rating this 3.5/5 feels kind of awful, because i had a lot of fun with this game, and i'm definitely going to keep playing it even with the main story being over. it has so many charm points and as always the core gameplay of rune factory is super satisfying, but there were also a lot of things i didn't like about rf5 or things that i thought could be done better.

to get it out of the way: the optimization is so so so bad. even as someone who usually doesn't mind load times, i thought it was too much. there was a loading screen during the ending cutscene that took so long that i thought the game had crashed. it's laggy and slow and stuttery, especially on festival days when confetti is raining. sometimes it takes a weirdly long time for anything to load when you exit your 'house' to the point where you walk up to your field and have to actually wait for it to load in before you can start farming. these should seriously not be issues. alongside that, the game crashes way more often than i've ever experienced with any other switch game.

as for other complaints:

the story was sweet but felt bare bones and hardly fleshed out, though the pacing was fine. it had some strong moments and i wouldn't say it was bad at all, but there was no 'pull' there for me or any actual emotional investment overall.

the characters are all likeable, but no one really stands out. while i don’t want to compare the two much, compared to rune factory 4 i didn't feel nearly as attached to any of the characters, especially ones you can have a romance with, and i didn't feel any kind of love towards them. i enjoyed them as characters and i think the main character has really nice organic relationships with everyone, but in a similar way to the story, there was no actual hook, there was nothing that would inspire especially strong feelings.

additionally, while i did like the designs for the characters, there was a strange disconnect between the portraits and the 3d models. i understand that the sprites are done in the typical rune factory artstyle, but some characters i felt looked surprisingly different, or that i would be able to greatly prefer the look of someones 3d model over their sprite or vice versa, which felt strange.

while i touched on the story pacing, i think the pacing of the actual game itself was pretty weird. for example some recipes you would get for crafting would have much higher stats than other recipes of a higher level that you get later on, which makes no sense. you can get strangely advanced requests early such as having level 5 friendship with everyone, which for some reason includes the rf4 npcs and i think even npcs you haven’t gotten yet? i'm not sure if this is true of every request, but for at least some, it doesn't track the objective if you haven't picked the request up yet, so you can end up having to redo something you've already done without realizing there would be a quest about it. it seems like it can't track multiple objectives at once, such as a request of x amount of three different vegetables, so you won't know how many of which vegetable you're missing. the repeatable requests are the exact same 3 quests cycled through, which i thought would expand after a certain period in the story which put emphasis on the nature of those requests, but i guess was just unrelated to the actual gameplay at all. the rewards for these requests are also the same few items, just an infinite amount of potions and roundoffs.

the pacing of combat is typical to a rune factory game so i won't criticize it for that even though i'm not a fan of several aspects, but there were other parts of the combat i didn't like. there should straight up not be insta-kill enemies in a story required dungeon, even if you can make food/upgrade weapons to ward against it. i don't know who thought putting a cinematic intro to every boss you can repeatedly fight against was a good idea, you can skip them but it's baffling that it even plays after your first story-based encounter. the bosses going immune sometimes is fine, but the immunity period is too long and feels obnoxious. the amount of time that stuns take to wear off is straight up the worst thing about the combat, it needs to be cut down to at least a third of the time it takes, and i mean that for the enemies as well as the player. it's such a ridiculously long time.

moving on from that, i have some smaller complaints like: npc dialogue expanding as you gain hearts with them is good, but the pool feels too small to start off with- the dialogue immediately repeating a lot does not feel like a good start to the game. even if you go to shops during their opening hours sometimes the characters just aren't there, so you can't do anything. the farm dragons was a really, really weird choice which feels completely divorced from anything that's happening in the game and i don't even understand the point of them since they don't mimic seasons (why are there no season specific fields...). the 'farm camera' being on by default nearly made me stop playing until i realized it was something you can toggle off, it's awful. i didn't like the design of the town itself, it felt too big for your default run speed, while also feeling very barren because of its size, and the shops and services section of the town is organized really strangely to me- you have three shops grouped together in a row and then all the other buildings are thrown around wherever, it doesn’t feel right. the flower shop being locked behind a character that only comes to your town late into the game (i think the 7th or 8th dungeon?) is stupid, sorry to say that so plainly, but i don’t understand how that was an intentional choice they made. the placement of furniture is frustrating and clunky and you can never get things to line up well because all the furniture is like allergic to even the idea of being placed somewhat close together. it would be more convenient if you had a choice in activating the side quests you can see on your map, if you have several you can do at once and want to do one about a specific character, you can get thrown into another characters event on the way there because it immediately triggers as soon as you’re near it. dialogue lines repeat to much- what the shopkeep does when you’re shopping for example, but the main character especially just talks all the time despite having three lines of dialogue any time you’re farming or fishing, i really don’t like that. the item limit on the floor hasn’t been increased at all and the auto-pickup only works when you run over the items, so grinding out lumber + stone is still a massive pain for no reason.

obviously this is a huge amount of complaints and i'm sure a bunch of them seem really petty, but that's just how off-putting they are in the context of the game. despite all of that, it is genuinely a good game:

there is definitely depth to the characters you interact with and they feel like they were written as real people who exist outside of the main character, they have their own tropes but still manage to feel like organic people that you (or the main character) can have an actual connection to. while there are a lot of story moments where the main character has to handle everything, there are moments outside of that (especially with scarlett which was a pleasant surprise), and a small arc that attempts to give the main character time to exist as their own entity rather than just a plot-pusher, which i liked a lot.

as i said before the character designs are nice, even for characters i don't find appealing or eye catching, i can still appreciate the idea around their design. i spent the first few hours of the game feeling amazed at the 3d character models and how lively and intricate the outfits were.

in general every part of the game i didn't complain about is very solid, which is why i would love to rate it higher, and is why i would still recommend the game to anyone who enjoys farming sims. it's such a shame that some weird faults that shouldn't exist can make such an impact, but they're not at all game-ruining and it's still a very 'feel good' kind of game that you can see the earnestness of while you play it, so it gives a very sweet and comfortable feeling- that would be the sum of my feelings towards it.

BTW LET ME DATE MISASAGI

A young girl (though she doesn't know it yet) sits alone in her room. It is April of 2016, a very tumultuous time in her life. What is her name?

> Enter Name

Your name is KYE. An ANOMALOUS WEBCOMIC that you have LITTLE INTEREST in is coming to an end soon. You have had SMALL INTERACTIONS with it in relation to a VAGUELY RELATED INDIE RPG ABOUT MONSTERS. You have also tried to read it many times - with LIMITED SUCCESS.

> Kye: Take stock of your current situation.

You have been HOUSEBOUND for the past four months. In December of the past year you fractured your femur in three places, which would leave you with a PERMANENT LIMP. Currently, you cannot walk. You have been doing your HOMEWORK on your COMPUTER with a lot of FREE TIME to spare.

You feel like a shell of yourself.

> Kye: Read the webcomic.

No.

> Kye: Read the webcomic.

You begrudgingly agree to read the AFOREMENTIONED WEBCOMIC. For the first few hundred pages, you are bored out of your mind. It takes about a week to get through them. Then something interesting happens. You really start to get into it. The humor starts to click with your THIRTEEN YEAR OLD BRAIN.

> Kye: Watch the animated conclusion to the first major stretch of the story.

You're in shock. The PLOT BEATS of the beginning of the narrative all came together in such a BLOOD-PUMPING CONCLUSION that you can't help but read more. No matter what happens, you are going to see this thing through to the end.

==>

It's been months now, but you've managed to reach the FINAL STRETCH. You're exhausted, but glad that it's almost over. It can't be much longer than the rest of it, right?

Unbeknownst to you, but BEKNOWNST TO EVERYONE ELSE, this final stretch will be some of the most AVANT GARDE BULLSHIT you've ever read. It will be tiring. It will be difficult.

It will have an IRREVOCABLY NEGATIVE EFFECT on the way you engage with art.

Worst of all, it will be the length of HALF THE COMIC up until this point.

> Kye: Continue reading.

At this point, there's no turning back.

==>

It's been a year since you broke your leg. You no longer even have to use a CANE anymore - though that limp will always be there, as a scar. In that year, you've read the entire ACCURSED WEBCOMIC from FRONT TO BACK - not just once, but three times. You have just finished your third reading.

It is in this moment, watching this final animation once again, you come to realize SOMETHING VERY IMPORTANT:

It's impossible for you to discuss this comic in any way. It's too vast, unwieldy, and worst of all, important to you.

HOMESTUCK is a part of me, as much as I don't like it.