Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma is a re-imagining of the long-running farming game in a mythical Japanese setting instead of its traditional vaguely European appearance. That’s hardly the only dramatic change to the series, though. Combat and adventuring take on a bigger role that ever before, and farming has moved from the focus of the game to a task that can be completely automated depending on how you set up your town. The core Rune Factory experience is still recognizable, but there’s a lot more Animal Crossing than Harvest Moon in this one.
The setting shift is probably the most unambiguously positive change. Rune Factory always had some unique flavor with its willingness to get silly, but its looks largely blended together with every other farming game. Its new look has rarely been done before in this genre, so most of its settings and character designs feel fresh here. It also helps that, rather than just copying Sakuna and making an ancient Japanese farming game, it went with a Meiji-era analogue and shows its world starting to interact with the characters and countries of previous RF titles.
Combat is also pretty close to unambiguously improved. It’s still a relatively simple affair, but there are five weapon types with their own strengths and special moves, and you can have two weapons equipped at once to react to the situation. You’ll also collect Sacred Treasures throughout Azuma that each have a special combat ability you can use by spending Rune Points (basically MP) and two stronger abilities you can use by spending charges you earn through attacking the enemy. All of this combines with the party system, which lets you bring along six characters to fight alongside you, three of whom are on the field at any one time. All of this has been done before in other genres, but it’s uniquely deep for a farming game and supported by some solid exploration and dungeon design.
The changes to farming and town building will be more divisive. You become mayor of four villages over the course of the game and gain responsibility for building various functional buildings and stat-boosting decorations in each town in order to level them up. Higher level towns support more villagers, who in turn needs more housing and more jobs assigned to them. The villagers are not characters and barely even have dialogue, but they can do a solid job of running your farms and collecting materials once you have enough of them. You’re going to have to engage heavily with the town building to beat the game, both because its the only reasonable way of earning enough money for late game items and because the stat boosts you can earn from it are dramatically larger than anything you’ll get from level ups. All you really have to do is build everything wherever it fits, though, so it doesn’t take over the game.
Lastly, the story and characters are kind of a mixed bag. The plot has some good moments, but the pacing is all over the place and one major choice can be resolved in a way that is rushed through and never mentioned again. The characters, similarly, mostly get the job done, but the non-romanceable characters are pretty flat and there are so many people spread across so many villages that trying to talk to all of them could get tedious. Azuma was the first time in recent memory that I’ve had to turn off voice acting in a game. Although some of the characters are well acted, some of them are what I will call “anime dub quality” and feature actors who’ve only previously done mobile gacha games where overacting and fake kawaii voices are expected. There are no sliders for individual characters, unfortunately, so the only choices are to mute everyone or put up with the ones that sound terrible.
Overall, Azuma is a great experience. The pacing issues keep it from reaching excellence, but I had a lot of fun with it and there’s a ton of satisfaction in watching your village numbers go up as you build more and more improvements. I played the Switch version on a Switch 2, which ran great but featured lowered graphics settings that were impossible not to notice. Unfortunately, the upgrade is a hard-to-justify $10 just to get nicer graphics and mouse controls, and they further felt the need to lock two of the marriage candidates behind a $10 day one DLC. If you’re able to look past the bad acting and exploitative DLC, the rest of the game is well worth your time.
Rating: 85%
Time to beat: 30-35 hours. Going for 100% would take much longer.
MSRP: $60 for Switch 1 or PC, but inexplicably $10 more for Switch 2
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