Describing itself as a reimagining of the series, Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma still has you farming crops and building relationships, but puts far more focus on fluid action, an engaging story, and expanded mechanics than previous titles. Does this spinoff’s new direction work? I dove into this JRPG to find out.
Amnesiac Dance
To anyone familiar with the series, it’ll come as no surprise that your character starts the game having lost their memories. They only recall a battle atop dragons, where they face the female character option if you chose the male or vice versa.
Following the memory loss, you’ve been living in a tiny village in the Japanese-inspired land of Azuma, a land that is slowly dying off. Following a disaster 50 years ago, the land is starved of runes, the source of life, leaving plants and animals in poor condition, and the gods haven’t been seen since. Blight has spread over the land and those unable to support themselves are leaving. While some dream of revitalizing their home, they can only do so much.
Then one day, you dream of a pink-haired goddess, calling you ‘Earth Dancer, an aide to the gods’. She says that her life force is almost spent, but asks you to act in her stead, offering you her sacred treasure, a drum with special abilities. Soon after, a flying Wooly tells you that it is a powerful dragon (despite looking more like a sheep) and that you need to track down the black dragon from your dream before it spreads more blight and further drains the runes from the country.
As you work to restore the land, you’re asked to take charge of the villages and develop them into productive places where people can both be happy and make a living.
This sets up the main narrative for Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma—Purify the blight, revive the gods, restore the four villages (one for each season), and chase the black dragon to stop it. It sounds simple, but it’s quite an involved story with the occasional dramatic twist.
Slow Start. Stronger Finish
Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma starts fairly slow, which isn’t unsurprising for the genre. You’re using your growing abilities as an Earth Dancer to restore the land around a village while meeting its residents, then moving on to complete tasks required for the next one.
It works well to give you time to get to know the village residents, but it’s not too exciting since you’re doing the same thing more or less four times in a row. That said, each part does have some story around the circumstances, which is either amusing in its own right such as dealing with the Autumn God’s reclusive personality or sows the seeds for more important events later on.
Not long after, things start to escalate and become more serious. We learn more about the protagonist’s mysterious past and the danger increases. Hina from Rune Factory 5 is an important character in Guardians of Azuma, so unsurprisingly there are some links there too.
There are some aspects I felt were missteps along the way. A certain choice has too much weight to it despite many previous choices not making any difference, and it too easily locks the player out of something important. Related to that, a big event is quickly finished and never mentioned again which makes it feel unimportant. The story was also at times a little too light, with everyone quickly making up and being friends, and the rare exceptions when it got unexpectedly heavy or serious would then feel out of place.
Despite a few issues, I thoroughly enjoyed the story of Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma to the point that I finished it within the week. I always wanted to see what would happen next or find out more about the lore that was being expanded on throughout the game. In the latter half of the game, some of the more prominent residents got more involved in the story too, giving us the chance to get to know them outside of their individual unlockable scenes. New characters were introduced fairly consistently throughout the game too, which in turn unlocked more of these scenes.
Going on an Adventure
Much of one’s playtime in Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma is spent exploring the regions surrounding the seasonal villages and making your way toward objectives to trigger the next story scene. Along the way, you’ll come across plenty of optional objectives that reward you in various ways. These objectives can be items, recipes for food, equipment, progress toward village level-ups, and more. You can even equip some of the villagers and bring a party of them along with you.
Monsters across the land will stand in your way. Fortunately, combat is fun and frequent. A good amount of choice is offered too, with a variety of balanced weapon styles. As you play, you also unlock new tools to use different kinds of elemental skills to mix into your combat style. Enemies have different weaknesses, so experimenting is encouraged.
While combat isn’t always the smoothest and perfect dodging could stand to be a little more obvious to time, I found it fun. It’s a nice mix of hack-and-slash action, with the ability to step back and start shooting arrows while your party takes the front line. And every action you take here gives you experience with the relevant skill, letting you level it up further. This applies to many non-combat skills too, from forging weapons to socializing.
As well as combat, there are plenty of puzzles to navigate, some of which did take a bit of thinking, especially those around some of the optional objectives. Later puzzles often had multiple layers, needing to figure out how to remove obstacles in order, search for hidden buttons, and figure out how to use tools to navigate parts of the level. This was sometimes combined with occasionally difficult platforming, where the right timing and approach are needed to land a jump. It’s a fun challenge, especially when the obstacles are sometimes actively attacking you and monsters appear on top of that to add more excitement.
While I enjoyed other aspects of Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma, this is where I found a lot of the enjoyment. I was actively searching for the optional goals, not for a sense of completion or the rewards, but because completing them was genuinely fun. Exploring little hidden corners of the map to unlock a path or find the perfect ledge to float over from felt rewarding.
Bonding and Romance
You can get to know each resident of the village through a line or two exchanged with them and the chance to hang out once per day or give them a gift. While a handful of the hangouts have scenes attached the first time that you view them, most of these events are just brief visuals.
Due to this, much like the story, getting anything interesting out of Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma’s relationship system involves getting through a slow start. Perhaps a little too slow, as it feels like it takes quite a long while, and many of the characters don’t make much of an impression at first despite their attractive character designs. Still, it does some things well, including showing that many of the characters have relationships with each other too from some of their dialogue or scenes.
Bonding quests for each of the romanceable characters appear after building up a good enough relationship. These are interesting, letting you explore the character’s backstory or help them explore some sort of personal issue. I grew to like all of the characters, either due to these quests or later main story developments. I did find it a little frustrating that many of these quests were locked by story progression though, despite it making sense for them to be. Between that and some characters just unlocking later, it meant that I was waiting a long time to continue some quest lines until near the end of the game, while I’d finished others by the halfway point of the game.
After completing a character’s bonding quests, you can then ask them to start a relationship. This involves another line of quests unique to the character where you find out more about them and involves some sweet moments together. I was pleasantly surprised that it had so much content specific to each character.
As with Rune Factory 5, you can romance characters of any gender regardless of the one you choose. Even if you don’t want to romance them though, it’s worth getting to know them both for the story and on occasion for special unlocks. And yes, you can date multiple characters at once, if your conscience allows it. It only cuts this off when you get married and even then you have a chance to change your mind later.
I should mention that building up the relationship can be slow going. Increasing it can be done in a number of ways, but it’s primarily through hangouts and gifts, which each character has their own preferences for. These preferences are difficult to suss out at times and you can step on a proverbial landmine in the process, losing the chance for progress for the day, as I learned when giving a character a tomato after she said she likes them, only to find out that she actually hates them. Still, building up relationships offers some nice rewards even outside of unlocking quests. One bonus I particularly liked was being able to cook with a character and make some character-specific food variants that tend to be better than the originals.
Farming Fun
As you clear the blight away and do other small tasks, you’ll level up your villages and gain access to development zones within them. This is where you can build farms and place buildings and decorations.
Farming is fairly straightforward. Much like similar games, you put down a field tile, plant seeds, water them, and then harvest the resulting crops to sell to fund your building and equipment costs. Materials to make field tiles tended to be the limiting factor rather than space, with the need to find these materials in the field or through side quest completion. You can later use tools to sacrifice crops in exchange for higher-level seeds, so there’s a small element of balancing future for current profits.
You can go about farming in two ways: the method typical of farming games where you run to each tile and perform the action, with the slight awkwardness of sometimes hitting the wrong tile, or you can do it all from an overhead view in a fraction of the time, quickly skimming through dozens of tiles in seconds to plant seeds, water tiles, and harvest. Each in-game day only has a limited amount of time, so there is a practical benefit to the overhead view as it leaves more hours to spend on bonding events or exploring the world. The only exception is the seed upgrades, which must be done with the slower “go to the tile and perform the action” method.
There are a few crops that grow well or poorly in each region, as well as some non-specific ones. I found making money via farming really easy in Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma, but it was more effort to grow specific crops of certain levels to use to make high-quality food or fulfill quests.
If you don’t want to farm, you can even assign villagers to do it for you. Sadly, I found they don’t do a particularly good job of it. They tend to leave some tiles unwatered and replant random low-level seeds or even nothing at all at times. With at least one farm per village, it is a little difficult to keep up if you want to build them all up. I ended up mostly focusing on the Spring farm, just occasionally looking in on the others. You might have a slower play style where you don’t mind taking the time though.
As an additional note, while not specific to farming, inventory management could be better. Whenever I ship crops, I find myself searching for too long for the right crops. A filter for type or being able to order by recent would be helpful.
Building Barns
As mentioned, you can also add buildings and decorations in Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma. They have an interesting system where adding them not only adds a feature to the village at times or helps to increase the village level but also increases your stats. It only counts for the first one of each type per village though, which encourages variety.
This ties into village management too, with the ability to recruit new villagers who can then be put to work. I mentioned their lack of farming prowess, but they can also be assigned to tasks such as working in shops or other facilities to earn money as passive income or going out to gather resources.
It nicely spreads out adding new features over the progression of the game, with features like taming monsters linking to the villagers’ function to take care of them.
Some villagers have special skills that let them work in certain stores (like blacksmiths and carpenters), which was an interesting feature. But despite completing the entire game, upgrading my villages a lot and even occasionally evicting less useful villagers, I never did manage to find anyone with the amateur chemist skill, leaving me without the ability to make potions.
Post-Game Clean Up
It took me about 40 hours to complete the main story, though a lot of that was going out of my way for optional objectives and bonding quests, and I continued playing after the story. There isn’t much in the way of new content that you can only do after completion. What you can do however is spend time completing any remaining bonding quests or romance quests, along with any objectives you’ve not yet cleared, which is at least another 10 hours.
Unfortunately, there is no New Game+ mode. This would’ve been a nice inclusion, especially considering that certain choices are irreversible, including some linked to Steam achievements/trophies.
Little Issues
I certainly enjoyed playing Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma, but I’ve mentioned a few minor issues and these hold it back a little. There are just little moments of frustration that seem like they could be easily fixed.
One example of this is a helpful villager disappearing without any indication. It turns out that she went missing in a bonding quest, but she stopped appearing in the villages before this happened and with no indication of why until starting that quest. This didn’t make sense, especially since the ‘disappearance’ was resolved immediately. I was busy with other quests, so I didn’t continue that questline until later, meaning she was just gone for days without any apparent reason.
Mismatched dialogue was also an issue occasionally. In the story, a character says they wish someone was there for an event when they were in the party at the time. Just running around and mining ore had a character talking about using it as an ingredient for food. And as I mentioned earlier, at least one character mentions liking something they actually hate to receive as a gift. Little things like that which stood out.
There were also issues in battle. On occasion, your allies may start to shoot into rocks or other surfaces when an enemy is on the other side.
Most issues are small, but there are quite a few little things that do bring the experience down, if only slightly. Perhaps some will be updated in future patches.
Prime Performance
While I know not everyone is on board with this 3D anime style of model, I think overall everything looks good. The character designs in particular stand out and there is a good variety of monsters, despite using recolors/palette swaps for more powerful variants of monsters.
On the topic of characters, a nice bonus is that you can change equipment and separately change appearance. Don’t like the look of that hat but want its stat bonus? You can wear it while setting something different in the appearance menu.
I played Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma on PC, partially due to the poor Nintendo Switch experience of Rune Factory 5. While I can’t comment on other platforms, the performance here felt near-perfect on my aging PC. I occasionally experienced a little slowdown, but these occasions were few and far between. Pop-in (i.e. things appearing suddenly as they load in) was an issue too, but an infrequent one.
Both Japanese and English voice acting are included. Both were good, though I mostly played through with the Japanese which I preferred. I found the voices suited the characters well and the acting was appropriate. The game is partially voiced only. Some scenes have full lines, while some just use voice utterances and grunts.
Verdict
Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma is the most fun I’ve had with a Rune Factory title yet. It’s certainly not perfect with quite a few little issues holding it back, but the core experience is so fun that it didn’t stop me from enjoying every moment. There’s just so much to enjoy here that it makes it easy to recommend.
RUNE FACTORY: GUARDIANS OF AZUMA IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
If you are looking for another JRPG/Simulation game hybrid, you might want to check out Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time.
Many thanks go to Marvelous Games for a PC review code for Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma.
A gamer since the days of Amstrad and DOS and someone who has dabbled in a variety of professions. He enjoys a wide variety of genres, but has been focusing on visual novels and virtual reality in recent years. Head Editor of NookGaming. Follow him and the website on @NookSite.
