Rune Factory 5 review: A farmer’s life for me

Dialogues are genuinely entertaining and funny, though they aren’t as varied as previous titles.

Like all Rune Factory titles, this one starts with an amnesiac protagonist who wakes up on the outskirts of Rigbarth. The protagonist, the male Ares or female Alice, wakes up to save Hina, a little girl who has wandered into a dangerous area outside of town. She leads the hero over to Rigbarth, where the villagers inspect the protagonist before recruiting them as an agent for SEED, the local task force. Your job then becomes to farm crops, tame monsters, fulfill requests from townspeople, capture wanted criminals, and so on.

There’s plenty to juggle, including completing the main plot, raising skills, and bonding with your favorite townspeople.

Players can focus on a number of aspects of the game, depending on what kind of player they are. One can start dominating their fields with seeds right away or build bunches of barns to house as many monsters as possible. Meanwhile, others can cash in on pricey catches from fishing ventures.

There’s plenty to juggle, including completing the main plot, raising skills, and bonding with your favorite townspeople. It never felt like I was stagnating, and there’s near-constant progression thanks to the skill bars for almost everything, including cooking and sleeping.

Just a girl and her Buffamoo.

Farming is one of the first skills that a townsperson will walk players through. It’s simple at first, but once crops hit level four, players need to enrich the soil to grow higher-level crops. As players progress through the game, they learn other skills like how to fish and tame monsters. Each skill has layers that make them more advantageous and build on one another. For example, taming monsters leads to recruiting them, allowing players to collect important drops and in turn raise a monster’s friendship level to acquire higher-level drops. Think better-quality eggs from your chicken friends, depending on how much they like you.

Another major element of the game is romance, which eventually leads to marriage, including same-sex unions, and children. Players can choose between six bachelors and six bachelorettes. Marriage candidates, and townspeople in general, differ greatly in terms of personality, so each one feels unique and caters to different tastes. Unfortunately, there’s not much variation in terms of skin color or body type for the candidates, so it might not cater to players looking for a more diverse dating sim experience.

Each skill has layers that make them more advantageous and build on one another.

It’s easy enough to raise friendship levels (and romance levels) through daily conversation, gift-giving, and exploring together with your ideal candidate. I raised Martin to heart level seven by the first week of summer, thanks to a steady stream of gifts and adventuring invites.

A new mechanic lets characters in your party charge up to an “ult,” which will unleash a powerful attack on the nearest target.

Rune Factory 5 has serveral difficulty levels, which can be cranked up to make a playthrough more challenging, but even then, it shouldn’t be difficult to beat a boss head-on without worrying about the quality of equipment or gear. I didn’t experiment much with strengthening weapons or equipment, though the game gives players that option. That easy difficulty is a shame considering the game allows up to four people or animals in a party. You probably won’t need the help, though you should bring them anyway to raise friendship levels.

You will befriend many dragons who happen to have giant fields on their backs — like this one.

In my preview, I noted how the game didn’t clearly explain what I had to do to build a monster barn. After playing this game for 50 hours, I’ve found that the ambiguous instructions continue even further into the game. Sure, it tells you how to farm and how to learn new recipes with bread. However, it doesn’t clearly explain many other basics like where to find the fertilizer bin or the fact that there’s a delivery port inside your room, but your wardrobe blocks it, so you need to move it to have any chance of having items conveniently delivered to your house. There are Redditors already asking these questions while playing the Japanese version.

I’ve found that the ambiguous instructions continue even further into the game.

The problem should be less pronounced for those already familiar with the series just based on features that carry over from past titles. I often looked up Rune Factory 4 guides to make educated guesses about how to do tasks, which I shouldn’t need to do, but it helped me nonetheless.

Captain Livia might look like a child, but she’s also your boss.