Frontier has more stuff going for it than the first and second games, notably its really good dungeons, but this game is REALLY slow. The first problem you'll notice is probably the harvesting animation, this legit takes something like 4 seconds, what the fuck? Extend that to an entire line of crops squares, which I think is like 24*3, and that's 5 minutes of straight harvesting, and that's not counting walking between them or maybe I'm wrong and it's even longer. You better have those harvesting monsters, and they don't become efficient instantly

Another time-waster that's tangentially linked to dungeons is that you have to prepare energy restoring items and potions for them. And you can't automate that unlike crops, and it takes an ungodly amount of time to make this stuff, you'll be sitting in front of the mixer making ice creams and you're gonna like it. This and the insane amount of time it takes to raise your forge levels are things that took until RF4 to fix, at least RF3 was like RF1/2 and didn't have the dumb timing minigame

And of course we gotta talk about Runeys lmao. It'd be fine honestly if it worked like it does in any PC management game where you just clicked on one area, you'd select move to another and that was that, but having you go manually physically collect them (which means looking for them in the area too) and moving them to another area, all while you don't have access to the map since this is in a separate location and you have to go 2 stories in a building to see it, all that's a perfect formula for a mechanic no one wants to bother with. People advise cheating it out of the game and yeah, please do that, it's awful

And that's all a big shame because really, the dungeons are definitely good, trekking in there feels great, they did a super good job on the atmosphere and I really like that they're so long and you have to go there a bunch of times to manage to clear them, but they're held back massively by what's around them. Oh and yeah, having a character hidden in one of the dungeons is cool in concept, but the fact that you have to get her to friendship 1 to progress the plot is really fucked, the only clue the game gives you is Raguna going "yeah I promise to visit you :)" and you're somehow supposed to guess this means this a plot wall and you have to bury her in gifts, I was stuck for a stupidly long time because of that

And a reason for that is that unfortunately, characters repeat lines. A LOT. Big problem in the first 3 games, there is not a lot of dialogue at all, characters only have like 5 lines they repeat, and that didn't make me want to go say hi to Iris in her dungeon. This game had a few character events but they require insanely high friendship levels and these raise so slowly (except for Iris thankfully), this and the repeat lines really don't make you want to go talk to them everyday and go through the effort of making gifts

I played this all without cheats, but if you could simultaneously remove Runeys, get friendship and forge levels to raise faster and be able to just put 99 ice creams to restore energy in your inventory whenever so you don't have to bother crafting them, this could honestly be a super great experience. It's pretty frustrating that it's ultimately so held back by these few, really big problems

Also the final boss is awesome