Try as I might, and oh, have I tried, the Rune Factory series has been a hurdle for me to get into for years. I’ve tried 3, 4, and 5 with their Switch versions, and none of them ever seemed to pull my attention. The latest title, a sort of spin-off experiment called Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma, caught my eye upon announcement, though. Cutscene direction, combat, and visuals were looking much better than the underwhelming Rune Factory 5. I decided to give it another shot, and I left impressed enough to know that the modern state of Rune Factory is clearly on the right foot.
Your chosen protagonist is an amnesiac who discovers themselves to be an Earth Dancer, tasked with saving the four realms of Azuma. Along the way, they need to uncover their past, restore life to each of the main villages in the realms, and roam dungeons across the land to gather materials. The story is a charming little romp to get you spending time with a silly cast of likeable characters. It also helps that progression doesn’t feel as aimless, with complexity left mostly to figuring out the gameplay instead of just figuring out how to progress in the story for those trying to mainline it.
While you have a calendar system in Azuma, it’s pretty lax. Days play out in real time, but none of your tasks has a deadline in any way. You are completely able to take your time with requests, farming, exploration, main story, or spending time raising your relationships with your party spread across the world. Characters have certain birthdays, and you can forget specific events you select, but that’s it. This is why I think this works as an entry-level farming sim, since I never once felt overwhelmed and drowning in time management woes. While I do prefer some kind of consequence to wasting my time, I found that this quickly led to me embracing the part of this genre that has always struggled to pull me in: Farming.
Each of your villages has sections dedicated to customization, and the number of these increases along with their levels. This is where you are free to build your own terrain, farms, houses, and more. Under the hood, the game calculates a scenic score amongst other buffs, improving the happiness of the villagers you place there. How you build these out is guided slightly by a list of missions, functioning as a numeric guideline to get your creativity going.
It is worth mentioning a unique feature amongst the console versions of the game for this Switch 2 Edition is a mouse mode for editing your village. The camera will pull out, letting you handle adding and removing parts of your towns with precision. Thankfully, the interface when playing with a controller is smooth enough not to cause too many issues, but it’s nice to see a system gimmick being used to its fullest. I still can’t believe how many Switch/Switch 2 ports don’t get a lot of use out of the touch screen, even for dialogue progression.
Having the freedom to dedicate days on end just to leveling up my farms made it feel less like a chore, and days are quick enough that my brain would never feel like the time was wasted there. I’d like a version of this game that puts more pressure on you to engage with the systems, but at the same time, these systems probably only worked for me individually because I could dedicate days to a single task. The only thing you ever really need to worry about is money, and that can be resolved quickly by a day of farming. This made me catch the farming sim bug, and I’ll be revisiting some of the older games now that Azuma has allowed me to “get it”.
Developing your villages will allow you to increase the amount of gear, items, and food you can take into the field. Spending time with your allies at home will make them work better in battle, which is nice given the large cast of playable characters you can befriend and take into battle. Those who play this only as an action game will find themselves at a wall, since you’ll need to consistently put your money into your party of 4. The best way to make money is to set up villagers to farm or run shops, since the profits will be tallied up at the end of the day. Exploration feeds back into farm life, since the fields are filled with enemies to fight or recruit, materials to gather, and new crafting recipes to unlock. The different parts of the gameplay all feed back into each other, but I think the lack of time management keeps them feeling more disparate than I would have ultimately liked.
The action combat is much better than anything I’ve seen from the series before, with smooth animations and genre staples like perfect dodges causing slow motion. You’ll have a primary weapon, a secondary weapon (I often made this a bow, since it can map onto the left trigger instead of needing to go into a menu), and a sacred treasure. A lot of your time is spent trying to aim for perfect dodges and keeping your NPC party members alive, but I think it works.
Sacred treasures have field effects that can sometimes double as attacks or enhance your movement options. These use up a resource called RP, which is replenished by food. So before you go out into a dungeon or a field, it’s a good idea to load your inventory with some healing items. Not too many, since you’ll want room to haul back materials, which is some well-needed friction the game would have been much worse without.
In terms of map design, though, I find the fields to be really fun and well-designed. The sprawling zones with no load screens (besides the one you use to get there out of the village), hidden secrets to find, were fun to revisit in the second half of the game as your arsenal and movement capabilities expand. You have a sky region above that can take you to the different villages (fast travel exists as well, once you find them), but that ultimately seemed a bit barren despite the pretty visuals. There are several dungeons you’ll be visiting throughout the main story, and while they aren’t all the most visually interesting, I appreciated that progressing through them felt very hands-off.
All this comes together in an adequate way, but shies away from true brilliance. I like the characters a lot, but I doubt any of them will stick with me for too long after I stop playing. There’s also the unfortunate reality that, despite being a game where your party can be made up with numerous side characters across each of the villages, a lot of these characters can’t be romanceable (Tsubame and Yachiyo come to mind). Battles are fun, but I found the upgrade tree feels both too limiting in how it improves your character and too easy to unlock since general EXP is gained at the end of the day by culminating everything you’ve done. I don’t find any of these faults to be damning to the ultimate experience, but I think they show that with small iterations, the next Rune Factory game can really amaze.
Being a Switch 2 launch title, it set a pretty high expectation for its visuals and performance. Rune Factory has never been known for high visual fidelity, with big criticism being laid in 5’s direction due to its lackluster visuals. This looks like a generational leap in comparison, despite both being available on some of the same systems. There’s stylized shading that allows the 3D models to match the art they were based on, and the bump in hardware means these are crisp docked and undocked. Being a lower-budget title, though, you can see the smart cutbacks that should lead to smooth performance on a portable system.
Unfortunately, it struggles to hit a consistent 60 frames per second on the Switch 2. From my eyes, it seems like it mostly hovers around 50-60 (the lowest I could feel would be around 45ish when things got hectic). It’s not enough to make the game fall under the unplayable range, but it’s consistently unstable enough to make the stutters pretty distracting. In the time since launch, there have been several patches, yet none have meaningfully improved performance.
Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma might not be the most polished game, with all of its systems not being fully cohesive, but it was the entry point to Rune Factory I’ve been looking for. The skill floor is pretty low, with simple combat mechanics and easy-to-manage farming. While it might not have the tightest design in a farming simulator or an ARPG, I think it presents a breezy and fun combination of both genres. I’d like to see another spin-off tackle this approach again, because I think there’s a lot of potential in the series going in this new direction. Hopefully, next time, though, the Nintendo Switch 2 version could get a bit more love.
Version Tested: Nintendo Switch 2
Review Copy Provided by Marvelous Europe / Marvelous USA
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