Rune Factory 5 is hitting the west in 2022, same-sex marriage feature is the highlight

The Japanese simulation RPG Rune Factory 5 is coming to the west on March 22, 2022, XSEED and Marvelous announced.

Not only that, a very important feature that the team has been working toward for many years will also be implemented into Rune Factory 5 along with the localization: same-sex marriage.

"Rune Factory 5 will be the first game in the series to include same-sex marriage. This means that from the start of the game you can marry any of the 12 wonderful marriage candidates as Ares or Alice without avatar-swapping or other conditions. This feature was not present in the Japanese release of the game in May of this year, but will be added to that version in a future patch. It will be included in our game from launch", said the U.S. localization team.

As also stated in this lengthy post, adding same-sex marriage didn't delay the game's Western release, since it'd take quite an amount of time to do the localization anyway especially from English into French and German. Also, the team needs to make sure they have enough time to do the quality assurance testing, "implementing this new feature did take time, but we adjusted our overall schedule so that it didn't affect our release date", explained the developers.

They also talked about how the groundwork was laid, and for the new same-sex marriage feature how they have to add more cutscenes and lines, etc, more details can be found here if you're interested.