even if its still a good game, with obvious performance issues among others. In fact some people would call this entry a disappointment. What about me? I think it is, to some extent, better than RF4. It manages to add some quality of life improvements, showing that the devs were still willing to find ways to improve existing mechanics. There are some additions that I like, like catching ability, and, although not a substitute to seasonal fields, farm dragons are still overall a good addition and an evolution of expandable fields of RF4. On the other hand, there are a lot of technical issues and a lot of missteps that I’ve already covered. Was I disappointed? Actually, no. I expected Rune Factory 5 to be as fun, if not more fun that RF4. And, well… I got what I expected. It is fun. Reading this review, you probably wondered, why a 4.5 star rating? You’ve pointed out so many issues, shouldn’t it be 3 or maybe even lower? Yes, Rune Factory 5 is far from a flawless masterpiece, and maybe not as great as Rune Factory 4, in fact it won’t replace Rune Factory 4 in my top 10 ranking, but it still makes a very good honorable mention. Because I still had a lot of fun playing it. I can’t help but enjoy what I like. And I happened to like Rune Factory 5. I still sank a lot of hours into Rune Factory 5, playing it for weeks after its release, and still playing it today. The game is pretty much as engaging as ever, with memorable characters and solid mechanics. I decided to be more critical for this review because I want to see the developers improve, I want to see them make the ultimate Rune Factory game, the one that surpasses anything before, and pointing out mistakes that they could correct makes for a better feedback. The devs wouldn’t learn anything if I just pointed out what works, because I’m sure even they know what works for the series at this point. I think you should critique what you love if you want to make a better successor. I truly care about Rune Factory series, I’ve never felt about that about any other franchise before. I want to see the developers to do better, and I know they can do better. Rune Factory 5 is not the best the devs can offer, but even at it's "not the best", it's still a good effort. I really hope the developers learn the harsh lessons and make the best Rune Factory game there can be.
Let’s knock out the most obvious issue with the game. The framerate. I personally don’t really care for framerate as long as it doesn’t negatively impact the gameplay. For the most part I think the framerate is… acceptable. By my standards anyway, which are fairly low, mind you. I'm not very hard to please really, if the gameplay is fun, that's all that matters. That being said I'm not going to pretend like the issue doesn't exist. The game is plenty laggy and stuttery, and it does become bothersome after a while. Especially since sometimes it seems like the game can’t read the inputs properly due to the lag. This didn’t occur to me very frequently, but sometimes when I wanted to use the combination of buttons (say R+X) it’ll only read the R input, resulting in a dash instead of ability, or the opposite where I just happened to press the buttons in a quick succession and they read as if I pressed them together. It can be annoying. The lag is even present in the dialogue. Try fast-forwarding the dialogue and it’ll halt for a bit a certain points because the game has to load the character sprites on-screen which isn’t as quick as In Rune Factory 4. The loading times for transitions don’t actually bother me too much (except for the ending when the game took alarmingly long time to load), however after a brisk game that was Rune Factory 4 that features quick loading and transitions, you wish that this game got more time to polish and optimize its code.
One of the actual issue I have with this game is the combat. I haven’t really played a lot of similar action games with lock-on such as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time or… Dark Souls. Of course in transition from 2D to 3D, the lock-on was added as it’s a staple of such games and makes the combat less clunky, it’s pretty much a necessity. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t implement it very well. Sometimes I want to lock onto the enemy that’s close by, that I’m looking at, but instead the game decides to lock onto some completely unrelated enemy in the back, which makes this mechanic rather unreliable and unpolished. I also think dashing and performing dashing attacks isn’t as satisfying as in previous game, dashing is a little slower as well as performing dash attacks and they make you stop when you perform them instead of propelling you further or something like that. I should mention that when you dash from a close attack, the time will slow down slightly, and allow for a special dash attack. I generally think these perfect dash attacks are actually kinda useless, I didn’t find myself triggering perfect dash very often to begin with, and executing these dash attacks would propel me forward… usually away from the enemies making these attacks useless. I guess you could try dashing into a group of enemies, but don’t you usually want to dash away from enemies to avoid their attacks? That’s what the dashing is for afterall. I think this general combat style isn’t really my cup of tea, I think it’s a decent enough combat, but it doesn’t feel as fun as in RF4. I think this is more of a me thing though, and I should play more of these 3D action combat type of games. The bosses are kinda cool because you’re usually incentivized to use your dashing at the correct moment so you don’t take damage, and learn their attack patterns. However they can be easily cheesed with the new addition to the combat - link attacks. After your NPC partner hits enough enemies, or you heal them a few times or w/e you can execute a devastating link attack that can chip off quite a bit of the bosses’ health. There are only a couple instances in the game where you can’t bring NPCs and experience the combat against bosses without the opportunity of the yummy cheese, and experiencing their attack patterns as intended. The boss before the very final boss of the main story before the ending is a very quick guy, making the fight actually intense and very challenging, actually felt kinda souls-like. Not in terms of difficulty, but in terms of intensity, making it a satisfying boss battle.
Let’s talk about 3D in the 3D game that is Rune Factory 5, and how Rune Factory translates into 3D. Though technically this isn’t the first RF game to be fully 3D (remember Frontier or Tides of Destiny?), but this is the first numbered game that is fully 3D, and it’s been a decade since last 3D RF game. Visually, I think the game actually looks pretty good. I think it’s a step up from the previous games, which looked good in their own right, and allowed the devs an opportunity to expand the landscapes, making them more interesting and doing things not possible in 2D space. I think the outside areas look terrific, such as Phoros Woodlands and beyond and Kelve Volcanic Region featuring great variety in landscapes. The first few dungeons are also pretty well designed, such as Belpha Ruins having unique traps. However, towards the end the dungeons are much less creative. Again, there’s inevitably going to be comparisons between these and the predecessors. Let’s compare Floating Empire and SEED Flying Fortress. Floating Empire is a multi-phase dungeon, with each branch offering a unique mechanic, such as wind, switches for colored gates and teleporters. SEED Flying Fortress… is a bunch of circles. Literally. The second floor of the fortress also features a pretty annoying switch puzzle where you have to turn on or off only certain switches to progress, and the switches aren’t marked on the map, so you have to remember which color switch is where. These two dungeons are pretty similar aesthetically, even though SEED Flying Fortress isn’t actually a last dungeon. But it gets sadder. The actual last dungeon, Calamity’s Edge is literally just a straight line. But we’re not done yet. Cloudheim features the most pointless time waster of a “gimmick”, little clouds that you have to use to get from one big cloud to another. Was it hard to implement a normal path from one cloud to another? Or just teleports, because this dungeon does feature teleports that are activated with switches. This isn’t a fun or engaging mechanic, if you don’t catch the little platform in time, you’ll have to just… stand still. This makes doing repeat playthroughs of this dungeon less enjoyable. Even the post game dungeon isn’t very interesting. It’s basically a reuse of the previous dungeons with pretty much the same layout. Only the very last room features new assets and stands out from rehashed content from prior, but the layout is still pretty basic. For comparison, RF4’s post-game dungeon while did have some theme reuse, the layout was still different instead of copy-pasting the dungeons in their entirety and tweaking them just slightly, plus it did mix in some unique themes not present in previous dungeons. Overall, the use of the third dimension in this game is a hit or miss. The models and textures generally look pretty good, and some landscapes and dungeons are good, others not so much with either basic or reused layouts or annoying mechanics.
Rune Factory 5’s characters are pretty fun, I think I may prefer them to Rune Factory 4 characters, I dunno. The characters strike a nice balance between realistic and quirky, like RF4 and unlike RF3, which while still fun were perhaps too quirky and over the top. And with characters come character interactions. At first you have special date events marked on the map. The ability of being able to choose the order of these events sounds fine, at least in theory. In practice however, I oftentimes ended the event in a location that would start another event, which is honestly kind of annoying. I think they should’ve implemented a cooldown, like a day or so. Still, the events are generally better handled than those of RF4, now the event triggers are clearly marked on the map, and you can actually still take participating folk out on adventuring in most cases. At one point these date events end and normal town events start occurring, which… end abruptly. It actually feels like there’s less events in the game due to less spacing between them. Rune Factory 4 didn’t actually feature a lot of town events, but they were well spaced out or required some sort of trigger, since I could still get some of them even after the first year of in-game time has passed. I think Rune Factory 5’s events also should’ve been spaced out more to make them feel more special, instead of something mundane.
Now let’s talk about farming. The farming mechanics of planting, harvesting, cutting wood and mining rocks are pretty much the same as in the previous games, they’re pain-free and decently enjoyable activities. One minor negative for mining and wood cutting is that it isn’t as fast paced as in previous games, meaning you’ll take slightly more time before each swing. Even upgrading tools doesn’t help, compared to how it worked in RF4, where you upgrade from cheap tools and you can mine or cut faster. Perhaps it’s due to the framerate, I can’t be certain but it seems like the devs are aware of that and offered a small compromise. With upgraded tools you’ll have a chance getting double wood or material stone, and for stone you can get RP runes which can be beneficial, but at the same time I do wish that this job was sped up just a bit. The game introduces a new farming mechanic - farming dragons. Almost, these are basically free farm expansions that you get through story instead of spending SEED points you get for doing SEED Ranger activities, as those farming dragons carry fields where you can plant more crops. Not only that but the dragons themselves can be fed crystals to give various benefits to the fields, such as generating rain, watering all the crops, making them grow faster, making them more resilient, making crops yield more harvest and expanding fields even further. The benefits the dragons provide are definitely welcome, but I do miss something previous games had. Seasonal fields. In previous Rune Factory games, you could find a summer field or an autumn field and so on and plant seasonal crops on them without worrying about current season in-town, which would make them grow faster. I couldn’t tell if the dragons themselves act as seasonal fields or all of them are identical, I didn’t actually test it out, and it’s not written anywhere in the game or the manual, so I guess they aren’t? But it kinda doesn’t make sense at the same time, like you’d think an Ice Dragon would substitute to winter field, because, y’know, ice? If they do act the same as seasonal fields, then its not clear which dragon is which season. Ice should be obvious, and maybe Fire Dragon for autumn? If we go in that order, Wind Dragon should be spring, but what about Earth Dragon and Terra Dragon? Is Earth for summer, and Terra for… everything? Basically, what I’m saying is that I really miss traditional seasonal fields where I could plant seasonal crops without worrying about growth speed. The dragons are still pretty cool because of the crystal rewards making them more convenient. I guess you get some, you lose some.
I don’t have a lot to say about story. I’m not really a writing expert, trying to find deep meanings or w/e, I’m just more of the gameplay guy so it’s harder for me to judge other aspects. But I think it’s pretty decent. Probably not amazing but pretty solid nonetheless. I don’t think the main story is a particularly strong aspect of any Rune Factory game really. That being said, there was one moment in the story that felt pretty urgent and it was nothing like I’ve experienced before. At one point in the story, pretty much every NPC is rendered KO, and you have to delve into a new dungeon to restore everything to order. Not only the did it feel urgent, but the dungeon itself proved to be surprisingly challenging, because it sucked RP out of the protagonist, which is required for rune abilities and such, requiring a bit of preparation, and you can’t bring NPCs with you, so I brought tamed animal buddies with me instead. It was kinda tense and easily the most memorable moment I’ve experienced in Rune Factory 5, or any game from what I can remember, and I don’t remember any other game evoking the same feeling of urgency. Perhaps it wasn’t actually urgent, but it just felt right to restore everyone ASAP, not even games where you supposedly hold humanity’s last hope like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion could pull that off.
Now I’ll point out some random positives/negatives:
-First, festivals and events. They’re mostly returning from previous games, I mean obvious are seasonal harvest festivals, but there are also new contests, such as Buff-A-Way which makes a good use of this game’s dashing mechanic. The only negative I have regarding events is one specific event is much worse in this game than in RF4, Eating Contest. In RF4, you and other participants are tasked on wolfing down food that spawns, with giant fruits and dishes giving more points, but there are also failed dishes. You’re supposed to mash the button to eat delicacies, and the free movement added some chaos, but also strategy, like how you can throw failed dishes at other players and subtract their points. In RF5, you and the other participants are fixed to respective tables and have to switch between dishes by pressing left and right and mash the button to eat the dish. The problem, is that getting first place requires way too much button mashing, my thumb hurt quite a bit after playing the minigame, RF4 didn’t require as much button mashing to eat food and being free to move made the event far more memorable and intense, RF5’s iteration is straight up bad in my opinion.
-Another minor criticism I have is non-unique town NPCs don’t offer as many useful tips as in previous games, which makes interacting with them practically worthless, as they tend to complain about slimy boogers or patrolling around hot springs. In RF4 I kept discovering new tips even after 500+ hours of playtime combined on 3DS or Switch. Even if those tips are about mechanics I knew about, such as pressing X to hide message box, it was still really nice that the game offers so many tips and so much dialogue that talking to those NPCs was usually a pleasant surprise, not to mention that some of those tips are humorous, like the guy who said Y to skip dialogue text saying a lot of unrelated things, making you want to skip text, which gives the game and the townsfolk so much personality. In RF5 those NPCs really feel like nobodies that you should ignore as they always say something repetitive. They could’ve included some of the more obscure mechanics or tips. Hell, even unique NPCs offered some tips, like Forte telling you how powerful rune abilities can be or Vishnal telling you about stashing items with Y (which I actually didn’t know about early on and it was very helpful and convenient). Yes, a few of the tips are now obsolete, such as Y for stash since what the buttons do are displayed in the menus. But there are still things that are explained nowhere in the manual or in-game. For example, in RF4, one tip you can get is enhancing a weapon with 4-leaf clover will raise chances of getting a rare item. Yes, you can probably figure this out on your own, but it was nice to have a confirmation that there is such a thing. I always assumed that enhancing the tool with 4-leaf clover would enhance the luck of the tool, like how enhancing a hammer would make mining gems easier, but maybe that’s not how it works, as the tip only mentions enhancing a weapon. But how do I know this wasn’t cut in RF5? While you could argue that encourages experimentation, I think having town folk give more varied tips gives them much more personality, with random named NPCs giving more tips giving a reason and excitement to engage with them, instead of them complaining about those slimy boogers! I think one tip that would’ve been incredibly useful is where to get apple/grape/orange tree seeds, I still haven’t found a single apple tree seed in my 200+ hour playthrough. Yes I’m aware of the tree seed spots and neither give me apples. That must be an insanely bad luck since I check them regularly, I read someone had a similar issue but with orange seeds. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if it’s straight up busted. But anyway, more varied tips for obscure mechanics or just general dialogue would be nice.
+Same-Sex marriage. I won’t lie when I say that my jaw absolutely dropped when I saw that announcement. I was already pretty happy with just the release date announcement, but the addition of same-sex relationship definitely made my day. This wasn’t in the original japanese release, but was added with a patch. Better late than never, eh? I hope this becomes a staple of Rune Factory series going forward. I mean, they made up a special way to get children specifically for same-sex couples, so it must be an established lore for further entries, right?
+Auto item pickup toggle. This is actually a very convenient feature, now I don’t have to manually pick up loot from monsters or ores or chopped wood, I can just run into the items and pick them up automatically. And since it’s a toggle, you can switch it off if you don’t want any random garbage. I approve.
-Bugs. I didn’t notice a lot of them, I encountered two crashes, which were probably from extended play session, but I’m not sure. Thankfully the game autosaves, and I save frequently, so it wasn’t a huge deal for me personally, but it’s still not a great issue to have. A couple times where NPC companions were holding nothing in their hands which is silly. A couple of out of bounds, which a normal player probably wouldn’t encounter. Thankfully you can teleport even midair so it’s not a huge deal either. The most annoying and frequent bug that I’ve encountered however is a sound glitch, where a sound effect would get stuck on repeat, and to get rid of it you have to reload a save. Not fun. Another issue that seems to be a result of some sort of memory leak (q-mark) is that changing between warp points on the map produces more choppier scrolling after extended play time. Weird.
-My personal disappointment, Seed Dungeon got cut. I liked the randomized nature of the seed dungeons, and I always found it fun to open multiple chests with random loot. I kinda hoped Rigbarth Maze would be like seed dungeons/mazes of RF4 because you spend a lot of ranger points to unlock it and it’s a maze??? But nope, it’s more like Rune Prana of RF4. Perhaps it would’ve been difficult to make this idea work in 3D space, but I’m sure not impossible.
-You can’t throw stuff into water (deep water with fish, not like hot springs) or just anywhere. If you accidently threw an item in the water in RF4, you would use a fishing rod to catch that item back. I think RF5 could’ve made use of the catching ability if you accidently threw an item somewhere unreachable, punishing the player with RP cost and teaching them to be more careful about throwing stuff around. Also, in RF4 throwing a gem or some other item into a small pond would give the player a seasonal headdress, which was a cool secret. Now I don’t know how to get these same headdresses in RF5. I feel like this is one of those instances where a tip from an NPC could’ve been very helpful. HINT HINT.
-Using a stick for navigating menus. I don’t know how they fucked that up but it didn’t feel as good as in Rune Factory 4 on 3DS or Switch. I could swiftly navigate menus with a stick because it was just that good, but in Rune Factory 5, it just doesn’t feel very good, like sometimes the stick moves the cursor somewhere I didn’t intend to, it feels like it takes the slightest inputs wrong or is just plain imprecise. I don’t know how to describe it proper, but it just didn’t feel very good, so I had to use the ol’ reliable D-Pad/Directional Buttons. I think it’s just a matter of preference, if you used D-Pad in RF4 for navigating menus, then this won’t be a problem for you.
+Can now switch between different storages (fridge, storage box etc.) from any storage with L/R which is rather convenient. You can also put items into shipping box directly from the storages with the same L/R. You don’t need to take those items with you to the shipping box anymore. And the shipping box can be used to transfer items from other storages into your inventory as well.
+You can also use L/R to switch between different recipe types, like in crafting table you can switch between hat recipes to armor recipes and so forth, adding a little bit more convenience here as well.
-Can’t change the quantity of crafted items as quickly. In RF4, you choose Pcs. and you can hold up or down to make more or less items. In RF5, you have to place your cursor on left or right arrow and press A to adjust. You can’t even hold A to make it faster, so you really have to hammer that A button if you want to make many of the same item at the same time.
+Crafted items that stack (like potions) now automatically stack in your inventory instead of creating stacks of 1 and filling your inventory, which didn’t really make sense. You still can’t make more items than spaces in your inventory, even if those shouldn’t take all spaces due to stacking, but it’s still slightly move convenient. It’s a progress in the right direction.
+One of the best quality of life improvements in my opinion, you can now throw all of the lumber and material stone into lumber/stone box with a single dialogue prompt, instead of having to throw stacks into the box for a while which isn’t fun in RF4. Now getting all that material stone and lumber is less of a hassle and is slightly easier because you can get double stone/lumber with better tools. Also, fertilizer bin offers a similar prompt to toss all weeds and weathered grass on hand into it. I think adding an additional dialogue option to throw all grass into fertilizer bin would make it even better, since colored grass and antidote grass also count for fertilizer, but it’s still a decent improvement. (also applies to fodder bin)
-Platinum tools are now kind of pointless? The descriptions state that they’re good because of shorter charge time, but I didn’t notice a difference between gold and platinum, if there is, it isn’t as noticeable as in Rune Factory 4, where platinum tools charge VERY fast.
+You can occasionally catch 2 fish at once, which is pretty cool. And on the topic of fishing, even if there’s no visible fish around, you can wait a little bit and the fish will appear for you to catch, so you don’t have to potentially wait eternity for the fish to come or have to choose a more suitable spot, though it doesn’t seem to work everywhere, but I’d say it works 90% of the time.
+Good music. Previous games also had good music and this game is no exception. Yes, there are a few tracks reused or remixed, but those songs are good as well, so I can’t complain. And that was a case in RF4 as well, so its nothing new.
-Requests are lacking in variety. You’ll get requests for getting rid of ribbitees or insects or griffins, but no other enemy or even a boss it seems. For other types of requests, a few basic fish or dishes or shipping basic crops. Even the rewards aren’t really worth it, with you getting medicine/potions instead, or a little bit of money if you turn in the board request at Terry’s Detective Agency, but it’s still a pitiful reward. Rune Factory 4 usually gave a randomized reward. These were kind of a gamble, but the randomness still gave them a good variety, like exchanging a common item for a rare item. I mean it makes sense that you get low reward for low-level tasks, but doesn’t that make you wish for actually high-level tasks? Like kill a boss or bring a rare kind of item or multiple items. Now almost everyone’s asking for a cold medicine. Is this a diegetic story telling about how everyone’s susceptible to common cold and the towns’ doctor can’t cure it? Is there a pandemic we aren’t aware of??? There technically are higher level requests in the form of wanted monsters that give you consistent rewards, but I would've still liked more varied requests from NPCs themselves. If you can't tell, I would've liked a bit of randomness, makes things more exciting.
I’d go on, but I hope you get the idea, that there are genuine improvements that I like, but also some cut or simplified content that's occasionally quite disappointing.
There’s a running theme in this game. Bad framerate. Lackluster dungeon design. Somewhat unpolished combat or other mechanics. Heck, even cut or reduced content. Throughout the game I couldn’t shake the feeling that the game was, in a way, rushed. So, while I was writing this, I noticed that this game received an update patch, 1.0.2. The update itself isn’t really notable, but it reminded me that you can check program info for intellectual property notes. That’s where I saw it. “Made with Unity”. That… actually explains a lot. The engines like Unity or Unreal Engine aren’t known for performing well on a relatively weak Switch, unless you have something simple and 2D. Of course, those engines are just tools, and it’s up to developers on how to wield them. However, Unity paints a bigger picture than just performance issues. Perhaps Hakama didn’t have access to the 3D engines used by Frontier or Tides of Destiny or didn’t want to spend time converting them for Switch hardware. So, they decided to move to Unity which is accessible and fairly easy to develop on (I think? Back me up on this fellow indie devs). If you think about, it probably wasn’t an easy task to practically remake all the Rune Factory mechanics in Unity, and if it was, it was time consuming. In which case its actually impressive, while there were a few cuts for sure, the general mechanics are the same, but also in 3D. I’m sure the pandemic didn’t help matters either, the initial Japanese release got delayed from 2020 to 2021 release date. At the same time it doesn’t feel like it was rushed in a way where it feels unfinished, it’s very functional, playable and still pretty fun, even if the performance leaves a lot to be desire. And it seemed the developers still had some fun with RF5, bringing new wacky shenanigans, and the voice actors from voice actor commentary were ecstatic to about being a part of the production and about the game’s release. I won’t be theory crafting speculating how badly the game was rushed or if at all, regardless I think the end result of a game is still pretty good even if obviously flawed.
When I like a game, I usually like to defend it, like how I liked The LEGO Movie 2 Videogame or Shrek The Third videogame and gave them higher than average ratings, but I decided to critique this game and point out as many flaws as I could where developers could improve going forward. I really care about Rune Factory series, I want to see it continue growing stronger and release games that manage to outshine previous games. I started this series with Rune Factory 2. I really enjoyed that game, even though I didn’t get to advance to the second generation because I was slacking on wood cutting and the school required a sizeable amount of wood. It just managed to be this fun that I didn’t advance the story and I’ve never experienced anything like it. Then I played Rune Factory 3, and it was even better and more fun than Rune Factory 2, with a much faster paced action with memorable characters and setting. I experienced these excellent games through emulation, but then I get an actual 3DS and buy Rune Factory 4, and it somehow managed to be even better than Rune Factory 3, I sank a looooooooooot of time into it, including Special rerelease on Switch, it was that good. But is Rune Factory 5 better than 4? I’m sure many fans would agree that it is, in fact, not better than Rune Factory 4, even if its still a good game, with obvious performance issues among others. In fact some people would call this entry a disappointment. What about me? I think it is, to some extent, better than RF4. It manages to add some quality of life improvements, showing that the devs were still willing to find ways to improve existing mechanics. There are some additions that I like, like catching ability, and, although not a substitute to seasonal fields, farm dragons are still overall a good addition and an evolution of expandable fields of RF4. On the other hand, there are a lot of technical issues and a lot of missteps that I’ve already covered. Was I disappointed? Actually, no. I expected Rune Factory 5 to be as fun, if not more fun that RF4. And, well… I got what I expected. It is fun. Reading this review, you probably wondered, why a 4.5 star rating? You’ve pointed out so many issues, shouldn’t it be 3 or maybe even lower? Yes, Rune Factory 5 is far from a flawless masterpiece, and maybe not as great as Rune Factory 4, in fact it won’t replace Rune Factory 4 in my top 10 ranking, but it still makes a very good honorable mention. Because I still had a lot of fun playing it. I can’t help but enjoy what I like. And I happened to like Rune Factory 5. I still sank a lot of hours into Rune Factory 5, playing it for weeks after its release, and still playing it today. The game is pretty much as engaging as ever, with memorable characters and solid mechanics. I decided to be more critical for this review because I want to see the developers improve, I want to see them make the ultimate Rune Factory game, the one that surpasses anything before, and pointing out mistakes that they could correct makes for a better feedback. The devs wouldn’t learn anything if I just pointed out what works, because I’m sure even they know what works for the series at this point. I think you should critique what you love if you want to make a better successor. I truly care about Rune Factory series, I’ve never felt about that about any other franchise before. I want to see the developers to do better, and I know they can do better. Rune Factory 5 is not the best the devs can offer, but even at it's "not the best", it's still a good effort. I really hope the developers learn the harsh lessons and make the best Rune Factory game there can be.
Aside from all the technical aspects, this game feels like a Rune Factory only on the loosest of terms. The great lore potential left by RF4's ending was not filled in the slightest, only vaguely touched upon during the very underwhelming ending and some later relationship quests - which I couldn't reach because asking characters out is a random chance every day instead of a guarantee once you have enough hearts.
I hated this game, and then I picked it back up and got super hooked. Its awkward and laggy, but still super fun if you can get past that. It's a total trainwreck of a game but certain types of people would definitely love it.
I hope I can give this one another shot someday. The immediate disappointment I felt from the drop in quality compared to 4 just bounced me off so hard that I still have yet to recover.
This is such a downgrade from 4 and it's so disheartening man
If they do make 6 I hope it will be good but for now I'll be putting my faith in Sqaure Enix Rune Factory (Harvestella)
If they do make 6 I hope it will be good but for now I'll be putting my faith in Sqaure Enix Rune Factory (Harvestella)
:( its boring
It's just OK, definitely enjoyed 4 more. And the Switch version is pretty much a scam at this point with the PC version existing. It runs horribly.
a disappointment that was so clunky on switch.
oh no :(
You know, I never actually got far into the game. And I don't think I ever will. There seems to be little point playing it when there are... better experiences in the same genre. The impression I had is that it feels very souless compared to RF4, and actually other games in the series as well. Something so cool about RF is that even the games with simpler writing such as Frontier and RF3 still manage to brim with charisma and character. Now, granted, I'm judging this having played very little of it. But the comforting atmosphere of RF is something felt early on by all of its good titles. This game's art direction has no character, and it's a pretty big downgrade from RF4 for the villagers to have the same conversations everyday. Also, the combat seems to have downgraded from the last 3d game in the series (TOD, which had pretty nice combat).
I must also mention it's disappointing because RF4 is one of my absolute favorite games, if not my number 1. And obviously I was out of myself when this one was announced. Nevertheless I'm VERY glad the series seems to have been reborn, and I genuinely hope it keeps getting better.
You know, I never actually got far into the game. And I don't think I ever will. There seems to be little point playing it when there are... better experiences in the same genre. The impression I had is that it feels very souless compared to RF4, and actually other games in the series as well. Something so cool about RF is that even the games with simpler writing such as Frontier and RF3 still manage to brim with charisma and character. Now, granted, I'm judging this having played very little of it. But the comforting atmosphere of RF is something felt early on by all of its good titles. This game's art direction has no character, and it's a pretty big downgrade from RF4 for the villagers to have the same conversations everyday. Also, the combat seems to have downgraded from the last 3d game in the series (TOD, which had pretty nice combat).
I must also mention it's disappointing because RF4 is one of my absolute favorite games, if not my number 1. And obviously I was out of myself when this one was announced. Nevertheless I'm VERY glad the series seems to have been reborn, and I genuinely hope it keeps getting better.