Game Review: Rune Factory 5

 

As a lifelong fan of the Rune Factory franchise, it fills me with great sadness to abandon Rune Factory 5 nearly 60% into it's overall content.  I wanted to go into this game and rekindle my love for this niche series after banking so many hours into the previous titles. Before Stardew Valley came along I often considered Rune Factory 3 my favourite farm/life-sim game. The main charm of Rune Factory is how it blends the calm and relaxing concept of managing your own farm and defining relationships with characters on top of a traditional RPG combat system in which you fight monsters. It was a unique premise in that genre until Stardew Valley came along and redefined it. 

Developed by Hakama and published by XSEED and Marvellous, Rune Factory 5 served as the next big leap for the franchise. After narrowly avoiding termination at the hands of company bankruptcy, it felt like fate was giving the series one more shot at cementing a legacy amongst it's core audience. In an effort to reflect this new definition, the entry was developed and released on the Nintendo Switch and utilised a fully 3D engine as apposed to the top-down/semi-isometric style the traditional titles are so well known for. This was the next big leap for the series, so it's fair to ask how did it land?  

Not well in my opinion, not well at all. 

Let's break it down in terms of narrative and gameplay. 

The narrative element of Rune Factory has also been one of it's more notable aspects. Part of why I love Rune Factory so much is it doesn't shy away from trying to tell an engaging plot alongside your day to day farming duties. The quality of each game's story ranges quite a bit though. I consider Rune Factory 3's narrative to be the best in the series while I the original Rune Factory narrative feels the weakest. In comparison to it's predecessors, Rune Factory 5's storyline isn't terrible, but there's not enough here to feel compelling enough to follow. I appreciate this is coming from someone who didn't beat the game, but I made a solid attempt to progress through the game's narrative and it just wasn't doing anything for me. It's a very lukewarm attempt at weaving a mystery plot  You are a farmer/warrior with no recollection of your past, you get given a farm and are recruited into a ranger program to help defend the region and solve a mystery before it spirals out of control. It has a glimmer of originality in some aspects but it's weighed down by a incredibly slow pace and reliance on too many familiar tropes we've seen time and time again in this series.

The main appeal of the writing which is often always guaranteed to be good is the character's themselves. While I do admit the characters all have a unique presence and design behind them, it's not a complete case here that the writing for them is all good. I think this is where Stardew Valley has superseded games like Harvest Moon and Rune Factory as it doesn't shy away from tackling more complex and mature characteristics. In Rune Factory's case, this will always be a game geared towards a younger and more sensitive audience so in result the characters feel artificial and have little complexity to them. A lot of the scenes with them in which you help them develop, consists of 'Saturday morning cartoon' tropes of friendship and learning to trust and believe in yourself. I'm not saying there isn't any merit to this type of writing, but I think on reflection my appreciation for more mature writing has grown since I last played this series and it shows in my resistance with these characters. 

Where the game truly failed in my eyes is the gameplay. I can't even excuse the game for being the first 3D title in the series because Rune Factory Frontier and Tides of Destiny came out prior. There's no shying away from the fact this game just doesn't feel all that fun to play. The farming  and upgrading mechanics initially seem simple, but there's a serious amount of knowledge that the game just expects you to work out for yourself and when the game is this layered in text and confusing menu systems, how can you hope for any player to find enjoyment from it? It's needlessly complicated and restrictive in it'a overall design and that can be applied to nearly every element of the game's core offerings. Combat while serviceable just has nothing unique or compelling to make it stand out from the competition. It's a derivative and generic offering which you will get bored of so easily.

The worst aspect of this game for me though is just how it looks and feels. It makes me laugh that everyone laid into Pokemon Legends Arceus for looking like hot garbage when you take a look at this game that will look like a masterpiece in comparison. Like, how can this game look worse than Frontiers or Tides of Destiny when it's come out on far superior hardware!? It's not just the way it looks that's difficult to process, but it's also in the way it runs and plays. This game is just so poorly optimised that it's not even funny. It came out a year prior in Japan and you're telling me in that year's worth of time to prepare the game for a western release, there was no opportunity to make the game run at even a serviceable level? There's so many frame rate skips and constant loading times between zones that is's honestly shameful that Nintendo allowed the game to be released in this state. 

I think a part of growing up is recognising when a series just isn't working for your tastes anymore. I appreciate that there are fans out there who will enjoy this entry in the series just like any other, but for me; this game has ended my commitment to the Rune Factory series. I am far older and far wiser to appreciate how limited my time is with my games and I don't intend to give it to a game so undeserving of it. If you want a solid and fun experience in the Rune Factory series, go back and play Frontiers, 3 or 4; skip Rune Factory 5 and save yourself the tedium.