Rune Factory 5 is a dense delight for fans and a fine entryway for newcomers – Review

gamepur.com:

The primary appeal of life or farming simulators is being a part of a community. The fantasy, at once completely attainable yet curiously out of reach, is the simple caring fantasied about in small-town nostalgia. This requires a kind of easygoing friction. To care about someone else, you have to work with and through them. Their community, and the place where they live, has needs and wants that existed before you came. Those same needs will continue after you leave. At their best, farming games lean into the particularities of place and community.

Unfortunately, more recent successful forays into the genre abandon this simple interconnection. Animal Crossing: New Horizons puts players in charge over every aspect of their island home, and Stardew Valley makes your little slice of farmland into a factory floor. Fortunately, despite adding a great deal of customization, Rune Factory 5 keeps the simple joy of getting to know a community separate from you.

Rune Factory 5 starts more or less exactly the same as every other entry in the series. The player awakes, rescues a town member from imminent danger, and then discovers that they have lost their memory. In gratitude, the town takes them in, gives them a home and an occupation. In Rune Factory 5, the role expands out from a farmer to a SEED ranger. This basically equates to a town good-doer. You’ll help clear the area of mean monsters, run errands for locals, as well as raise money and materials for renovations. Villagers will leave requests on a corkboard for you to tackle as you find the time. This change in exact role shows a shift over the series’ lifetime; farming is “merely” an important part of the game, not the primary attraction.

In some sense,