To Rune Factory’s credit, you can either beeline your way through the main story and finish in about 35 hours, or take it at a slower pace alongside the rest of its activities and extend it out much, much longer. But because Rune Factory 5 is so wonderfully open-ended and unconcerned with time constraints, these pacing blips didn’t matter much in the long run. It’s an imperfect way to teach you the basics, as the slow pacing of these quests meant I had often mastered a system well before it was introduced via sidequest, or wasn’t shown a helpful system until much later on because I was stuck on an earlier task. A sizable chunk of these jobs are glorified tutorials, steadily guiding you through Rune Factory 5’s numerous farming, crafting, and combat intricacies and offering rewards for figuring them out. One way to befriend them is through the tasks board outside of SEED headquarters, where townspeople will offer rewards in return for various tasks being done. Even the folks in town you can't marry are interesting enough, and worth taking the time to chat with and befriend. Every romanceable character has numerous story events you can unlock and participate in as your affections grow, and unlike other games with similar features Rune Factory 5 has helpful map icons to ensure you know exactly where to find them once they're available. The roster of 12 bachelors and bachelorettes in Rune Factory 5 is pleasingly varied with great art design and with plenty of variety in personality types, though almost all of the options are on the younger end of adulthood with the only more mature options being the lupine Murakumo and the succubus Ludmila. Just when I thought I'd explored everything there was to see, I'd be sent into another dungeon I didn't know existed, or back into an old dungeon to delve into an entirely new set of caves, always with enough updates to avoid being a reskin of the upper levels I had already moved on from.Īs usual for Rune Factory, you can befriend your neighbors and progress their individual storylines through conversations, cutscenes, and gifts – some of whom you can eventually marry and have a child with. The story itself is surprisingly meaty, kept fresh across numerous excursions into monster-infested wilds by a decent amount of variety in its biomes (including a prehistoric volcano, ice caverns, and a dope ghost town) and enemy types (ranging from cute little sheep-like dudes to heinous teleporting grim reaper guys).
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Their community service quickly takes a cheesy if enjoyable turn into a winding mystery involving powerful creatures, more folks turning up with amnesia, dragons, and plenty more pleasantly extra anime protagonist fluff. As a SEED ranger, the protagonist can tend a massive farm and grow tons of different crops, capture and raise a wide array of wild monsters for resources and combat assistance, run various errands for the villagers, or fight off monsters that threaten the town. Rune Factory 5’s abrupt opening sees a young amnesiac hero dropped via portal just outside the backwater town of Rigbarth, where a community service-oriented organization called SEED takes them in as the newest ranger – basically a scout crossed with a monster cop.
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Unfortunately, it can’t manage to translate other elements like “looking nice” or “running well” in its move from Rune Factory 4's top-down perspective to a 3D world, leaving it in a fun but frequently frustrating spot. Rune Factory 5 has fallen somewhere in the middle, with the series’ first dedicated Switch game largely clinging to the depth that has earned it praise in the past. Last year Story of Seasons made the leap best, if imperfectly, while Harvest Moon’s attempt around the same time was utterly mediocre.
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There’s a disappointing trend going on right now with the classic trio of farm life sims – Harvest Moon, Story of Seasons, and now Rune Factory all having a rough time making the jump from handheld to console.