Rune Factory 5 uses Skyrim’s best feature

polygon.com:

Rune Factory5 is quaint, and a little unpolished, but I always feel like I’m improving.

Moments after pressing start in developer Hakama Inc.’s upcoming release, I picked my character and woke up in a forest with amnesia. After saving a girl from “monsters” (they were sheep), I passed out again, only to find myself waking up in the SEED headquarters. And that’s how I was abducted into this JRPG’s neighborhood watch.

At SEED, the goal is to help out around the small town of Rigbarth, picking up requests off the job board and becoming closer with the neighbors — most of them are humanoid, but some are hybrid animal-people. Being a small farming town, the issues are simple at first, like helping an old woman find some glasses that aren’t actually lost. But that’s OK, because Rune Factory 5 is all about being a helpful member of a small community, like other cutesy farm games. However, Rune Factory 5 also leans heavily into dungeons, combat, and an intriguing mystery that distances itself from more farming-centric games like Stardew Valley.

After finishing the game’s lengthy tutorial, I begin the morning by watering the crops behind my house before going off on a series of adventures around town. In the first two hours of the game — all I was allowed to play for this preview — those adventures mostly consisted of ingratiating myself with the community. Sometimes neighbors give me a new tool (an axe to cut the stumps out of my garden, for one) but more often than not it was some new seeds or a chest to store my gear.

Things started to get more interesting toward the end of my play session, when the lovely innkeeper (whom I hope to make my wolf-man anime husband, what with Rune Factory 5 being the first game in the series to