My personal biggest issues with the game

[Purrz]

Hi all, I am a Rune Factory series veteran, and I am going to share some info/opinions on the game if you haven't played it yet on switch. There are a lot of cons about this game, but some good as well. I think it's important for everyone to know what to expect when buying this game because it is quite a big purchase.

Positives I've seen:

+Like the other games in the series, the characters are unique and likable with varying personalities.

+Character models and interiors look nice.

+Ability to upgrade shops

+Some random QoL changes, ability to dump all lumber/stone in boxes at once with one click. Ability to see which gear you have given villagers.

+A lot of systems have been carried over from Rune Factory 4

+Tandem abilities; once a day, you can try to pull in different villagers to help you with profession related tasks which are beneficial to you. You play a small minigame basically. (eg., tandem blacksmithing gives bonus stat points to items)

+New monster varieties, ability to have 2 people ride certain mounts* (see cons)

+Same sex marriage* (if that applies to you, see cons)

The bad:

-HORRIBLE OPTIMIZATION. Game feels like it's held together with toothpicks. Game struggles to reach 30 fps even in open areas. Festivals are a nightmare because of it. Entering/exiting buildings makes the game feel like it is going to crash. Long loading screens. Hopefully the PC port fixes a lot of these optimization issues.

-Your character never feels like its on solid land. What I mean by this is, your character slides around too much doing any basic task. It makes farming really hard. And if you're moving while putting items away in your inventory, your character starts ice skating across the floor. It is quite comical.

-Ironically, janky combat in a game that was suppose to feel like Tides of Destiny. Most magic abilities are really bad in this game as well. They have such a long delay and cast time. Also really weird hitboxes. A monster can attack me and I will dodge, but if i try to go behind the monster to attack which it's still in an attack animation, I'll still get hit and take damage!!

-Assets used over, and over... and over... and over.... monsters are reskinned with a different color to give the illusion there are more new monster varieties than there actually are. I'm not kidding either, at least 5-6 monster varieties are recolored at least 4 or 5 times throughout the game for different dungeons. And many dungeons themselves are copy and paste versions of themselves. It's so obvious where the developers ran out of funding so the dev team was like "uhhhh ♥♥♥♥ it recolor this, copy and paste this, no one will notice"

-Too many monsters have feint abilities to the point where almost every dungeon has 2 enemy types (common ones, mind you) that can 1 shot you no matter what. Horrible and lazy way to balance difficulty.

-For some reason, you cannot access flower seeds until late game. This decision is very strange to me. This means you cannot really upgrade your chemistry levels until very late game. Finding tree seeds are also really obscure and require a guide to even find.

-Unusual misc. decisions. Like how upgrading your sickle once makes it cover a much larger area than it should. Which sounds nice in theory but if you're trying to cut down plants for seeds you can cut other plants you dont need to. Also, the field is divided horizontally for monster tasks instead of vertically. its so strange and jarring.

-This one is subjective, but I found the story to be really boring. The game also seems to disregard lore from previous rune factory games (not gonna get into spoilers though)

-The way character love stories are handled in this game was really bad. You will get to a point where you are actively avoiding entering certain areas/buildings because there are too many cut scenes displayed on the map. This all goes back to how porting over and adding same sex marriage late in the game development collided with the original coding of the game. Also some documented translation issues have some characters using dialogue that they shouldn't be using.



I will probably end up editing this when I remember more pros/cons but this is the stuff that instantly came to mind. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed this game despite many flaws, but there are a lot of things you have to look past to enjoy this game and I just wanted to be honest. If you are new to the series, you should play Rune Factory 4. It is arguably the most well rounded game in the series. RF5 is the weakest game in the series and should have spent at least another year in development.

[Jao]

Really helpful.

[Boaboa]

I think the stories of all RF games are pretty boring. I've seen people laud RF4 for having a great story, and then going to criticise RF5 for not having one (haven't played it yet so I can't really judge), but damn I thought it was boring, RF3's was more interesting honestly.

[ColorfullOreo]

well as RF fans i happy to get RF5 on PC, even tbh maybe current price indeed expensive, no doubt it is Expensive. i do still buy one, and idk i would regret this or not. hope at least the game is optimized for pc. i dont expect much for battle mechanic from rune factory... i do expect things from the story, and side quest

btw thanks for the list!

[Purrz]

Originally posted by Suzie:

I think the stories of all RF games are pretty boring. I've seen people laud RF4 for having a great story, and then going to criticise RF5 for not having one (haven't played it yet so I can't really judge), but damn I thought it was boring, RF3's was more interesting honestly.

I understand, I mean I personally dont expect these kinds of games to have spectacular stories so Im fairly neutral. And Rune factory 5 does have a story, what bothers me the most is that the story is built from almost nothing. Without getting into too many spoilers, the story that Rune Factory 5 takes completely ignores the existence of the native dragons from previous games. So when certain plot events happen, you think to yourself, "what happened to this dragon?" etc.

[Purrz]

Originally posted by ColorfullOreo:

well as RF fans i happy to get RF5 on PC, even tbh maybe current price indeed expensive, no doubt it is Expensive. i do still buy one, and idk i would regret this or not. hope at least the game is optimized for pc. i dont expect much for battle mechanic from rune factory... i do expect things from the story, and side quest

btw thanks for the list!

Np. I am happy as well

[Tostado]

My problem with this game is that I got a broken product at launch when I bought the Japanese version day one with insane load times, a plethora of bugs, crashing, single digit FPS. After almost of year of patches that left the game in a barely acceptable state, they go and release the PC version, which probably means they expect you to buy this version if you actually want decent performance. I get it, the Switch is an underpowered tablet, but look at games like Breath of the Wild and Monster Hunter Rise, they absolutely put this game to shame graphics and performance-wise. Also despite having more story content the game still ends way faster than RF4, probably because of how easy it is, and it has less post game content too. Unless you're really starved for more RF and don't mind a very clunky and short game, I wouldn't be too excited for this one.

[Be Obscene]

For the cons, you forgot the funny walking animations and uninspired town layout. It's not like they have no experience making a 3d RF game. Look back at Tides of Destiny. That game was gorgeous in comparison.

[Inari]

I found the controls in general very janky. Trying to throw stuff into the harvest box from afar was a pain. They made a QoL thing where you just keep pressing the use key to water the next plant in the field,but it makes your character kinda look like they're sliding around and doesn't feel very good.

[drew8898]

As for magic being "weak" with long animations, that is half true. You can actually dash cancel out of the tail end of your casting animation. There is this earth area of effect magic that you can gatling gun cast by dash canceling and destroy most everything in the game. On the Switch version, I was able to beat the game and the post game dungeon using magic while being over 100 levels below the last post game boss and never upgrading any equipment.

[Purrz]

Originally posted by Inari:

I found the controls in general very janky. Trying to throw stuff into the harvest box from afar was a pain. They made a QoL thing where you just keep pressing the use key to water the next plant in the field,but it makes your character kinda look like they're sliding around and doesn't feel very good.

Cant forget the repeated voice lines over and over again for watering as well LMAO

[Purrz]

Originally posted by drew8898:

As for magic being "weak" with long animations, that is half true. You can actually dash cancel out of the tail end of your casting animation. There is this earth area of effect magic that you can gatling gun cast by dash canceling and destroy most everything in the game. On the Switch version, I was able to beat the game and the post game dungeon using magic while being over 100 levels below the last post game boss and never upgrading any equipment.

Ah, I see. I did not know this. But to be fair I was so turned off by magic early game I barely touched it afterward

[Darkening Demise]

I still prefer Frontier. How a Wii game looks better than a Switch game is beyond me. The devs are clearly not the same. They have no clue how to use the tech. Switch is under powered yes. But the Wii was extremely weak in turn. Plus they use Unity. So that doesn't help.

[Inari]

Originally posted by Darkening Demise:

I still prefer Frontier. How a Wii game looks better than a Switch game is beyond me. The devs are clearly not the same. They have no clue how to use the tech. Switch is under powered yes. But the Wii was extremely weak in turn. Plus they use Unity. So that doesn't help.

Yeahhhh they kinda butchered it art-wise somehow.. and it doesn't even run well on the Switch

[funewchie]

Originally posted by Darkening Demise:

I still prefer Frontier. How a Wii game looks better than a Switch game is beyond me. The devs are clearly not the same. They have no clue how to use the tech. Switch is under powered yes. But the Wii was extremely weak in turn. Plus they use Unity. So that doesn't help.

As I understand it, Switch is not very compatible with Unity. And so struggles to run it.

It's not a question of hardware and power, it's a matter of compatibility.

[Inari]

Originally posted by funewchie:

Originally posted by Darkening Demise:

I still prefer Frontier. How a Wii game looks better than a Switch game is beyond me. The devs are clearly not the same. They have no clue how to use the tech. Switch is under powered yes. But the Wii was extremely weak in turn. Plus they use Unity. So that doesn't help.

As I understand it, Switch is not very compatible with Unity. And so struggles to run it.

It's not a question of hardware and power, it's a matter of compatibility.

There exist Unity games on Switch that run well though. Gotta optimise for it. Which should be expected if you're going to release on console. That's the whole shtick for consoles after all. "One system, so you don't need to support lots of different hardware", aka they totally knew how well it runs and still released it in that state.