Rune Factory 4, you need to pick your game up, I'm being rapidly disappointed in my 40 dollar purchase
I'm not fully done with it yet, atleast I hope not, but I'm extremely frustrated in the fact that it's so intensely hard to get any of the npc characters to do anything with you.
You see, one thing that attracted me to the game was the possibility of forming friendships and relationships with the wide cast of characters. In fact, what is probably the most prominent blurb in the advertising is that you can get married and your family can adventure with you.
*Fast forward to me playing the game*
Playing the game for the first time, I find there's a bar that keeps track of your intimacy with other npc's. This is unmissable as it's in the tutorial. Once I'm given free movement through the game world, I start introducing myself to the cast of townspeople. Everyone looks kind of average, until I get to Illuminata, the Elf Ace Detective, wherein I then immediately declare her to be my future waifu, until I look at the previously mentioned bars that track intimacy and notice that she's only friendable and nothing more. My disappointment is already palpable, every other girl is very wishy washy.
Progressing through the game, I notice that I really only have two methods of socialization: One being showering people you like with gifts every day without rhyme or reason, which is actually a true grueling test of patience and a war of attrition against your wallet (which actually seems counterintuitive, since shelling gifts onto anyone for no reason is kind of creepy and personally demeaning IMO) and the second being the "BTW" option, wherein extracting a character's normal text from talking to them, you attach a question to the end in the form of a "By the way..."
You only have two options though, you can ask them to go adventure with you, or you can straight up confess your deep true unwavering passionate love for them...
Come on game, stop making me be creepy. I don't want to be creepy.
So, as far as I can tell, you only have ONE option, and that's asking people to adventure with you. Good luck with that though, cause ABSOLUTELY NOONE WANTS TO ADVENTURE. Doesn't matter if they like you, if they're not doing anything, time of day means nothing, gifts given mean nothing. Noone is at all interested in sacrificing a minute of their day to hang out with you and kill monsters.
I didn't know this going into the game though, so my adventure shaped out like this:
Talking to the stereotypical chinese girl, a possible hookup candidate: "Want to adventure and kill monsters? It's like literally the only interesting thing to do"
"Haha no"
The next one, some elf girl "I'm doing something else."
The next one, a cute, narcoleptic butler girl "I'm busy"
Everywhere I go, every girl I talk to, they only have one answer for me, it's NO NO NO NO NO!
Actually, I take that back, cause there was ONE girl who agreed to adventure, and it's the one dressed up as a knight with a weird chivalry complex. She adventured with me sometimes, even if she had a ridiculously inconsistent bed time, sometimes bailing on me high and dry at 8 pm sharp, while other times sticking with me well after midnight and into the next day. But hey, beggars can't be choosers, she might even grow on me, who knows? She had a transparent personality quirk though, and it's that she's afraid of ghosts. So, of course, I take her adventuring to the haunted house and we fight nothing but ghosts, eventually getting to the ultimate ghost monster at the end, where in the chaos of the fight she gets her ass handed to her and I scrape out a victory by the skin of my teeth.... I wasn't thinking about it at the time, but that's probably why she doesn't want to adventure with me after that...
BUT HEY, WHO NEEDS THE LADIES RIGHT? Let's start up the goddamn bromance train with some other manly fella that DEFINITELY WANTS TO DO MANLY SHIT LIKE KILL MONSTERS!
Everywhere I go, every guy I talk to, the result is the same, it's NO NO NO NO NO!
Holy shit Rune Factory, I shell out money, real hard fucking cash, in hopes of momentarily quelling the everpresent desperate loneliness that is my life, wanting so badly to drown it in a kind of wishful-thinking escapist fantasy game that'll let me atleast PRETEND to have close friends and love interests. What happened though, is that I paid money to have a game that rejects me over and over and over, which is actually something of an accurate simulation of my real life.
..but hey, atleast I have my enslaved monster pets that have NO CHOICE but to love me... right...?
Fuck my life, Rune Factory.