Rune Factory: Frontier/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Complete Monster: Gelwein.
  • Crowning Moment of Awesome: How Raguna wins the final battle.
  • Crowning Moment of Funny: Several, but most notably-
    • Try and propose to any of the non-marriage candidates when their friend level reaches 10, even the men! Seriously, Hilarity Ensues.
    • Even better: Just see what happens if you try to propose to another woman after Raguna gets married.
  • Crowning Moment of Heartwarming: Any and all of the proposals and weddings to the maidens.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: "Song of Trust", sung by all the maidens, in the final battle. Give it a go here.
    • This here [dead link] is the Japanese version.
    • The enitre soundtrack qualifies, with the Season themes standing out in particular, and ESPECIALLY Iris Noire's battle theme.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Rosetta, Selphy and Kross.
    • Don't forget about Melody. She's so well liked that they made another character that looks similar in Rune Factory 3 and clearly expected her to be one of the most popular, as evidenced by her presence in the first OP.
  • Fridge Logic: The recipe given for the wedding bouquet is said to be part of the tradition for proposing to someone in Trampoli, yet it requires an ingredient that can only be found on Whale Island, which was inaccessible until Raguna grew a path to it, so how could there be any married couples in town without a needed ingredient for the traditional bouquet?
    • People get married elsewhere and move here.
  • Game Breaker: The Runey System, either in a good way or a bad way. Bottomlined, having a lot of prosperity areas can make crop growth ridiculously fast[1], but if you don't take care of the Runey balance quite often, you'll be waiting for weeks for a turnip to grow.
    • That's just a con for not taking care of Runey population properly. And properly taking care of it is another story...
  • Ho Yay: The male characters have several lines that hint at this. Made especially blatant with the option to propose to them. Even Brodik.
  • Love It or Hate It: The Runey system. Again.
  • Scrappy Mechanic: If you don't like it, the Runey System. Basically, you have to balance out nature spirits (Complete with their own food chain, so they never STAY balanced) by sucking them up with an inefficient "Harvester" and spreading them out evenly throughout the world. If you do it right, your crops will grow much faster (To the point of Game Breaker status; see above). But if you ignore this (Or aren't aware of the need to do so) the runeys will die out. And Runeys dying out in even ONE AREA (There are 7 or 8 areas) of the world can cause crops to take much longer to grow (Up to 4 times as long!) and/or randomly die in your fields. Needless to say, it has caused a case of Broken Base.
    • While those that like it point out that it can speed up crop growth and can be streamlined, critics have some valid points when they point out that it's fairily inefficient, tedious, and NOT optional at all. Simply put, if you don't spend a good chunk of time on the system, you can kiss your chances of farming goodbye as your crops take forever to grow and randomly die.
      • To clarify on why it can be love or hate, you need to collect different Runeys and release them in order to balance them out (on top of natural death/growth rates). To collect them requires using an item to suck in near by Runeys. However, doing so results in a good 4 second or so animation and it only sucks up Runeys very near you (around 12 or so in a crowd) and it does so indiscriminately (you can't pick which ones you want and you will suck up everything in range). You can't move while this is happening either. Releasing them also results in a long animation (and you can't move). And you need to do this for many areas each of which can have tens of different Runeys spread all over the area. The result is that while the mechanic isn't necessarily bad, the means to interact with it is long and imprecise. If you want to suck up only 2 near by Runeys of a specific type, you end up having to suck up all nearby Runeys and then release the all of the Runeys except for the 2 you want.
    • The worst part is that the game and the manual don't really explain this at all. They mention it, but don't explain any of the finer points. To truly understand how to make it work you'll have to look on the internet.
  • That One Boss: If you don't know the tricks, all the bosses will qualify, even if not at first. But the dungeon bosses just outshine the storyline bosses in particular; in addition to their massively towering sizes, they can ass-whoop you in a few hits even around the first time you fight them. On successive visits, they'll be waiting for you with a new bucket of kick-assery. Even that fades in comparison to their post-endgame power-ups, where their stats are buffed up 2~3 times to hit three digits their original, with their HP literally Over Nine Thousand hitting FIVE digits. Have fun dying!
    • However, two dungeon bosses need to be defeated only once, and the other two are just optional. But chances are, you're gonna need to fight them sooner or later, since you need their unique drops for... your kid's toys.
  • Toy Ship: Marco and Candy.
  • Unpopular Popular Character: Erik has to bribe Anette to say nice things about him. Would you require a bribe to tell anyone how awesome he is?
    • Erik may be Estrogen Brigade Bait in the fandom, but in-game, he's the butt of jokes regarding his failure at romantic relationships.
  • Values Dissonance: As Jonathan Holmes of Destructoid put it: "[I] still can't believe I had to talk a girl into losing weight in a videogame, and it was actually the right choice."
  1. At 6, onions grow at the same rate as turnips.