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I loved the idea of Elrentaros Wanderings when I first heard the premise behind Rear Sekai. There being both an ordinary world and isekai fantasy one existing somehow at the same time, and you needing to play to find out what’s going on? Action-RPG battles paired with relationship building? It sounded like so much potential was there. Unfortunately, Hakama wastes any possible goodwill by somehow making every element of the game boring and tedious.

Elrentaros Wanderings begins with your protagonist happening upon the out Elrentaros. You’re a wanderer who doesn’t know much about who you are or what you were up to. You’re welcomed into the community, and end up getting a chance to restore mitamas to magical mirror by heading into dungeons that reveal themselves around the town. However, in so doing, you also begin waking up in a more ordinary high school setting after every major boss encounter resulting in a gem acquisition. When you do, you find all the people you met in Elrentaros also exist in this other world, albeit in different roles and without any memory of you.

So the first disappointment tied to Elrentaros Wanderings is the fact that the localization isn’t great! Sentences read very awkwardly here. Sometimes, it seems like the translators couldn’t decide what to go with as an official name or phrase. For example, early on it feels like the townsfolk can’t decide if the first dungeon is “Cave Pick” or “Cave Peak.” I do wonder if part of that is due to the nature of the original script though. While there are 10 people who could be your “partners,” there’s no real depth to them. Some personality traits will come through, of course, but this isn’t like a Rune Factory game where your potential love interests feel as though they are well-realized individuals.

The second is that Elrentaros Wanderings doesn’t handle the idea of dual worlds very well! The more fleshed out side is of course Elrentaros, since that’s where you can walk around a town, shop, talk to NPCs, and explore dungeons. The school life portion does eventually get more screen-time, but prior to that it is limited to extremely short, visual novel segments that don’t do much to make that element of the game feel well-realized or inviting. Spend enough time dungeon-crawling for equipment or NPC quest items, and you might even forget there is that element.

Said dungeon-crawling is disappointment number three, but you won’t realize that initially. See, Elrentaros Wanderings is a loot-based action-RPG at its heart. Your avatar’s level is tied to the weapon and armor they found and equipped when heading into one of the locations you’ll find on the map. Each dungeon will have different floors, with new minimum-level-advisories and challenges. To get the items from NPCs that you need to fulfill their requests to bolster relationships, advance the story, and unlock new dungeons, you need to complete run and complete those tasks. 

As an example, an initial one might say you need to find the hidden areas (done by clearing out all enemies in a space), not take damage from a certain type of enemy or hazard, not fall in battle, not be hit by a certain type of boss attack, or defeat a boss. Each tier of a dungeon will have five of these challenges, which will reward you with the sidequest item, a weapon, or a currency you can put toward “buying” a partner gift so you can earn an alliance battle ive by equipping them as a designated partner. This means that you typically need to run through each “level” of a dungeon at least twice, since all objectives won’t be revealed until you’ve cleared it once.

The problem here is that these dungeons are incredibly tedious and, after a certain point, feel like they don’t pay out with the gear at appropriate levels to handle the “asks” by the time you unlock the third and fourth ones. To avoid spoilers, I’ll use Cave Pick as an example. The dungeon layout at all tiers will remain the same. The enemies are all mostly identical, and you’ll also see those same foes repeated in every other dungeon. (The only difference is, their colors will change and they’ll be slightly stronger.) Attack patterns aren’t altered. After you get to about build level 25-28, you may even find that you’ll be able to handle dungeon challenges that would normally require a minimum of up to 40 if you equipped the right special skills from Legendary-tier drops. Viability of equipment comes down to if it has a special skill attached, and you’ll have more money than you ever need since that’s only used to unlock skills for your weapon and armor. Even the bosses eventually start to repeat, once you get past the recommended-level-30 tier. 

This all leads into the fourth most disappointing part of Elrentaros Wanderings, which is that I didn’t find the gameplay loop in any way fun or satisfying. This isn’t like Diablo. The gear you get won’t eventually hit a point where you’ll keep it around for at least a half hour or so. By the point I hit the fourth dungeon, I only cleared out floors of enemies when the game would bar my progress through an area. I could be in and out of an area in about 15 minutes. Maybe less if it was one of the more predictable bosses at the end. Odds are, I’d at least switch out the armor at that point. Though by the time I got my Legendary Ugallu axe, I did hold on to that for about two hours because it was still better at level 27 than anything else I owned or found. I never replayed any of these repetitive dungeons because I wanted to. It was only because I had to.

Which is also how I ended up feeling as the story and relationships seemed to reach the endgame as well. Nothing about Elrentaros Wanderings felt satisfying to me. I didn’t want to really “romance” anyone, by which I mean toss a type of currency at them to get their Alliance Buff perks, even though some of the character art looked good. The nature of the story meant that some of the “reveals” were buried so deep and had so little substance surrounding them that I didn’t really care when a Big Bad suddenly appeared or I started to get answers. 

I didn’t like Elrentaros Wanderings, and the things wrong with it are such that patches to fix the localization or adjust other elements wouldn’t salvage it. It’s a tedious game that doesn’t offer the sort of substance to make it feel in any way satisfying. There are better isekai adventures. There are better loot-based dungeon-crawlers. There are better titles where you can connect with people in the nearby village and perhaps even fall in love with them.  

Elrentaros Wanderings is available on the Nintendo Switch on August 16, 2024, and it will appear on the PC via Steam on August 22, 2024.

The post Review: Elrentaros Wanderings Is a Waste of a Good Idea appeared first on Siliconera.

Bushiroad and Red Art Games announced Hakama’s Rear Sekai is getting an English release for the Switch and PC via Steam and, when it does, its new name will be Elrentaros Wanderings. The Steam English patch and Switch release will happen worldwide on August 16, 2024. 

For those unfamiliar, Rear Sekai is from Yoshifumi Hashimoto, who worked on games like Rune Factory, and the new Elrentaros Wanderings title pulls its name from the game’s world of Elrentaros. After chosing an avatar, you realize that the world you think you inhabit may not be the “real” world. You end up in a different universe. You’ll then need to travel between the two, going through dungeons and making friends with people, to save the world. 

Here’s the latest trailer, which goes over the title and shows the special editions that will be released for the Nintendo Switch.

The base game will be $39.99/€39.99. The Deluxe Edition, which consists of 500 copies total, will be €49.99. That includes the game, an acrylic stand, an art book, a keychain, and stickers. The €69.99 Collector’s Edition, of which there will be 1,000, includes a steel case for the game, a two-sided poster, stickers, the keychain, and three pins. 

Elrentaros Wanderings is coming to the Nintendo Switch and PC on August 16, 2024, and Rear Sekai is already available on the Switch in Japan.

The post Rear Sekai New Name Is Elrentaros Wanderings appeared first on Siliconera.

Preparing Rune Factory games for a worldwide audience is quite an undertaking. After all, these are large games with all sorts of events. The mix of life sim and RPG elements means tons of text. To help understand what that meant for Rune Factory 5 and its characters, Siliconera spoke with the Localization Manager John Wheeler and Assistant Localization Manager Lori Snyder. After all, XSEED did note in first localization blog that there were 1.5 million Japanese characters in the game between the script and system text.

Jenni Lada: How familiar with the Rune Factory series were you before you started working on the localization for Rune Factory 5?

Lori Snyder: I’m a big fan of the series—I’ve been enjoying the Rune Factory games ever since the first was released a little more than 15 years ago! I’ve played each title to some extent and am pretty familiar with the series lore/stories of each Rune Factory, which was a big help for when we were working on Rune Factory 5!

John Wheeler: I played countless hours of Rune Factory and Rune Factory 2, and I worked as the project manager for the new content in Rune Factory 4 Special after ing XSEED Games. I’m familiar with the series, but I can’t compete with Lori. She handled the localization of the retrospective art book included in the
Rune Factory 4 Special limited edition.

About how long did the localization process for Rune Factory 5 take?

Snyder: We began receiving localization materials, like character information and early text files, around February 2020. Since the game was a massive undertaking to localize with over 1.5 million Japanese characters and over a month’s worth of voice recording to accommodate, it took about two years to complete the localization for this title from those early notes to our final release.

How closely did you work with the development team in Japan?

Snyder: In order to deliver the best Rune Factory localization possible, we worked very closely with the developers, with the localization department at Marvelous in Japan as our liaison. We were often asked for on certain aspects of the game, such as how to implement same-sex marriage and how the game’s main story beats would be received by western audiences. In fact, while creating design documents is generally done on the developer side, for same-sex marriage implementation and localization, the XSEED side was asked to help with a prospective design document so that these new features could be included, and the developers were able to use that as a reference for same-sex marriage in the final game.

Among the Rune Factory 5 marriage candidates, Fuuka is a bit unusual since English isn’t her first language. What sorts of challenges did this present for the localization?

Snyder: One challenge for Fuuka was that we wanted to make sure her language didn’t alienate her from the player or the rest of the cast. In Japanese, she spoke with very simple “gau gau” sounds, which we felt wouldn’t work in the English version. Simple growling noises would be redundant and wouldn’t help the player connect with her as well as the other marriage candidates.

Adrienne Beck, one of our translators for this title, suggested creating a functional language for Fuuka, and our team helped flesh the language out to a point where it had a massive list of vocabulary and grammar. However, another huge challenge after establishing this language was keeping it consistent, so when localization quality assurance time came around, of the team had to keep an eye on Fuuka’s language as well as the English text so that it remained consistent for all of her dialogue. She has a whole lot to say in her language, so we had an entirely separate text-fix checklist just for her!

Was it more difficult to find a “voice” for certain Rune Factory 5 characters over others?

Wheeler: As Lori described, were-animal character Fuuka’s “language” presented the most time-intensive challenge, but I’ve been so happy to see how fans have reacted to it thus far.

Besides Fuuka, the character we agonized over the most early in the localization process was Captain Livia. She has a unique way of speaking in Japanese that ties into her character’s backstory, and we spent a long time discussing how to properly capture her voice in English in a way that would keep the spirit of the original but sound natural.

Which Rune Factory 5 character’s dialogue was the most difficult to localize and why?

Wheeler: I worked on translating the main story, and the character I had the most trouble with was the bandit Oswald. He has an idiosyncratic speech style that somewhat mirrors the performance of Chafurin, the actor who voices him in Japanese, that was very difficult to render in English. (Chafurin’s delivery is so iconic that the voice actor SungWon Cho immediately recognized him when listening to reference files for recording Oswald.) Oswald’s final dialogue is very entertaining in English, thanks to the efforts of our editors.

Rune Factory 5 allows same-sex relationships with marriage candidates. How did this affect the localization process and events for each gender?

Wheeler: The development team implemented unique text for anything that needed to be updated in the Japanese, and in general we were able to use gender tags—special localization programming tags that insert a different word such as “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” depending on the player character’s gender—to tailor the English even further.

One event we discussed a lot while we were planning the same-sex marriage text was a Priscilla romance event where she (spoiler alert!) asks the player to take on the role of a prince in a skit she writes. We were concerned that this reinforcement of traditional roles would feel unnatural, but the scene itself pokes fun at those roles—with Hina telling Julian he should play a princess—and in the end it felt perfectly sweet regardless of if the player had chosen Ares or Alice. It’s one of my favorite events in the game.

Compared to past localizations you’ve worked on, how difficult would you consider Rune Factory 5 in comparison?

Snyder: While my part in Rune Factory 5 was a bit smaller than other key of the team, I will say this is the biggest project I’ve worked on to date, and it presented some of the biggest challenges I’ve worked on at XSEED Games so far.

My role in Rune Factory 5’s localization mainly involved the in-game script and voice recording, but the script itself took the summer of 2020 to complete, and voice recording alone took a month and a half!

After that, my main goal during LQA (localization quality assurance) was checking through all of the voice clips to make sure they matched the context of the scenes they were used in, and that took quite some time to check and implement as well! There was a lot going on these past two years for Rune Factory 5 alone, but I can at least say I learned a ton from the experience!

Rune Factory 5 is available for the Nintendo Switch.

The post Interview: Localizing Rune Factory 5’s Characters appeared first on Siliconera.

Rune Factory 5 is a perfect example of a game that, at a glance, has everything you’d expect from an installment in the series. There’s an amnesiac hero with a connection to nature. You have dragons. People from different fantasy races appear, some of whom you can even smooch and seduce. There’s farming and fighting. However, it’s also unfortunately a bit hollow and marred by technical issues. It’s like the developers at Hakama were told what the game needed to be and shown videos of Rune Factory 4, but didn't really grasp what makes the series special.

Like Rune Factory 4, the fifth entry begins with a person who seems to be someone notable and influential. However, circumstances result in them losing their memory almost immediately. They’re taken in by an authority figure of the town where they wind up and placed in a position of power in the community. In this case, players end up being a member of Rigbarth’s SEED force. They’re essentially an organization that helps people around by dealing with dangerous situations and monsters. However, because you’re special, you also can manage this division’s farm and issue Directives that result in festivals being held, storage increases, and getting licenses to craft. This means when you don’t have a case that will send you to a dungeon, you’ll be talking to people in town, running errands, and growing crops.

Right off the bat, Rune Factory 5 is going to give people a sense of deja vu. In the past, every mainline Rune Factory game had its own gimmick. The original set the pace. The second entry focused on the generational aspect. The third involved transforming into a monster. Tides of Destiny had two characters sharing a single body. The fourth involved being “royalty” while accomplishing your goals. I’m not going to get into any spoilers here! However, there are a number of story beats and elements that are very similar to Rune Factory 4. If other elements were executed better, this might have been forgivable. But unfortunately, they’re not.

One such flaw is how imprecise Rune Factory 5 can feel. Which is weird, given the amount of control it does offer a player. You can fast travel to set points in town, certain points on the world map, dragons you’ve unlocked, and to floors you’ve reached in dungeons. Which is great! It really helps you engage in activities and progress at your own pace. You can use the L button to pop into your pockets to immediately access farming tools, weapons, items, or other useful things you’ve designated. Everything is immediately on-hand. It's convenient! You can quickly pick up or harvest items.

But the game is also very floaty. Moving around can feel awkward, and you can overshoot your targets when running, attacking, or performing actions. Upgrading farm tools aside from the watering can or fishing rod doesn’t always feel necessary. I found I could sometimes button-mash to till, water, chop, or hammer faster than the time needed to charge up upgraded tools' actions for early stages. Not to mention your free axe and hammer can handle any tree stump or rock you’ll find on the farm and tackle mining ore. It meant I really didn't feel a need to invest in Recipe Bread for farming too often initially.

This extends to combat. Rune Factory 5 is an action-RPG, like past installments. Normal enemies spawn from gates. Which means defeating them stops the flow of foes. You have magic, provided you stumble upon, buy, or earn spells. But the amount of time to cast and reach enemies and their power means they aren’t very viable. Standard weapons are better. And the strongest “fast” weapon you have tends to be the best. (Even if it is tied to an element.) Which means investing in Weapon Recipe Bread for those crafting recipes is an easy way to break the game. There are no “walled off” areas. You can explore any part of the huge map from the beginning. However, you’ll quickly hit barriers in the form of enemies you won’t deal any damage to who are about ten steps away from ones you can wipe out in one or two hits.

But what really got to me about Rune Factory 5 is how cumbersome the little things can be. When you leave your room every morning, it will take a few minutes for things like crops and your health/RP bar to “load up.” Especially on festival days, when confetti is raining down. The initial load makes it feel like you literally drag yourself out of bed. You get outside. Then, you have to wait 10 to 15 seconds for items in your field to "pop in" and populate. There are also frame rate issues.

I felt like I would overshoot targets because the game perhaps was trying to catch up to what I was attempting to do. This becomes a problem when trying to dodge opponents’ — in particular bosses’ — various attacks. Dashing can feel like you’re trudging through mud. It seems like there’s no collision detection sometimes, which means your avatar could play hide-and-seek by literally standing inside of another character like Palmo. (Which I mean means you won't get trapped somewhere, I suppose.) You can lock onto enemies, but I’d find it would switch my target to whichever foe would be closer to me without my input. It's not great if you’re trying to take out the gate first so additional monsters don't spawn!

It can also be extraordinarily time-consuming to get things done. I’d attribute this to it being “too” big, too empty, and having terrible monster drop rates. The dungeons are generally fine, though a bit boring since there’s no real puzzle-solving or thought to them. The town and world map, on the other hand, are overly large and empty. It feels like you’re running forever across dull, empty expanses to get anything done. Once you finally reach a destination to perhaps fight monsters for materials, good luck getting them! I’d need to typically fight at least ten of one kind of creature if I wanted to get one of their typical drops. With bosses, I would maybe get their item once every five times after I’d return.

Which made me feel discouraged from casually following a daily routine. Especially when I hit the endgame and post-game. Let’s say there are quite a few reused assets throughout Rune Factory 5. Not to mention that the bosses aren’t terribly challenging, so the prospect of returning to them isn’t exactly thrilling. If you don't really need their materials for crafting, there isn't much of a reason to repeat cleared encounters.

As for the love interests? Some can come across as bland, one-note characters. Martin is a workaholic, and one of his first encounters involves berating Ryker for being a halfling. Reinhard is the knight devoted to his liege. If you spend enough time with them, there can be a bit more nuance. However, I feel they aren’t as well actualized as the Rune Factory 4 romance options. This made it more difficult for me to connect to them.

But hey, at least now you see map markers letting you know when an event with one of them is available. That helps you romance them faster! Though heart events do play out over multiple days and locations in this entry. So if you accidentally start one for a character you aren't fond of, you have to spend a few days clearing it until you can pursue someone you do like. Say you finish Reinhard's first event, which ends in the restaurant. But you don't notice Fuuka's first heart event opened up the second it was done and is a few steps away. You could unintentionally walk into it, locking you into needing to complete that over the course of the next in-game week before you could continue a love affair with someone else.

If you need a farming-and-fighting fix, Rune Factory 5 is an option. It just isn’t the best one out there. It’s living in the shadow of its far superior siblings. Even if patches fix all of the technical issues, it would still feel uneven. I do think that, if we get a Rune Factory 6, it could be better and build off of this entry’s missteps. There were times when I enjoyed myself while playing, but going back to Rune Factory 4 Special for another run would be a wiser choice.

Rune Factory 5 is available for the Nintendo Switch.

The post Review: Rune Factory 5 Does the Series a Disservice appeared first on Siliconera.

Marvelous has opened a special website to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the Rune Factory series. The website features a new promotional video that shows footage from all of the titles released thus far. Additionally, it has a timeline that details the release and a brief synopsis of each title. Several special campaigns are currently underway to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the Rune Factory series, which includes discounts through the Nintendo eShop Japanese storefront. [Thanks, Famitsu!]

From August 24, to September 7, 2021 consumers can purchase Rune Factory 4, Rune Factory 4 Special, and Rune Factory 5 for up to 50% through the Nintendo eShop. However, this deal is currently exclusive to the Japanese storefront. Other campaigns include a fan art contest that s can participate in, and the option to receive a special illustration through Twitter.

As mentioned previously, a special video has been released to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the series. It goes through the series in chronological order and showcases footage from each entry.

You can watch the video below.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAqT_GYMH3Y&ab_channel=%E3%82%B3%E3%83%B3%E3%82%B7%E3%83%A5%E3%83%BC%E3%83%9E%26%E3%82%A2%E3%83%9F%E3%83%A5%E3%83%BC%E3%82%BA%E3%83%A1%E3%83%B3%E3%83%88-%E3%83%9E%E3%83%BC%E3%83%99%E3%83%A9%E3%82%B9%E5%85%AC%E5%BC%8F%E3%83%81%E3%83%A3%E3%83%B3%E3%83%8D%E3%83%AB[/embed]

The first Rune Factory title released in August 2006 to Japanese audiences. It eventually made its way overseas to North America in 2007. A European release date followed in 2009. Since its original release, a total of five numbered Rune Factory games have come out. Additionally, several spin-off titles have appeared as well.

The post Rune Factory 15th Anniversary Website Opens appeared first on Siliconera.

During the Nintendo Direct at this year’s E3, Nintendo showed off a gameplay trailer for the Switch game from Hakama, Worth Life. It is a slice-of-life game in which you help make life better in a kingdom through mini-games. Worth Life will come out on June 24, 2021 in Japan.

Here is the trailer that aired during Nintendo Direct:

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvdvyUrspTA[/embed]

The king calls upon thirty people to help make the country more prosperous, and the protagonist is one of those thirty. Players then wander around the kingdom in search of things to do, such as building a house to collect rent. There are also classic slice-of-life and RPG tasks such as defeating monsters and fishing.

Worth Life will release on the Nintendo Switch on June 24, 2021 in Japan. There is currently no news as to whether or not a global version will come out in the future.

The post Worth Life Lets You Play as a Landlord on the Switch appeared first on Siliconera.

The curtains have been blown back, and it's time to do some farming! Rune Factory 5 has gotten its first trailer via the Nintendo Direct Mini Partner Showcase. It revealed that the title will be a 3D game, similar to Rune Factory Frontier and Rune Factory Oceans: Tides of Destiny.

For the first time since July 2019, we got a closer look at the protagonists of the game. As usual, it seems our avatar will somehow lose their memories and suffer from amnesia at the outset of the adventure. (It's a series staple.) The farm seems to be built on the back of a giant dragon, and the battles are entirely in 3D, similar to past 3D titles.

Once again, farming and other activities like fishing will be available, allowing you to earn money and gain materials used to craft weapons. You'll also be able to get married in the game, as usual.

Check out the first trailer below:

Apart from several of the other villagers, bachelors and bachelorettes, the trailer also shows off that you'll be able to perform some sort of special move alongside your allies.

Rune Factory 5 will release on the Nintendo Switch in Spring 2021.

The post Rune Factory 5 Is a 3D Game Like Rune Factory Frontier and Oceans appeared first on Siliconera.

It's been a while since we've heard about Rune Factory 4 Special, and it turns out that the game has been delayed from Winter 2019 to 2020, likely in February. [Thanks, 88Night88 on Reddit 1, 2!]

Several days ago, Reddit 88Night88 ed Xseed regarding Rune Factory 4 Special regarding retailer listings that said the game was delayed to January 21, 2020, and received the reply that yes, the game was originally targeting a late January release, which was now looking more like a late February release. French retailer Just For Games lists the game's release date as February 21, 2020, which would corroborate the reply.

That said, even late February seems to be uncertain, only being a best estimate. Xseed confirmed on Twitter that an official announcement on the new release date will be revealed soon. The delays may be due to the addition of French and German text .

Finally, Siliconera discovered that, earlier today, Nintendo updated the official site's game page's release date to 2020. (Confirmed with Nintendo site update tracker.)

Rune Factory 4 Special has likely been delayed to a late February 2020 Nintendo Switch release. The game is immediately available in Japan.

The post Rune Factory 4 Special Likely Delayed In West To Late February 2020 appeared first on Siliconera.

Story of Seasons and Rune Factory series producer Yoshifumi Hashimoto has left Marvelous to open his own subsidiary studio, Hakama Inc. Their first game is Dragon: Marked for Death, developed with Inti Creates.

The post Rune Factory Producer Yoshifumi Hashimoto Opens New Studio Hakama Inc. appeared first on Siliconera.