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

digitaltrends.com:

Rune Factory 5 reeled me in, much like the bunches of fish I sold for money in the game. Xseed Games’ latest iteration of the series offers a surprising amount of breadth in its farming, crafting, and combat systems — enough that it’s difficult to run out of stuff to do. That’s if players can stomach stumbling through the game to learn the basics without tutorials and ignore frame drops.

Rune Factory 5 is the latest game in the Rune Factory series, which originated as a fantasy Harvest Moon spinoff. Its previous release was Rune Factory 4 Special, a Nintendo Switch remaster of the original Rune Factory 4 for the Nintendo 3DS. Fans have been waiting for ages for a new generation, long enough that this should be a big deal for those who enjoyed previous titles.

Rune Factory 5 continued to impress me with its endless entertainment, which I noted in my preview. However, the flaws didn’t really improve. Nonetheless, its progression system and characters kept me invested enough to keep playing.

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