YMMV / Rune Factory 4

• Adorkable:
  • Let's see... Vishnal is clumsy, socially-awkward, passionate about being a butler despite his constant failures (and never gives up), stutters a whole lot (particularly around Frey), and can sometimes get a little shy from time to time. If Frey pursues a romantic relationship with him, these traits really show up whenever they're together.
  • Believe it or not, but Dolce definitely has her moments. If you talk to Pico the day before the quiz festival she begins bragging about how much she knows about Dolce, listing some adorkable, yet embarrassing quirks such as being really kind, easily hurt, is a little clumsy, gives names to all her dolls and holding stuffed toys to help her go to sleep, and is not good at cleaning up. Furthermore if the player pursues to romance her, some of her dialogue will show hints of this towards Lest.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Volkanon. Does he truly support Lest/Frey and care about their well being, or is he only supporting them due to their status as the prince/ss of Selphia? While most of the game leans towards the former interpretation, the prologue and the Town Event "Someone Has the Wrong Idea" appear to hint at the latter.
• Angst? What Angst?: The entire town is guilty of this and for one specific reason: Venti was Secretly Dying, and she didn't tell anyone, and the Protagonist is the one who is worried about her the most, and she collapses on the spot. No one even asked what happened and why it did despite her being friends with everyone, and even the protagonists themselves is even guilty of this if the player did their regular chores and participate events like nothing happened.
• Anti-Climax Boss: The final bosses of the First Arc of the game certainly feel like this. After a fight against Rafflesia, the two Anubi statues and Sarcophagus himself are pitifully easy to defeat, even without filling up on potential healing items. Likely a way to counter the fact that the entirety of Leon Karnak/The Forest Of Beginnings must be done in one swoop with no means of saving in-between.
• Broken Base:
  • Earlier Harvest Moon and Rune Factory games allowed the player to potentially romance all the available love interests to the point of proposal with no penalty, and fans would often "harem" to see all the romantic cutscenes, wedding scenes, after-marriage dialogue, etc. Rune Factory 4 was part of a shift away from the mechanic, with Harvest Moon franchise games typically all turning to the "going steady" option; players face penalization for deciding to "harem" and face far more difficulties trying to romance multiple romantic options. While some fans were glad to see a more realistic love subplot that allowed for more steps to the relationship (in contrast to other games where you could move from ostensible friendship to marriage quickly and with few romantic cutscenes for development), others were frustrated that the game was essentially punishing them for trying to view more than one romantic arc when romances are a staple of the franchise and one of the most interesting parts.
  • Elsewhere on the relationship front, there's two of the romance options, Amber and Kiel. Both are very controversial among the fandom for how young they look and act. Though they have no defined ages, they're both still clearly the youngest romance options, and a number of older fans find this worrisome or upsetting. This ranges from things as simple as liking them as characters but wishing they looked older, to more extreme things like thinking that any player who marries them is morally wrong. Suffice to say, bringing up their appearance is a surefire way to start arguments in the fandom.
• Catharsis Factor: Players of the first game will find satisfaction in finally being able to fight Ethelberd after his Villain: Exit, Stage Left in the first game’s ending.
• Character Perception Evolution: Upon release, Arthur was not initially one of the more popular options for the Romance Sidequest. Many players disliked him for his unappealing design (such as his pageboy haircut and scrawny frame), his detached way of speaking, and for his store being a Scrappy Mechanic for players trying to make late-game building upgrades. However, after the game's Nintendo Switch rerelease, many new and returning players took note of how surprisingly saucy a lot of his dialogue is—including, in a game without a true Gay Option, toward the male protagonist. Thus he went from being seen as a "detached nerd with bad hair and an annoying shop" to an "Ambiguously Bi Chivalrous Pervert who's seriously got it bad for the protagonist," and became a lot more liked for it.
• Complete Monster: Ethelberd, as explained on the series' YMMV page.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Thunderbirds have an attack that shoots lightning bolts in every direction possible all around them, which comes out so fast it is impossible to fight them in melee without getting hit and this attack can hit you multiple times. If one of them uses it at blank point be prepared to see your health vanishing faster than a meal on Porcoline's hands and at lower levels it's easily a One-Hit Kill.
  • Spirit and Color Fairies (Red, Blue, Green and Yellow) enemies love to spam magic and fill the screen with projectiles. While Fairies are very rare and locked to specific locations Spirits are far more common and on top of highly damaging attacks they have the habit of phasing out of the screen for a few seconds which can make getting rid of them in the middle of a fight a real hassle.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • There are many who wish Porcoline was one of the possible love interests for Lest and/or Frey.
  • Ventuswill is so popular, many Japanese fans often joke that the game is glitched because she can't be married. When the Special Edition came out, she got her own story about marrying Lest alongside the actual marriage candidates in the 'Another Episode' DLC (though she still can't be married in the main game).
• Fan Nickname: Dylas gets called "Pony" quite often on message boards.
• Game-Breaker: See here for the many, many examples.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Spiders, due to their web attack which slows you, making it hard to dodge other attacks, including the webs again.
  • Wasps and Hornets. Their stingers have a high chance of causing poison and paralysis, and they tend to fly to far areas of the map so that they can spam the attack while the protagonist is usually busy trying to take care of other enemies, making them a frustrating waste of medicine or healing RP.
  • Palm Cats and enemies that like to knock you airborne are usually not too difficult, but are just plain obnoxious to fight since you can't do anything until you fall back on ground. Enemies like this can easily become Demonic Spiders if something more dangerous is around as even though you're invincible while getting up, you're not while you're falling and you can get juggled for massive damage if you get unlucky.
  • Late-game archer goblins tend to spam high-damage arrows at far faster rates than their lower-leveled counterparts, and can often cluster on maps. Expect some areas of the Lava Cave map to have nothing but high-level archer goblins spamming arrows at nearly the same time, requiring a lot of running around to try to avoid getting stunlocked.
• Growing the Beard: The game manages this after Rune Factory 3 which was already a step up from previous entries. A much bigger world, many small but important quality of life changes, a more engaging story, optional challenges, revamped farming mechanics, a remarkable and colorful cast (but not as crazy as Sharance's people) and a much more complex and refined crafting system that adds a lot of depth in combat with more post-end game challenges made this into what people sometimes consider the peak of Rune Factory games in general.
• Ho Yay: Quite a lot of it in this game compared to its predecessors, with one notable example being Doug and Dylas as stated below.
  • The eligible bachelors will compliment the main character's cuteness, get flustered at the thought of spending time with the main character, and get jealous when they're getting along so well with their current partner... even if the main character is Lest, the male main character.
    • Arthur in particular frequently compliments the main character's cuteness, invites them on vacation and, if the main character says they're good at housework, says that their future husband will be a lucky man. Again, even if the main character's male.
    • Dylas has several of these if the main character is male, including one where the MC tries to help Dylas smile and others assume they're on a date and one where Dylas runs off a (male) NPC who's hitting on the main character before accidentally saying that the MC is cute, getting flustered and running away.
  • During one of the boys' sleepovers, Leon suggests that next time, they should invite the girls, too. Lest claims they can have fun without girls and Leon tells him to please be sure to sleep on the other side of the room.
    • Leon is an interesting case as being male and picking 'flirty' dialogue, like giving him cookies on Valentine's Day, gets strong negative reactions compared with most of the other guys, who tend to be confused or assume you're joking. Since Leon's usual dialogue can still be construed as flirty, it almost paints him as an Armored Closet Gay.
  • The day before White Day, Illuminata tells you she's going to be participating like one of the guys and asks if that's a problem. If Frey gives her a cookie on White Day, she says she's always happy to accept one from a lady. Maybe her High-Class Glass goes back to really old lesbian stereotypes?
  • Margaret thinks Forte is really cool as a knight in shining armor, though she seems to treat her phrasing as more That Came Out Wrong than a demonstration of her preferences.
  • Saying that Pico is canonically in love with Dolce is easier than saying they're like sisters. In one random conversation, Pico will claim them to be "lawfully married" due to the fact that she follows Dolce around all the time, earning a scorn from the latter.
  • If you, as Frey, say "I love you!" to Nancy, she will lament that she would have given some thought on dating you had she never met Jones. Also, during White Day, if you give her a cookie, you have an option to tell her: "See this as my heart".
  • Pico compares Dolce and Clorica and asks the player who of the two would he/ she choose as a wife. If the player is Frey, she will say "I'm female, you know...", to which Pico will answer "Minor detail. Who would you choose?". You can choose to answer Dolce, Clorica, Pico, or "No way!". If you answer either Dolce or Pico, Pico will say she's sorry, but they belong to each other, and Clorica will be upset. If you choose Clorica, Pico will be disappointed and Clorica very happy.
• Moe: The word is not enough to describe Amber and Kiel.
• Remade and Improved: While the original game was fairly well-received, the remaster is considered a massive improvement, as it cleans up art, expands the game and features, and fixes many of the ghastly RNG issues of the original version.
• The Scrappy:
  • Illuminata is not very well-liked among fans, due to her overconfidence and tendency to jump to conclusions as a self-proclaimed detective. It does not help that in one of the random events, she slaps Amber without apologizing later for taking flowers from the shop without permission.
  • Xiao Pai's father, Yang Fan, is not very well liked for coming off as a needlessly overprotective Boyfriend-Blocking Dadwho is willing to spread slanderous rumors against Lest during his daughter's marriage event.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The random Town Events system is the bane of many players' existence, especially those trying to activate the third plot arc or get married. Both require events that have a random chance of triggering and can't trigger unless there are no other active town events; that is, once an event starts, the player has to complete it before starting a new one, and some can take over a week to complete.
    • Worse still, any villager involved in a town event can't go adventuring with you until it's completed. Usually, this makes a small group of villagers unavailable for a day or two, but at the other end of the spectrum, Doug's proposal event takes nearly the entire town (including every marriage candidate and some of the non-candidates) out of commission for at least ten days.
  • Earlier games allowed the player to easily romance and propose to love interests as long as they had a high enough relationship value. In this game, whether or not a romantic option will accept your initiation is completely random. The player can't initiate a relationship unless the marriageable candidate is at a higher LP level, and though guides encourage the player to raise LP to improve their chance of success, reaching maximum LP has little effect overall. The player can either do a soft reset until the candidate accepts or try daily until success is reached (which may take seasons depending on their luck), though some have found that the success rate briefly spikes when a new LP level is reached. Rune Factory 4 Special fixed the RNG on triggering certain events, including marriage events, yet left the confession RNG untouched for unknown reasons.
  • In Special you cannot go to the main menu, and even quit the game normally, unless you access a save point to go to the main menu which can be annoying if want to quickly reload the game because you fainted or messed up something and want to restart quickly. Thankfully this was addressed in the next game.
  • Getting buildings fully upgraded requires massive quantities of Wood and Stone; far more than is easy to gain just from woodcutting/mining alone. Many players resort to just buying the needed quantities from Arthur's shop en masse, but whether or not Arthur sells them on any given day is random. While all shops change up their stock randomly on a day-to-day basis, the need for massive quantities of Wood and Stone makes this one of the more famously frustrating stores in the game.
• Ship Tease:
  • The game is more than happy to tease Doug/Dylas. Their competing and bickering is interspersed with veiled kind gestures (showing concern when the other is injured, or secretly giving each other birthday gifts) and multiple characters will comment on how fond of one another they are. Dolce even calls them lovers, much to their mutual horror.
  • Leon likes to pick on Forte so much like a kindergartner pulling her hair, he also pulls every villagers' hair at least once per day, including your character's. But he only displays a romantic interest with your character specifically, others he only regards as funny and amusing. Although Leon may regard Forte more as a little sister like Kiel a little brother, since Kiel and Forte ARE siblings, and since Leon's brotherly characteristic was proven with "Maria" in his marriage event.
  • Margaret outright says at one point that she'd be quite happy with Forte, going so far as to call her a "dashing prince of a knight." YMMV on whether Forte's very flustered reaction is just an expression of embarrassment or an indicator that the feeling's mutual.
• Strangled by the Red String:
  • Defied, unlike previous games — not only is it entirely possible to complete the entire game without getting married, but you have to become boyfriend/girlfriend with the person you want to marry before you can marry them. You do need to marry and have a kid if you want to get 100% Completion^note as at least one area requires you to have your spouse and child with you in a party, but otherwise you don't even have to try if you don't want to.
  • A platonic version with Ventuswill and the protagonist is possible. Depending on your play style and how you progress in the storyline, it's entirely possible to avoid raising friendship or even talking to Ventuswill at all (outside of cutscenes), and since Ventuswill will spend much of the longer segments of the storyline unconscious or asleep (as the forest, ruins, and mansion can be completed very quickly, while Leon's rescue and the Sechs storyline take far longer and are much more difficult), having a mutual conversation might not even be possible for half the game. Despite this, the protagonist will always treat Ventuswill as their best friend and sacrifice everything for them. When Ventuswill returns to the Forest of Beginnings and the protagonist mourns them, many players stuck in this progression were confused as to why Frey/Lest was referring to her as their best friend and waxing lyrical about their acrimonious friendship when they'd barely even spoken enough to discover the dynamic.
• Take That, Scrappy!: During the random town event "It's a Mystery!" Illuminata, mistaking the player character to be the thief that stole Kiel's watch, attacks and knocks them out briefly. She attempts to repeat her actions on the next unfortunate person to walk in... only for it to turn out to be Forte, who parries her attack and knocks her flat with her own weapon. After having her lecture you after she knocked you out (on top of her other annoying actions), watching Forte lay her out is very satisfying.
• That One Attack: Siren's musical note. She spread her notes everywhere when she starts singing, and they are really hard to avoid due to their sheer quantity and the small size of the arena. Worse, the music notes can inflict every status effect, including Faint, which is instant death.
• That One Boss:
  • Thunderbolt, who is impossibly fast and strong, likes to spam lightning attacks, one of which shoots out in a dozen directions (becoming That One Attack in Hard mode because after he Turns Red, it fires in every direction very quickly, with very narrow safe zones to avoid it), and plays dead at one point, so that just when you think the fight is over, he jumps back up and probably gets a good hit on you. Fighting him without a healer or lots of healing potions is not recommended.
    • Thankfully, your allies aren't fooled and this gives you the hint that he's playing dead. They'll keep attacking him while he's down, something they won't do against anything after it's been killed. This would go into artificial stupidity if the situation was even slightly different in any way. Unfortunately, he gets more aggressive after he gets back up.
  • Rafflesia in the Delirium Lava Ruins. Made up of the main body and four other plant parts, one which heals all of them for 1.200 HP, and summons hornets and can inflict one status effect after another on you, which all stack. When its HP is half-depleted it gets a big boost in defense, so even if you did some decent damage beforehand, it is likely that you're reduced to doing about 10 points of damage with melee attacks. Oh and the other parts of its bodies get regenerated after some time, so if you couple the boost in defense with the low damage you put out with the big healing from one of the plant parts, you've got one annoying boss.
  • The Sechs Golem leans more towards Marathon Boss, especially if you haven't got a high magic attack or you haven't levelled up your rune spells. It still hits like a tank though.
  • The Crystal Mammoth in Rune Prana is essentially the only obstacle in its segment of the dungeon, and deservedly so. It's significantly harder than even the Dual Boss of the next area. It also has the honorable mention of having a huge room filling attack that does enormous damage and stuns anything that gets hit, the only saving grace is that there are very few spots when that attack comes up that are safe to stand on. If you are equipped with 'Aqua' equipment (Aquamarine Gems when used on equipment that aren't weapons tend to result in defensive buffs that reduce all Water damage taken which Crystal Mammoth specializes in), you can possibly survive but don't expect it to make things a lot easier.
  • G Golem, an Earth damage specialist makes its return from the earlier installments and doesn't make things easier, especially since it's harder than the Sechs Golem. First off, it passively takes half damage from all melee attacks and it punishes melee fighters making it difficult for you to get close. Making it harder than that is that G Golem has at least two attacks that hit at a distance, a dual rocket punch that homes in on your character (or if you have allies, occasionally targets them instead) and a very powerful homing earth blast. Both of these attacks will auto-stun your character and allies should they get hit making them vulnerable for a few seconds. Earth resistant equipment doesn't help because it has one attack where it spins around and locks your character's movement making it impossible to escape until the attack ends meaning that one way or another you'll be taking a ton of damage.
  • Death Wall... Normally, you wouldn't get a boss like this but this one boss makes things harder than before, possibly harder than the actual final boss of the Arc. Starting things off, it's both a Luck-Based Mission and a timed mission at the same time. The former applies because the boss has a One-Hit Kill attack and the latter due to the former and a dead end being applied at the same time. The room moves down meaning that your maximum running space is reduced over time. Death Wall also has a few powerful attacks, but it's strongest is when it assumes the form of a drill. Thankfully, Death Wall when in this form, will randomly target any character in your party should you have allies so having at least one ally is recommended but what makes this attack devastating is that it constantly punishes the victim by doing continuous damage that won't end until the target's HP hits 0.
  • The four Giant Elemental Fairies, which is a pretty big boss rush at once where you fight four powerful elemental enemies at the same time. They are encountered within the boss room located a few areas from the final boss of the dungeon. Each specialize in a particular element, Water, Fire, Wind and Earth... with all of them doing magical damage. What makes this particular battle annoying isn't that you're not likely going to have more than one elemental resistance on your equipment meaning that three of the four fairies can easily harass you around but that they constantly move in circles around you making it nearly impossible to land a melee attack without being stunned. They each have a special attack that will auto-home in on you and only you after you do a certain amount of damage. This can be solved yet make things harder since if you or an ally hit them with an element they specialize in, they are healed for the same amount of damage they take. Meaning that should you bring the normal elemental fairies, chances are that they will heal two of the four half of the time.
  • Ragnarok. The Final Boss of the final Arc, while he/it looks like a palette swap of Ethelberd, this boss will make you think on the run. Sharing nearly every attack as Ethelberd, this boss has a few new traits in that he/it can use a unique attack by assuming the form of one of the four Native Dragons. The pain of the fight is that Ragnarock uses the same room filling, heavy-hitting One-Hit Kill attack that drags you towards it that Ethelberd used in the previous Arc. Oh, and the fact that this boss teleports about 90% of the time in battle means that you need to anticipate where he'll end up appearing if you want to get off some good hits.
• That One Level:
  • Delirium Lava Ruins is a massive pain. It's the first long dungeon in the game and features several environmental hazards including flame bursts that you have to time perfectly as you run across, carnivorous plants that will knock a good chunk of health off an underleveled player, and rooms that damage you just by being in them. Not to mention that Rafflesia, one of the most annoying bosses of the first arc that self heals and racks up status effects on you.
  • The Forest Of Beginnings. For starters, you are on your own for this stage, and to enter you have to destroy a large gate that summons random monsters and changes types frequently. Next you have to make it though 7 stages, each are blocked until you defeat the monster and invoke Checkpoint Starvation, this combined with the fact that you can't return to the clinic if you died (since you're on another plain of existence that requires a rare artifact to escape from or a rare magic that only Earthmates can cast to rescue something form there) mean you have to run this gauntlet from the very beginning if you fail. The first three are easy if you know what you are doing, the 4th and 5th can ruin you if you're not careful, the 6th one is a Dual Boss between two statues that shoots Fire and Ice attacks in a pattern (one attacks after the other) make it difficult to focus on one and the last stage is Sarcophagus; a monster with Teleport Spam, a plethora of attacks that all hit hard and once he Turns Red, a barrier that deals damage if you are too close and could kill you even if you defeat the boss at the same time. All in all this would be the first blatant Difficulty Spike in the game.
  • Maya Road is this even if you're prepared. Every enemy there hits considerably harder and a handful of them love to give status effects like paralysis and sleep like it's going out of style. It also has enemies that resist and many that absorbs physical damage, so you must bring elemental weapons or some potent magic spells or else you'll have little chance of surviving. And the boss for this area? A clone of Fiersome, another Native Dragon. Have fun.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Shipping higher leveled seeds in the previous game required you only to chuck said seed in the shipping bin and it'd be instantly upgraded for its respective shop. Now you need to properly ship it and if you forget to do it until 8AM you'll have to wait until the next day to upgrade the seeds you want to.
• Viewer Gender Confusion:
  • A common complaint regarding the male MC, which is ironic because Lest is the first male MC to be voiced by a guy in the JP version.
  • When Leon was first revealed, a number of people thought he was a girl due to a screenshot from his intro anime cutscene only showing him from the neck up. Once they saw his official art, though, all ambiguity about his gender went out the window.
• Viewer Pronunciation Confusion: Because a great deal of the text isn't voiced, players may go quite a long time without actually hearing someone call Dylas by name. Many have decided they prefer to pronounce his name as "Die-lass" instead of the game's "Dill-lass" (the Japanese version is more like "Dee-lass").
• WTH, Costuming Department?: Frey has soda can tabs on her nipples. Um, what?◊
• The Woobie: Most of the characters have some sort of tragic past, but Venti, the Guardians, and Doug take the cake. Venti is slowly dying from a lack of runes coming from the land, only being able to keep on living due to her four best friends sacrificing her humanity to maintain the rune population, thus keeping her alive. Once the protagonist defeats them, though...things go downhill quickly. The Guardians, as previously mentioned, pulled a Self-Sacrifice Scheme and turned themselves into monsters using the Etherlink spell to keep her alive. This froze them in time, being kept as monsters for centuries until they were beaten by Lest/Frey. All four of them show visible signs of missing their former lives, but Leon and Dolce arguably have the hardest time readjusting to the new time period. Doug is hiding some serious anger toward Ventuswill, being manipulated by the Sechs Empire into thinking that she leveled his village, killing his family and friends, when it was really the Sechs who did it. He tries to outright murder Ventuswill in the first arc, but only stops when she gives him a Kirk Summation on what he's doing. In the second arc, he nearly gets killed twice, first Taking the Bullet for Blossom after a Sechs Soldier attacks her, and trying to get the Rune Spheres back from Ethelberd the second time.