Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma review – Breathing new life into an old world

Finding a good entry point for a series like Rune Factory isn’t easy. While each game is mostly self-contained, there’s a whole world of lore to catch up on and, being a farming/life-sim series, a lot of complex mechanics to wrap your brain around. This is what makes Guardians of Azuma the perfect game for newcomers. It simplifies some of the farming and crafting mechanics, but makes up for it with a bigger emphasis on action and exploration, and a whole town-building system to sink your teeth into.

It also separates itself from the rest of the series by being set on a brand new land, far away from the settings of the other games, meaning coming into it knowing nothing about the lore is the entire point this time around – and the story can be structured around that assumption – making for better pacing and less of a hurdle for first-time players.

We awaken in a village, and just in case you weren’t already aware this is a JRPG, our protagonist is an amnesiac who needs every detail of the world explained to them. After a brief intro, we find the god of Spring come to us in our dream, and our quest for the game quickly becomes clear: Use our newfound powers as the Earth Dancer to awaken the four seasonal gods and restore their powers by planting Cabbages, and from there you’re off to the races

The gameplay loop will see you balancing your time between tending to your fields, building bonds with your villagers (many of whom are romancable), and exploring the outside world to gain new resources, recipes, and advance the main story.

The farming side of the game is simplified from the main Rune Factory series. You don’t need to worry about things like soil composition in this game; instead, you just need to keep your crops watered and pay attention to what season they grow best in, as each of the four villages you unlock is permanently in a different one.

However, you can’t use up all your space on crops, as the development zones where you can plant stuff are also the places where you have to build the villages. You can craft various buildings like shops, cafes, and bathhouses, as well as a huge variety of decorations to enhance the place, both progressing your villages’ level and increasing your character's stats.

As your villages grow, you’ll unlock more recipes, more villagers, and new quests, while each of the buildings increases either your character’s combat stats or the villages’ yields, ranging from increasing the number of crops you harvest to the amount of ore you can mine from nodes. This system is incredibly satisfying, and with four different villages to build, you can flex your creative muscles in a variety of ways, especially as the game rewards you for placing similar items and buildings close together or on paths, meaning it’s mechanically optimal to make nice-looking areas.

This all feeds nicely into the exploration side of the game, too. Each village is attached to a much larger area where you’ll be fighting critters, finding treasure, and using your power to cleanse the land of Blight. While doing this, you’ll be constantly finding new recipes for dishes, decorations, gear, and buildings, which in turn will improve your performance in the field. It stops the town-building from being a “set it and forget it” system, as you’ll always come back from an adventure with new stuff to add that encourages you to rethink your designs.

The combat isn’t complex, but I don’t want it to be in this sort of game. You have a variety of different weapons to choose from – of which you can equip two at once – and from there you’ll mostly be mashing the attack button and occasionally hitting a dodge. Boss battles are a little deeper, as your attacks barely do any damage, instead having to build up a stun bar to make them vulnerable. Plus, the god’s relics unlock a handful of special attacks you can pull out, but that’s it.

That isn’t a bad thing, though. With combat being just one aspect of what can reasonably be described as a cozy game, making it too in-depth would overwhelm the experience. Instead of a tough challenge, heading out on an adventure is more of a nice change of pace, with the focus being more on the exploration than the battles, often with the promise of story progression along with it.

The same god relics that can be used in battle are much more effective in cleansing the progression-blocking obstacles out in the world, both in the sense of clearing certain types of Blight barriers and as mobility tools, like a parasol that acts as a glider.

That brings us to the most important part of any life-sim game, though: the many bachelors and bachelorettes you can woo.

While improving your town will just attract non-descript NPC villagers, each location has a handful of distinct characters who mill about the place, and you can interact with. Each day, you can spend some time hanging out with them, selecting from a variety of activities that they all like and dislike to varying degrees, which I find to be a more fulfilling system than just throwing an endless supply of their favourite gift at them until they love you.

They all get a chance to let their personalities shine too, as every romancable character has their own questline that lets them take the spotlight. They don’t stray too far from your usual array of JRPG archetypes, but they all manage to bring a unique charm to the table. Plus, unlike so many life-sims, starting a relationship isn’t the end point, and you get to dive deeper into who they are once you’ve confessed your feelings for each other.

For example, I started dating the god of Spring and got a storyline about how that’s kind of weird for everyone involved. It actually addresses the fact that dating an ageless being with duties and powers beyond your comprehension is going to cause a few problems in the relationship, which is a surprisingly novel take given how most games like this treat it as totally normal.

It even gives you a way to experience all of these stories without feeling bad, as you will eventually unlock a way to hop between alternate, identical realities where you can be in a monogamous relationship with a different person. Although it’s not that big a deal, considering you can date multiple people in a single reality with minimal consequences anyway. Still, it shows that a lot of care has been put into these personal stories, and it’s worth experiencing all of them.

The game does fall into some of the common traps of farming sims, though. The whole point of the non-descript NPC villagers you can attract is to perform jobs for you in the village, but when it comes to the most important job, farming, they just aren’t up to the task. You need to make a certain amount of profit every day to feed everyone in your villages, and farming is the primary way of doing that. While leaving it to the NPCs will earn you enough to get by, they do an extremely sub-optimal job compared to what you can do, which is frustrating.

In the end, I found them interfering in my layouts more of an annoyance than anything, which led to me doing all four villages' farms entirely manually, and while it doesn’t take that much time, doing it at the start of every in-game day does get tiresome. It would be a lot better if the game gave you more options to direct the NPCs in terms of what seeds they should plant where and what they should prioritize to earn you XP towards upgrading your village.

Still, Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma stands as one of the better life-sims out there, striking a good balance between the village, its people, and the outside world you can explore. The town-building elements make it really feel like you’re regrowing these places into prosperous societies, and it’s a lot of fun getting to know all of the colourful personalities that reside there. Combine that with simpler farming and a solid main narrative, and you have the perfect place for Rune Factory newcomers to start.