Journey to the East.
Whether it’s farming, dungeon crawling, or storytelling, the Rune Factory series always makes sure it doesn’t slack on any of those aspects. The mechanics are in-depth without being overly complicated, making them approachable for all kinds of players. Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma is the perfect candidate for those who are looking for an adventure with a cozy atmosphere, but with more action. Its unique blend of farming gameplay and RPG combat elements make it a cut above the rest of the farming simulators out there.
Guardians of Azuma begins with an amnesiac character with a mysterious backstory involving dragons and a dangerous blight as they wake up in a village modeled after the spring season. The protagonist is an Earth Dancer, a being with the ability to channel nature and stop the blight from spreading further, while also restoring each seasonal village, including summer, winter, and fall by reawakening their gods.
The best aspect of the story is that you can engage with it at your own pace. If I want to spend an entire day rearranging my garden fields, I can do so without any pressure. It’s like the opposite of a Persona game. There are no deadlines and the game lets me take as much time as I want to get accustomed to farming, fishing, or learning about other characters’ backstories.
The stakes are high enough that I felt like the fate of the world was in my hands, but not so high that there’s cognitive dissonance in dropping the main plot for a while and just doing side activities like growing crops. The world isn’t going to die out soon, but my eggplants will if I don’t water them!
The story is also well-paced due to the multitude of different biomes you encounter, themed in tandem with each of the villages. You’ll learn about what problems have been plaguing the village, such as the Summer Village’s volcano being dormant, then venture out into the wild to help. The outskirts of the Summer Village are beach-themed while the area outside the Winter Village is predictably a frozen tundra.
Guardians of Azuma also has a slight Metroidvania element wherein you’ll earn different traversal tools called Sacred Treasures, which adds more replayability to previous outskirts. These include items such as a Parasol that lets you glide through the air or a Mask that grants you superhuman strength to crush boulders. They let you access areas you couldn’t before, giving you a reason to backtrack to older places, discovering new recipes and blueprints along the way. The exploration opens up at a gradual pace, feeling natural.
Like past Rune Factory games, there’s a swath of characters you can befriend and even get into romantic encounters with. Every day, you can chat with them about a different topic like their weapons or food. Unfortunately, choosing a topic like discussing food doesn’t actually provide any dialogue about what their favorite food is. After picking an option, the screen just fades to black and they simply say that it was fun hanging out. These smaller interactions are a bit disappointing as they only increase the bond levels between you and the characters. If the bond level is high enough, however, you can go on specific side quests with these characters and learn more about their backstories and personalities. These are much more substantive and worthwhile.
A personal favorite of mine involves Ulalaka, the god of the Spring Village. Being a god, Ulalaka uses her magical powers to solve problems whenever there’s the slightest inconvenience in the village. Eventually, this would cause the villagers to be completely dependent on her and take her miracles for granted.
As such, Ulalaka has to learn restraint and not come to the rescue of every single villager so that they can learn how to solve problems themselves, as well as live like a normal person. This approach is a fantastic way to learn more about the characters, even when they have little involvement in the greater plot.
Guardians of Azuma’s aesthetic also takes a departure from the more Western fantasy and sometimes steampunk-ish art direction from past games. This time, the setting is heavily inspired by ancient Japanese culture, like games such as Kunitsu-Game: Path of the Goddess. It feels refreshing, yet familiar. Guardians of Azuma doesn’t make much progress from the previous game, which have similar Genshin Impact-like anime character models. Fortunately, however, there’s much more color variety this time around due to the new eastern setting and the four-season themed villages. In previous games, the color palette sometimes looked muted with too many earth tones.
Rune Factory’s farming mechanics are a central part of the series’ appeal, and it’s impressive how much depth there is and you can easily lose track of time. There are so many factors that go into growing crops, such as weather, time of day, or the number of people working on the different farms you have in your villages. You can use the crops you’ve grown to sell and make money, or as ingredients to make certain dishes to give to villagers or heal your HP while out in the wild.
These interlocking systems and mechanics make sure that every single item never feels like it’s worthless. As a hoarder, I found myself picking up every item possible while exploring and the game constantly rewarded me. It’s a stark contrast to games like Starfield, where I felt so bogged down with useless materials. In Guardians of Azuma, there’s always a use for that piece of dried up grass I just picked up, such as creating a field panel for my farm or just outright selling it for a tiny amount of coin.
It’s amazing how flexible the system is, too. You can create different tiles and make structures like windmills to decorate your farms. Or, you can simply ignore most of the farm and get by with the basics in order to advance the story. You get as much as you put in.
When you venture out into the wild, you can mine for resources that’ll let you create and upgrade more powerful weapons and armor. There’s a bit more of a necessity to keep up with forging as opposed to farming as you’ll be facing progressively stronger enemies. Combat is just as flexible as farming. Progression here is as simple as just continuing to create equipment with higher attack and defense values, which makes the process easy to understand. The combat and equipment upgrades add some much needed action to what would otherwise be a mundane routine day filled with just farming.
The real-time action combat itself isn’t terribly deep, but the straightforwardness is much appreciated compared to the more complex farming and forging mechanics. You have your basic attacks and elemental attacks from your Sacred Treasures. There’s also a dodge system that slows down time Bayonetta-style if you time it right, and gives you a window to completely wail on your enemies. It’s simple, yet effective. There’s just enough combat variety between the elemental Sacred Treasures and different weapons like great swords, daggers, and bows to keep combat from feeling stale.
Guardians of Azuma’s worst aspect is its performance. Constant texture pop-ins actually impacted gameplay when character models would take ages to load in, meaning I had to wait a few seconds before I could actually talk to the blacksmith NPC to upgrade weapons. There are also some chugging framerate issues, especially during battle if there were too many effects simultaneously going off on screen. This became frustrating as it affected my ability to time dodges correctly.
These issues were more pronounced when playing on Handheld Mode compared to TV Mode. Even with the framerate problems, it never came close to how terribly Rune Factory 5 performed on Switch.
Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma’s cycle between farming, forging, and fighting is just as satisfying as ever, and the change in scenery to an Eastern aesthetic gives it a fresh coat of paint. There’s so much to do; the story itself can take between 30-40 hours, but experiencing everything it has to offer and getting immersed in all the systems will easily take the playtime count to the triple digits range. Guardians of Azuma made a valiant effort to address its predecessor’s glaring performance issues, and with the Switch 2 version right around the corner, hopefully these issues are completely alleviated.
Score: 8
This review is based on a Nintendo Switch code provided by the publisher.
