Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma Review - Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch
Rune Factory as a series feels like it’s in a bit of a tight spot. After years of no games and little hope for me, Rune Factory 5 got released and was a bit of a fart in the breeze. I doubt any person was energised for more games after that. Still, I was cautiously optimistic for Guardians of Azuma, because even though it joins the trend of looking a lot like Genshin Impact, a spin-off could be exactly what the series needs.
The spin-offs of Rune Factory are always a bit strange. Instead of having the core loop be farming in its various forms, they instead lean into a hook. The hook this time around is around village management. It’s light on, but you have the ability to place buildings and decorations in certain areas of each of the villages to raise their level and functionality, as well as kick out random villagers with garbage stats/buffs. The point here is to make each village profitable, so you’ll always kick out villagers who eat too much or are lazy. This feels pretty bad at first, but they’re completely replaceable and have no real presence, so you quickly get over it.
The villagers are also meant to do chores around the village for you, and mostly it’s fine, except for farming. Whoever designed the AI of these villagers for farming truly hates farmers. They’ll collect all your crops and replace them with random seeds, causing your farms to be a weird mish-mash of everything, rather than replanting what they picked up. It’s truly hellish trying to make your farms work around these awful people, and they handle it so early in the day that it’s nearly impossible to hit all the towns before they descend upon your farms like locusts.
You play as one of the Guardians of Azuma, an Earth Dancer. Your job is to go around bringing life to each village by waking up the gods and restoring their power through dance. It’s pretty basic, and I found the story pretty serviceable, but the stars are definitely the characters. Each of the characters is fun to talk to, and I greatly enjoyed their stories playing out as you get closer to them.
Whilst money is important, the real currency is time. Interacting with characters to increase their closeness takes blocks of time, and if you stay out until midnight, your health and RP (rune points) will start to drop quickly. This only became a problem for me a few times, where I was out in a dungeon and had to call it quits early, but the game offsets this by having a decent ‘checkpoint’ system via dragon statues. These allow you to teleport back to set spots instantly, and as there are a lot of spots on the map, they quickly become critical to getting around.
Combat also has a strong focus. Your options are limited – there’s realistically only one attack button outside of special attacks, and you can only use two weapons at a time, but usually, combat doesn’t last all too long, so it’s fine. You can also bring three villagers in your active party to fill certain roles, like tank or healer. It doesn’t add much to the gameplay, but it’s nice enough. Oddly, the ‘ranged’ attack button only works for bows and not talismans. Weird choice. Combat’s fine, but it didn’t exactly see my heart aflutter. Outside of bosses, encounters came down to spamming attack a few times and then moving on to the next enemy. It’s not a difficult game either, so often I would attack mobs much stronger than myself just to try and bring in some strategy.
Ultimately, though, outside of needing to push through the story as quickly as possible to get through the gated unlocks, the game boils down to managing the village. You have the ability to place buildings, but only in set areas. Most of these buildings have a stat bonus attached to them to help raise your character strength up, but more importantly, they level the village itself up. Developing the village by completing set challenges unlocks new areas, new items in shops and myriad other benefits. Because of this, you actually end up focusing on multiple things in tandem: the macro-level progression of the story itself, stopping the world from ending; the meso-level progression of developing towns to unlock new items and make your character stronger; and the micro-level of player relationships, watching smaller stories unfold and making your party stronger when you go out fighting. It’s a fine balance, and I think this game does really well at it.
If Rune Factory 5 was a misstep, Guardians of Azuma is a return to form. If they bring the same level of quality to the mainline games, I’m certainly back on board. It’s not perfect, by any means, but it’s more than enjoyable enough that I was happy to play through all 50 hours or so until credits. Hopefully, some more quality of life changes will fix some of the bigger pain points, like maybe a way to kick certain villagers automatically, or to advertise for specific traits.
Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma was reviewed on PC with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
