Well, here's to Rune Factory 5 and hoping that game turns out well. The odds are stacked against it since I've heard some rocky things surrounding it. I think the original developer went bankrupt at a point? Maybe?
The developer of the Rune Factory franchise did indeed go bankrupt, which is why we haven't seen a new one in eight years now. However, Marvelous, their publisher in Japan, hired most of the old dev team. Now the same people who made all the old RF games are making RF5. They also put out that Switch port of RF4.
I'll add that the footage of 5 we've seen seems promising and right in line with what you'd expect from an RF game. They released a new video showing it off last week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Im1z6RHiVoQ
Is Stardew... fun? I've been meaning to try it but I generally fall off planting/building games since there is no end hook to keep me playing in my experience.
Also, ouch this game looks -cheap-. Love how Vinny exits the barn on the horse and it spawns him off the horse.
It's an incredibly popular game, so I'm not sure what exactly you're asking. Obviously a lot of people find it fun. Is it fun if you struggle to get hooked on games with no clear end goal? ...Maybe not so much. There are things to do as you progress, though. Fill out collections, get married, upgrade your farm, etc. I think it's worth trying in any case, if you can catch a good discount.
And as the only guy here mentioning Rune Factory, I'll say that I think the RF games are a good entry point to this genre because there's actual main storylines you can work through as you play. Those games have endings, and credit sequences! (they still let you play after them). RF4 has like three endings, it's crazy.
The new Story of Seasons is probably going to disappoint people coming off of Stardew too, unfortunately. For those who want something that's closer to Stardew Valley, have a look at the Rune Factory games. Those are the games Stardew most closely took its inspiration from.
They're like Stardew, but with a little bit more action RPG content mixed in, and MUCH more character dialogue and interactions (note: I haven't played stardew in a couple years, so I don't know how much new character content is in there that I've missed). That's in exchange for less farm customization. It's also very anime. An enhanced port of Rune Factory 4 is out for Switch, and that one's pretty good. There's a Rune Factory 5 coming out for Switch later this year (May in Japan, TBD elsewhere).
I'm here for the Chulip appreciation. It's enough of an underappreciated PS2 gem that it almost never even appears on lists of underappreciated PS2 gems. But it's so good. Yoshiro Kimura is a legend.
The amount of dialog in this game is absolutely insane! Not only the story related stuff, but just how the character comments on bosses or enemies during dungeons. Have been playing this for about 170h total, and barely have gotten any repeats.
Comparing that to big open world rpg's like ac odyssey, where there's like 10 things total the side characters say out of cutscenes.
If what they said about Greg Kasavin writing 300,000 words for this game was accurate, and if all of them made it into the final version, then that's believable. For reference, 300,000 words takes roughly 20 hours to read for the average person (according to average read speed stats, who knows how that applies to well-read people). That number of words is pretty normal for a medium-ish visual novel (like a full phoenix wright game), but 300,000 words scattered across a game that is 95% action will go many, many times further. That's a ludicrous amount of words for this kind of game, to be honest.
Loved the stream!!! Thanks so much for doing this. Would love to see more MFS in the future. And if you do play more @vinny, maybe you could turn the multiplayer option to on, rather than friends only, that way the community could fly with you. It pulls in the nearest 250 or so players, would be nice to plane convoy with you.
Thanks! The only reason we did the friends only option was that we had trouble seeing each other when that wasn't on a few times. Could have just been a quirk when we were testing it around the QL though.
There's a hardcoded limit to how many planes show up for you in multiplayer (it's somewhere around 20 iirc). If you exceed that limit, it seems random which planes it chooses not to render. This means that if you're in an area with loads of other players, you're less likely to be able to see the one particular plane you want to see. It would be nice if Asobo made it so players on your friends list or group had a higher priority while in public multiplayer.
@alex Regarding your headlights, what you call your brights are actually your normal lights. And then what you think are your low-beams are just your cabin lights. That's why you were dinged with a headlight violation. If you want your actual high-beams, press the 'k' key. (or hold left on the d-pad when using the default controller configuration)
You can also customize your truck to have extra lights while in a service station, and you can configure those by pressing the pause button (not the menu, but the actual pause, which you reach with the select/options button on your controller). You can get a truly blinding floodlight setup if you really want. Illuminate the whole damn continent.
I played Sapienza probably 10 times before I even entered some of the apartment buildings, and discovered there's actually a complex network of interconnected buildings you can access by climbing over balconies, roofs, etc in the residential area. Such a deep and interesting level.
The first thing that struck me about the Hitman 2 levels was how BIG they were. That size is pretty awesome, but it did feel like that the finer details were missing in a lot of ways. I think a lot of this can be attributed to the lower budget and the difficulties IO went through after being dropped by SE. Honestly, though I've been disappointed with the pace of their content rollout in 2, I have to appreciate how well they did considering their circumstances.
I'll echo the sentiment on you guys going maybe a little too heavy on the side stories. At the rate you're going, there won't be a lot left for the rest of the game. When you got out of that food stall and immediately engaged in that side story at the park, among others, I groaned a little.
I just think it would be more interesting if you guys engaged in the main story a little more and kept a better balance. There's some incredibly cool shit coming up and I'm getting blue balls here, lol.
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