I'm a sucker for the Rune Factory franchise; I'm not gonna pretend I don't enjoy playing this. No other game of this genre beats it for me yet, because no one really seems to mix the farming and anime fantasy aspects as well as Rune Factory does. I love the world, the monsters, the character tropes, I love the cliche, the jokes, and I'm very glad now people are finally able to marry male characters as a male protagonist.
That being said, RF5 was very difficult for me to stomach. It has many flaws and barely adds anything new to the franchise. It has RF4 bones and it does everything RF4 does, it just does it worse.

● Some QoL was introduced, like auto-pickup items, which is useful but works in an odd way, making you need to walk away from the item first before going back to it so the game actually picks it up for you.

● Seasonal fields got removed; instead we have giant elemental themed dragons with fields on them. They add a new gimmick of consuming crystals to optimize your crops and double as warp points on the map. Still, we can’t plant off-season crops optimally anymore. They could’ve introduced that again on the crystals, but they didn’t.

● Events get in your way and there's no way to opt out. They are signalized on the map, which is nice, but becomes a problem when an event skips time to the next day, without any warning or choice. No past game caused this annoyance

● They made using withered grass/corn/4-leaf clover to plow fields worse, as it now wastes your entire stack if you don't drop just the amount you want to use.

● Like previous games, upgrading items still makes you drag yourself through the UI to select the item and go all the way back with it to confirm, making the grind of those forging levels an insufferable task. It just makes no sense to not have some quality of life here. Thankfully there's a mod that makes it work in a better way, respecting the player's time.

● Not enough warp points unlocked to compensate for how large the map is. Forget warping to specific fishing spots around the world.

● New weather condition called meteor shower randomly spawns 3 mining spots to mine new crops on the overworld. But, due to how laughably low drop rates are in this game, you're left to save scum your way to forcespawn it as many times you need or want, as long as you feel like walking back to it everytime.

I think meteor showers are a nice addition to the game, but let's be real: no one is gonna play thousands in game years of a game that barely has any intriguing story, or endgame goal, just to collect the starfall seeds. This is not a MMORPG to make such items so difficult to drop, to the point that save scumming becomes a possible (yet awful) solution. These showers (and getting starfall seeds) are so rare, that someone playing without guides or looking up is more likely to win the lottery than to learn about them, and it’s not like finding them is so gameplay changing. Either making them more common, telegraphed, or better communicated would make them more balanced and fun to interact with.

Other problems include dating your favorite character having an incredibly low chance. You can try just one time per level and wait for next level in case of failure, or save scum so you don’t suffer the increased affection raising costs that come without new dialogues even
- Character's outfit inconsistency with official art/portrait/model;
- Poorly programmed dialogues (e.g., characters asking where others are when they're right in front of them, your spouse on Valentine's Day acting like you two aren't married and have 3 children together).

Those are my biggests complaints about playing this game. I'm trying not to be too harsh on it and I hope I didn't offend the devs. That's just my experience with it and all the things I would like to see changed. Once you put it all together, it just makes the game look visibly cheap and rushed.

As I said at the beginning, I love the Rune Factory series. My frustration definitely comes from a place of care for the franchise, because I've played those games since RF3 original release and even played a bit of Frontier.

Now with RF5, my love for it quickly became a disappointment and I just need to warn that if you're that invested in Rune Factory like me, it's gonna be really difficult to not play this without mods or trying to overlook all the mistakes made here.

I know I haven't played this game for a significant amount of time at all so feel free to take this review with a grain of salt. I really tried getting into this game because of all the people raving about it, but after 3 hours I gave up trying to like it. The controls are super janky, not smooth at all when it comes to switching tools/weapons or farming. The top-down only when farming is also kinda annoying. You cannot customize your character, you can only pick male/female. Super weird spacial alignment throughout the town and strange stretches of empty land between buildings/landmarks and such. The combat is laughably easy even on hard mode. Graphics are meh. Colors are super bright and fake looking (grass/trees, etc.) I get there is a lot of nostalgia for people playing this game, but it's definitely not worth the price tag... I would say it's worth anywhere from $5-10 in comparison to other games on Steam, $40 is outrageous for this game. Maybe the value of this game comes from relationships or the story line but clearly I didn't get too far due to all the other factors limiting me from enjoying the game.

While considerably shorter than RF4, It's still a rather fun game on it's own merit and well worth playing.