MARVELOUS!

As an Earth Dancer, you must find the lost gods and return life to a Blighted, dying land. Leagues above RF5! But still a spin-off, with some issues due to that.

Pros

• Can choose your protagonist (female or male) and their personalities differ. The one not chosen is available for romance later. This does not limit romance options (yes, there is gay marriage, and you can still have kids!)


• Great, well developed characters, including more variety in romance options


• Can decorate farming spaces and

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• set up custom areas in villages


• Gift and activity preferences actually get marked so you don't have to memorize them! And you can access storage so you don't have to carry around everything!


• Can schedule contests yourself


• Woolby will remind you about birthdays, festivals, and contests


• Big world to explore


• Can play with either English or Japanese voices

Cons

• Villager farming AI is dumb, and villagers themselves are random for what stats you get. And every new villager automatically joins as a farmer, so you have to remember to reassign them quickly when you wake up to make sure they don't mess up your fields


• Crafting, farming, and ranching are very dumbed down. There are no custom crafting recipes (so no OP broken builds) and farming has no soil levels, no typhoons, and giant crops are random


• Cooking is bugged and doesn't actually let you choose ingredients, meaning you will always cook with your lowest level stuff. Not great for cooking contests


• Bullet time dodging makes combat ridiculously easy (most likely because of not really having detailed crafting)


• Giving gifts takes 30 minutes in game time?!


• Woolby is annoying

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Arguably the best Rune Factory to date.

Pros

• Can choose your protagonist (female or male)


• Great, well developed characters


• Smooth combat


• Intricate farming and crafting mechanics


• Can have two followers and tame bosses!

Cons

• Random events make triggering specific ones (or act 3) a massive pain


• Romancing Doug (or even getting him to like you) is locked behind finishing Act 2


• Romance is only heterosexual


• Lin Fa is not a romance option