Ushi No Tane - Harvest Moon

I admit I haven't tried killing monsters with disasterous dishes! Looks like there's another thing to try in RF4S.

Throwing knives/axes could be fun! Arrows and blades would be super easy to add elemental attacks to. And then there's additional effects like poison or sleep. (I don't think we've ever been able to use that either.)

That wind staff from Tides sounds like it was pretty fun to use. I'd be happy if we even saw more stuff like that.

ONE MORE thing then I'll stop with combat. Have we ever had any kind of AoE attacks? (I guess that staff, above, would count.) I'd love to see some kind of AoE since there's so many rooms with groups of enemies.

I guess that's sort of the complication of a series like Rune Factory. I feel like videogames function on the "if you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one" convention and RF bucks that pretty hard.

You're right about rune abilities though - it's been a couple of years since I've touched RF4 and I'm trying not to get sucked in before the Switch release. (Didn't realize you could level up quite that much though, holy cow!)

Some sort of upgrade to rune abilities would be nice. Maybe they're what add elementals to weapons or augment them in some way. Cause it IS a good trade off - hard to control for a wider AoE.

RF4 was one of the most solid games I've played, but that's not to say that there weren't a few... Issues. I'd love for RF5 to improve on these things.
-Should furniture customization come back, let us use a grid to place objects. It annoyed me that I had to pick up and put things down to hopefully try to manipulate where I wanted them.
-Please no more RNG based Town Events.
-For fishing, use the rumble feature of the Switch.
-More variation in monsters.
-Better dungeon design than just a maze of endless hallways/rooms.
-More voice acting that's hopefully not drowned out by the music. Speaking of, more option sliders in the menus for BGM and voices separately just in case.
-Maybe not a return to Norad since all 4 Elder Dragons have been met. Unless there's a 5th one we don't know about...

• As everyone has been saying, a diverse cast! I'd like to see maybe ten potential bachelors and bachelorettes with even more changing daily dialogue than RF4, all with distinct personalities and backstories. I'd like to see some elves (including dark elves!), dwarves, humans, univirs, and especially monster-hybrid people like the Guardians, may be even merpeople again. Maybe . Marriage candidate with horns? One with an eyepatch?
• Children that look like the spouse, at least in terms of hair and eyecolor/ear-type, maybe skin color too. I enjoyed being able to choose the gender of my offspring too, maybe we could get more kids this game. I really want two daughters.
• Non-random events. They could be so frustrating! I had problems triggering dating/marriage events in RF4, and some events tended to glitch out, and I'd have to restart everything. More events too, especially more post-marriage with the spouse.
• I'd like a more versatile combat system. RF4 was a lot of pressing the same button over and over and hoping for the best.
• I want the story to be just as long or longer than previous installments, and for exploring to be equally rewarding and fun. I LOVED finding new places and dungeons and treasures, even if they weren't necessary for story progression.
• I like having an avatar portrait, and I really prefer having 2D portraits to 3D models. Maybe the avatar could be customizable this time around? Nothing major, just hair and eyes, probably, like FE.
• I want decorating my house and rooms and moving furniture to be easier and less frustrating. It's so difficult to get things exactly where I want it. Also, I would prefer children get their own room this time around--I had a lot of empty space from castle upgrades and nothing to put in it.
• Keep a dating period between marriage. Maybe have more cutscenes trigger if you date more than one character. Not necessarily major consequences, just acknowledging that it's a thing.

Oh gosh, I forgot about how annoying moving furniture around is in RF4. Definitely this. I'd hope that the grid squares were relatively small, for even more precise placement, but any grid at all would be really helpful. Having my cooking stations a hair off from each other drove me nuts. -_-;

I'd also love more ranged combat!
Maybe for an AoE type of weapon, they could implement potions? You could throw a potion in the middle of a group of enemies and the bottle would shatter, placing an effect on the floor. Might be neat~

I'm hoping for at least as many events as in RF4. I didn't mind the rng so much, because I got to see all of the events anyway.

A lot of fantasy race representation.

Rival marriages and kids.

Kids that are important and unique to the spouse in some way, whether by looks or stats or something.

+Friend dates or something of the like for villagers that aren't candidates, please! I wanna hang out with folks in the town, it's one of my fave parts of the game
+Theyll probably do it, but I kind of want the buddy system reworked a little? Sometimes animals or villagers just kind of dope around instead of fighting, or they run headfirst into a spray of murdermagic, which is not the best.
+Rival marriages pls, or some kind of second gen system in place
+More character integration with the story! I liked what they did with Doug and Barrett!

We found the scaley

but yeah I agree I think it'd be a neato thing to do as long as they don't pull the thing FE did with Nowi and make them look like that and then pull the "I'm actually 500 years old!" card that seems to be really popular. Or at least if they do don't make it a romance character