There’s a disappointing trend going on right now with the classic trio of farm life sims – Harvest Moon, Story of Seasons, and now Rune Factory all having a rough time making the jump from handheld to console. Last year Story of Seasons made the leap best, if imperfectly, while Harvest Moon’s attempt around the same time was utterly mediocre. Rune Factory 5 has fallen somewhere in the middle, with the series’ first dedicated Switch game largely clinging to the depth that has earned it praise in the past. Unfortunately, it can’t manage to translate other elements like “looking nice” or “running well” in its move from Rune Factory 4‘s top-down perspective to a 3D world, leaving it in a fun but frequently frustrating spot.
Rune Factory 5’s abrupt opening sees a young amnesiac hero dropped via portal just outside the backwater town of Rigbarth, where a community service-oriented organization called SEED takes them in as the newest ranger – basically a scout crossed with a monster cop. As a SEED ranger, the protagonist can tend a massive farm and grow tons of different crops, capture and raise a wide array of wild monsters for resources and combat assistance, run various errands for the villagers, or fight off monsters that threaten the town. Their community service quickly takes a cheesy if enjoyable turn into a winding mystery involving powerful creatures, more folks turning up with amnesia, dragons, and plenty more pleasantly extra anime protagonist fluff.
The story itself is surprisingly meaty, kept fresh across numerous excursions into monster-infested wilds by a decent amount of variety in its biomes (including a prehistoric volcano, ice caverns, and a dope ghost town) and enemy types (ranging from cute little sheep-like dudes to heinous teleporting grim reaper guys). Just when I thought I’d explored everything there was to see, I’d be sent into another dungeon I didn’t know existed, or back into an old dungeon to delve into an entirely new set of caves, always with enough updates to avoid being a reskin of the upper levels I had already moved on from.
As usual for Rune Factory, you can befriend your neighbors and progress their individual storylines through conversations, cutscenes, and gifts – some of whom you can eventually marry and have a child with. The roster of 12 bachelors and bachelorettes in Rune Factory 5 is pleasingly varied with great art design and with plenty of variety in personality types, though almost all of the options are on the younger end of adulthood with the only more mature options being the lupine Murakumo and the succubus Ludmila. Every romanceable character has numerous story events you can unlock and participate in as your affections grow, and unlike other games with similar features Rune Factory 5 has helpful map icons to ensure you know exactly where to find them once they’re available. Even the folks in town you can’t marry are interesting enough, and worth taking the time to chat with and befriend.
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One way to befriend them is through the tasks board outside of SEED headquarters, where townspeople will offer rewards in return for various tasks being done. A sizable chunk of these jobs are glorified tutorials, steadily guiding you through Rune Factory 5’s numerous farming, crafting, and combat intricacies and offering rewards for figuring them out. It’s an imperfect way to teach you the basics, as the slow pacing of these quests meant I had often mastered a system well before it was introduced via sidequest, or wasn’t shown a helpful system until much later on because I was stuck on an earlier task. But because Rune Factory 5 is so wonderfully open-ended and unconcerned with time constraints, these pacing blips didn’t matter much in the long run.
To Rune Factory’s credit, you can either beeline your way through the main story and finish in about 35 hours, or take it at a slower pace alongside the rest of its activities and extend it out much, much longer. That said, one odd story quirk pushed me more toward the former approach where I would have preferred the latter. An event about one-third of the way into the story takes away a key power from the main character, one tied to everything from monster catching to raising one’s rank within the SEED organization to collecting certain useful items. You don’t get this power back until you’ve completed about 5-10 more hours of dungeons and story events, though that time stretches even longer if you’re busy farming, crafting, or hanging out with your neighbors instead of dashing your way through mainline quests. It’s a weird choice that forced me to play Rune Factory 5 in a much more story-focused way than I would have otherwise, just so I could get back to filling all my empty barns with Woolys again.
That story speedrun I went through was primarily disappointing because Rune Factory 5’s farming, crafting, and relationship systems are so broad that I always had more I wanted to do outside of the main plot. As usual for Rune Factory, time in-game progresses through six-day weeks, four per season, with built-in time of day, weather, and seasons impacting how your crops grow, what your neighbors are doing, what events can occur, and more. Central to Rune Factory 5 is the farm, which you can clear of debris, till, sow, water, and harvest at your leisure. Crops grow fast and are not confined to seasons, so you can grow whatever, whenever, and will unlock new crops over time through certain sidequests. But while it’s easy to grow crops at all, there’s a surprising amount of depth to growing crops well. Factors like seasons, how much you’re using the same patch of soil, how you’re harvesting seeds, and so much more impact your crop yield and quality. Having the flexibility to ignore it all if you want or spend hours trying to get the most perfect green peppers you can grow makes the whole system spring with life.
Closely tied to farming is Rune Factory 5’s robust crafting system. In fact, crafting is at the heart of everything in Rune Factory 5 – it leads to stronger weapons and armor for dungeon crawls, better farming tools, higher quality meals cooked from farmed crops that you can sell or give to neighbors, and so much more. Rune Factory 5 does overdo it a little in the sheer chaos of how many unique crafting tables you need sitting around to make everything you want, and learning new recipes is unfortunately dependent on some level of luck, as you learn a few random recipes each time you consume a “recipe bread” item for a given trade. But as with farming, you’re free to engage with crafting minimally if you just want to get the things you need for the specific trade you’re interested in – you can acquire almost anything you would craft, admittedly with some more luck, by simply running around and hitting enemies for long enough, or as gifts from your neighbors. Or, you can dive in headfirst and try to master every single recipe.
One small detail that unexpectedly stands out is the writing in Rune Factory 5’s item descriptions. Almost every item has a funny blurb explaining what it is and does, and almost all of these are not only helpful, but also entertaining – things like the Safety Lance’s punny reference to the song “Safety Dance” in its description, or the blunt explanation that “Spider’s Thread” apparently “Comes from a spider’s butt.” These clever lines were a little touch that frequently made me chuckle, and are especially impressive given the sheer volume of items I was able to find and craft.
Alongside farming and crafting, the other central pillar of Rune Factory 5 is its combat, which has a surprisingly wide array of weapon options (from short swords to fists to magic staves), spells, and physical weapon skills to customize your loadout with. Like farming, Rune Factory 5’s combat is something you can engage with a little or a lot depending on your interests – you can focus heavily on weapon types and upgrades via crafting, stats, and skills to truly hone your technique, or you can grind and button mash your way through everything on a lower difficulty and no one will blink at you for it. It’s a great system on paper, but both combat and farming can be massively frustrating due to just how bad Rune Factory 5 feels to play.
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Simply put, Rune Factory 5 runs terribly on Switch. The controls are slippery and imprecise, an issue exacerbated further when playing docked, where significant input lag causes actions to take longer than you’d expect. That often made me overshoot the plot of ground I was trying to water, the spot I wanted to place a piece of furniture, or the monster I was trying to whack with my sword. That technical jankiness is especially frustrating during combat, with input lag making it challenging to dodge enemy attacks, and the slippery controls making movement awkward and chaotic. Because Rune Factory 5 gives you so much freedom and so many options to grind against enemies and get better weapons, I was fortunately never stuck in a situation where bad controls made a fight impossible – even on hard mode. But they did make what could have been one of the main draws of Rune Factory significantly less fun. (Rune Factory 5 is also alarmingly sensitive to stick drift, something I experienced surprisingly frequently even when using the generally more resilient Pro Controller.)
These issues are not limited to movement either, as Rune Factory 5 has aesthetic problems too. While not the first 3D Rune Factory game, the jump from top-down to third-person was a rocky one here, leaving Rune Factory 5 lacking in much of the charm and detail that the worlds of its 2D predecessors were praised for, including Rune Factory 4 Special on Switch. The character design remains stellar, especially their dialogue portraits and the animated introductions for bachelors and bachelorettes – but the world itself is full of flat textures and long stretches of bland, empty space. The town of Rigbarth and its surrounding countryside feel big and empty for no reason, with objects suddenly popping in regularly and frequent framerate issues whenever there are a few too many things on screen at once. And sure, when I play a sim like Rune Factory I can still enjoy it without stellar technical prowess or cutting edge graphics. But with a ten year gap between games, I was hoping Rune Factory 5 would try to be something a little more impressive than “Rune Factory 4, but clunkier.”