Games: Rune Factory 5

I’ve reviewed Rune Factory 3 and Rune Factory 4 previously on this blog; they’re among my favourite games. So when I heard there would finally be a Rune Factory 5, I was excited. I kept checking the release date and a couple of months ago, finally got the game for myself. (It’s been out for a while now. I was just slack about posting this.)

While RF5 wasn’t terrible, it’s the first Rune Factory game where I ran out of steam and wasn’t motivated to finish. I unlocked the last bachelorette of the game and realised I was too bored to keep going.

Now, this game has a lot of similarities to its predecessors. Many gameplay elements are familiar – you keep a farm, catch monsters, cook, craft gear, befriend townspeople, and go through the motions of a story designed to get you fighting, levelling up and improving your character’s stats. On paper, this game should have been every bit as fun as RF3 and 4.

However, there are three changes they’ve made for the worse: the main reasons the game couldn’t keep my interest.

Change 1: Perspective (and time)

In RF5, they’ve changed from a top-down view to a 3D one and made the world bigger to move around. It’s a shame that this has become more of a trend in games in general, but it’s particularly unfortunate for a game like this which relies on repeating simple actions over and over. It gets in the way of the goals of the game.

The cons of this change include:

• It’s harder to manoeuvre your character precisely or to see the world around you clearly. I kept walking into things, failing to get into doorways, failing to place objects in the exact place/orientation I wanted them, failing to locate monsters who were right by me (because I needed to turn the whole camera around to be behind me to even see them), failing to see what was ahead because a character walking behind me was filling the screen, etc. Even a very small thing, like entering someone’s building, can be a time waster as, if you approach it from the wrong angle, you have to walk all around the building/fence until you get to the door. This seems small, but there are a lot of examples that add up. Really, it was better when you could simply move in straight lines with a top-down view.

• The world is physically larger than in the earlier games, but with more empty space. This is a big problem in a game like this, which has you visit the same locations repeatedly. You’re encouraged to visit and chat to other villagers every day. Doing so takes a lot longer, but most of that time is spent physically moving your character from place to place – not doing anything fun. Because the town is so big, you are far less likely to just walk past villagers by chance. (In the earlier RF games, any brief wander around town will take you past half the NPCs). You have to go chase them all down one by one. Adding to the time wasting is that the game has to pause and load every time you enter or exit a building, enter/leave a dungeon, or use the warp feature.

• To compensate for the larger world, they’ve edited the in-game clock and made each day take longer in real time so that you have enough time to do everything you need to. This again kind of pads out the gameplay but not in a rewarding way. If it’s going to take me so much time to visit all the townspeople and chat to them each day, then I will just react by not talking to most of them (plus their dialogue is usually not worth the effort; see my next point). If the player limits their time-consuming activities but has a longer clock, the result is that they’re either killing time or going to bed at 2pm. There were frequent occasions where I had to complete an event in the evening but had nothing I wanted to do until that time, so I just left the Switch on for 10 minutes idling as the clock ticked on. Mostly I wanted to get to each new day more quickly so I could progress in the relationships I was trying to pursue, but I felt like it was taking me ages to get there. I think the time factor is a big reason I got bored eventually. I felt like I wasn’t achieving as much in my time overall.

Change 2: Characters and dialogue

The writing in Rune Factory 3 and 4 is quite sharp. Characters are funny. A lot of them have endearing quirks and are very distinctive. Your protagonist character is frequently responding to people either with snarkiness or alarmed bewilderment.

In this game, that’s not the case, unfortunately. Starting out, I wanted to get a feel for all the townsfolk, so I went and chatted to them all for the first few days of gameplay.

Their comments could be summed up as:

• The weather’s a bit cloudy.
• Are you working hard? Keep at it.
• Come by my shop any time!

Like, that was nearly all of them. Doesn’t make you rush to keep conversations going. The characters were not distinguishing themselves, and the protagonist least of all.

The dialogue is less snappy – it feels like there are often more lines of dialogue but ones that don’t further their characters; they just take up space. It’s tiresome that when you talk to a character, they always begin with a repetitive comment about the weather before they say something unique.

A few characters do have some original quality, like Heinz with his dreadful dad jokes, Palmo with his desire to do strange and terrible things to the world of architecture, and Ludmila… yeah. Ludmila. A few of the bachelors and bachelorettes who come later in the game are a bit more interesting than the default characters But that still leaves a lot of bland characters. Not many of the characters have a unique schtick like in previous games.

Like, compare similar character types. For example, Cecil from RF5 and Vishnal from RF4 are both focused on becoming great at the job they are apprenticing into, but aren’t all that great at it yet. But Vishnal has a bunch of quirks – his fiery eyes of Burning Passion, constant mistakes, determined ‘I’ll do it!!’s, overall awkwardness – which make him funny and endearing, while Cecil is bland.

Or compare Scarlett from this game with Forte from RF4. Both are female soldiers (of a sort) protecting their little town; both are a little over-serious but can be counted on. But Forte has various foibles – like trying to put forward a strong and stoic image while having a secret girly side, being easily flustered, having a little brother often embarrassing her. Scarlett doesn’t have any.

Being less goofy – not having distinctive quirks – could be fine if the characters were developed more deeply and had more substance, but they don’t. If the game improves in this regard, it went on way too long without improving, so I didn’t get the chance to see it.

Apart from a few scenes with Scarlett, and arguably Ryker, there are also no characters that you have to win over. Everyone is just a nice person. In RF4, you had Dylas (surly and awkward), Doug (openly antagonistic for part of the game), Leon (the condescending ass), Dolce (shy and unwilling to open up) – thus making it more satisfying when you did eventually win them over. In this game, pretty well everyone just likes you and is friendly right off.

Okay, I’ll give a few specific examples of where the dialogue and story-telling fell flat.

1. Simone is kind of depicted as this game’s wacky inventor – a doctor who likes to test out all kinds of experimental medicines on herself. But the game doesn’t lean into it enough, because she’s also depicted as a voice-of-reason, sensible-adult leader. So the ‘wackiness’ feels half-baked and unconvincing. There was one conversation where a character brought up Simone’s weird habit – as if going for humour – and then another character quickly remarked, ‘Oh, but she’s a really good and caring doctor’ – thus killing the humour dead. Instead, it would be funnier not to defend her but to build on it. Have the other characters add their own alarming anecdotes – be taken aback – decide that they might just stay home and self-medicate next time rather than ever going to the clinic again…
2. Ryker is struggling to get inspiration for his blueprint. Your brilliant solution is to, in effect, jump out and shout ‘BOO!’ to surprise him out of his doldrums. -_- (This is the best idea you can come up with, because you and all the other townspeople are morons.) You repeatedly try this with various attempts and people until – surprise! – it works perfectly and Ryker is grateful for your efforts. I mean, if this is the only idea you have, at least it could backfire properly. Like, at the very least, jump out and scare him just at the moment he has come up with a great idea, only to find that your attack has scared the idea out of his mind and he gets mad at you.
3. A mystery person requests that you meet them somewhere at midnight. Cecil wants to go along but gets told by Terry that midnight is way past his bedtime. Cecil replies: “When you’re right, you’re right. I can barely keep my eyes open after sundown, let alone stay up all night.” Why have him immediately agree and back down? No conflict. Sure, Cecil is an amiable character, but he should still have feelings. So what would be funnier than that? How about… Cecil gets huffy, protests that he can too stay up late if it’s in the name of fulfilling His Dream of Being a Great Detective – and then when you go to the rendez-vous point that night, you step over his sleeping body to talk to the mystery person?

Okay, I’m not a writer, but the point is that in all of these examples, any tiny hints of potential conflict are stamped out too quickly. (‘Simone is crazy’ – ‘Oh no, she’s not’, ‘This idea for helping Ryker is really stupid – oh wait, it worked perfectly’, ‘Cecil, you can’t help’ – ‘You’re right, I can’t.’) It’s funnier when characters try and fail, or talk back, or react negatively, or show a bit of spice. The people of Rigbarth are too agreeable and that’s why they’re not very interesting.

Change 3: The difficulty level

I found that with Rune Factory 4, the default gameplay itself offered enough challenge that it served as motivation. I’d attempt a boss too early, realise I couldn’t beat it yet, and then work on improving. This fuelled me to attempt lots of the game mechanics (farming to make money to buy new equipment, exploring to get new items to craft with, catching new monster companions to help me, etc).

In this game, your character has a lot more capacity from the beginning. On day 2 or 3 of my adventure, I went into the woods for the first time, found the first boss immediately, and easily killed it. I’d done no fighting until that moment. There was no need to level up or build my fighting skill before taking on a boss. I returned to the woods the next day and noticed that the monsters attacking me were dealing no damage to me. I was already too strong.

I also noticed that the first few days, I never ran low on RP (energy for completing daily tasks). The earlier games maybe erred too much in the other direction – at the beginning, you’d run out of RP after just a tiny bit of farming – but they also gave you gratifying, regular levelling up which meant that you saw yourself improve in no time.

What this meant was you’d kind of lose the sense of progression – that dopamine hit and quick, satisfying ‘I’m getting stronger!’ buzz of the early game gets lost. Since this game series essentially relies on exactly that – grinding, levelling up and improving in different areas is 100% the focus – it’s better not to meddle with that. If I don’t perceive any value in levelling up, why would I care when my character does?

Some of this gets better as the game goes on – there are actions that do significantly deplete your RP, for instance – but still, I never lost to any boss, whereas in Rune Factory 4, I had to re-attempt several boss battles after getting myself stronger.

At one point, I gained access to a new area; a sign at the entrance recommended I be at least L35 to attempt the area. At that point though, I was L59, and I’d reached this level by completing just the required gameplay and a few optional jaunts into dungeons to get items. It’s not great to have effortlessly become so much stronger than the game requires. Again, it means that a big source of motivation in the game is lost. If you don’t need to do anything like level up, craft fab gear, etc, then it feels pointless to put effort into it.

Okay, so those were the three changes I didn’t really like. To avoid being only negative – it’s not like this was a terrible game – I’ll finish with a) a change with pros and cons, and b) a few positives.

A change with pros and cons – the relationships

In Rune Factory 4, you could only romance members of the opposite sex, so if you chose the male protagonist, you could date the girls of the town, and if you chose the female protagonist, you could date the dudes.

It meant that you’d have to, essentially, play through the whole game twice, once as a guy and once as a girl, if you really wanted to see each character’s extra scenes, dialogue, etc when taking them on dates. A lot of people were unhappy that you couldn’t have same-sex relationships. So in Rune Factory 5, they’ve ‘solved’ that problem. Unfortunately, the way they’ve solved it is now every character in the town is bi. If you befriend any character, they’ll soon start making eyes at you. This has pros and cons.

The good thing is that those who want to have same-sex relationships in the game can. And you get the chance to see romance story events of any character, without having to play two whole separate games. Romance events are generally linked to character development, so it’s nice to be able to see the stories of whomever you want.

On the negative side, even if you don’t want to date the character (and you don’t have to), there’s no ability to have platonic relationships with any single character in the town even if you want to. You can’t easily befriend characters without triggering romance events, because it’s easy to trigger them without meaning to just by moving into a space near the relevant character. There was not one female character I wanted to date in this game (bar Ludmila, who joined the town so late that I didn’t get the chance), so the game map became a minefield of romance events to avoid.

The main issue here really is that once you trigger a romance event – and some of them are pretty thin fare – it may take you several in-game days before you’re able to complete it and free yourself up to try another villager’s – and that in a game that already feels more drawn out because of its new clock/day length. So making progress with the characters you actually like can take a while.

Good points

It goes without saying, a lot of the gripes I’ve listed are subjective; lots of players have really gotten into this game, loved the characters, had no issue with the gameplay, etc.

And to be fair, this game does have a lot of the fun gameplay features of the earlier Rune Factory games. But is there anything it does better?

Well, there are a few quality-of-life improvements that make things easier. For example, if you are in the middle of an event (or going to trigger one), the map will show you where to go to make the next event happen. There’s not a lot of ‘dead time’ when no event is in progress. You can warp to different places in the world – even if you’re inside – and that’s handy.

On the whole, though, if I was going to recommend a Rune Factory game, this one wouldn’t be it.