Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma Review - Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back

Rune Factory has been in a weird spot over the last few console generations. Despite surviving the collapse of its original developer, the eventual release of Rune Factory 5 was — to put it bluntly — a bit of a disaster. However, rather than disappearing for another 10 years, Marvelous ended up revealing that not one but two more games were on the way.

While Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma might not be a numbered title, it held all the expectations of a mainline entry regardless. It needed to fix up the issues with Rune Factory 5 and bring the franchise into the modern era. But while it certainly manages the latter with a big boost in production values, Guardians of Azuma’s different take on farming and fighting fails to do either of these elements particularly well.

Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma takes place some time after the events of 5 in the eastern lands of Azuma. Devastated by an event known as “The Celestial Collapse”, Azuma is slowly withering away. Enter the protagonist, one of two playable amnesiacs who finds themselves trying to restore the lands and regain their memories along the way.

This leads to the protagonist’s new life of both adventuring and village building as they work to bring life back to each area. It definitely tries to set up a more plot-heavy story, thanks in part to the addition of full voice acting and much improved character models. In practice, though, the story often takes a backseat to character events instead.

You start off with access to Spring Village, quickly becoming its leader and given free rein to start building new facilities and decorations. Being able to design sections of each village is the main new gimmick in Guardians of Azuma, improving them to both entice villagers back and increase your stats in the process.

You’re only able to build within specific zones, adding in facilities like blacksmiths, farmland, or more housing as new villagers move in. It’s all easy to understand, with simple Village Missions guiding you towards specific goals. Completing missions lets you level up villages, granting access to more buildings, build areas, and an increased villager cap.

This simple system makes picking up building a breeze, but also ends up being its downfall at the same time. Village building never increases in complexity as you continue, and you don’t have to put much thought into how you construct each one. In fact, Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma does a pretty terrible job of making any of the village-specific stats actually matter.

Some buildings can increase the percentage bonuses for certain aspects like farming or mining, but this never feels impactful. Villagers also come with an Output value, though you have no real incentive to actively pay attention to this. Regardless of what I chose, it never seemed like my choices changed much about how villages functioned day to day.

I’m reminded a lot of Dondoko Island in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, where you're not expected to try that hard in building things up. At least in that game, it was only a side mode, rather than a key component of the main gameplay loop.

By the end of the story, I stopped paying much attention to any of the village building mechanics, outside of cramming stat boost decorations into one corner. Since build space is quite limited in most villages — only one has a large area to work with — it’ll be hard to really make a village that's distinct from what other players will end up creating anyway.

What makes this an issue is the fact that a lot of Guardians of Azuma is cut back when compared to mainline Rune Factory entries. Farming is even less important, there are few side activities, and the world is still kept relatively small. I could understand if this was done to make way for an in-depth village-building system, but that’s just not the case.

In regard to the small world, this is something that’s shared by all games in the franchise. But in Guardians of Azuma, it almost feels like you were intended to have access to larger zones at some point. You have four main zones, with smaller sky islands and linear dungeons. None are particularly big, and everything is shown on the map, which kills the feeling of exploration.

At the very least, combat has seen some improvements over Rune Factory 5. Movement and combos are generally faster, with timed dodges opening up enemies to counterattacks as you slow down time. Weapon choices aren’t that exciting, and you can get by using pretty much anything, though the bow does at least allow for manually aimed charge attacks.

As with earlier Rune Factory games, combat still remains easy overall. Keeping your gear up to date and placing decorations in each village is enough to keep your stats up to date. Level grinding is nonexistent too — if you enter an area with enemies higher than your current level, you gain massively increased XP. Conversely, you get barely any XP for enemies at or below your level.

Adventuring outside the villages is still fun enough, I just wish that there was more going on in each area. As mentioned earlier, there’s no real sense of exploration due to the small areas and abundance of map markers. Outside of gathering wood and stone, there’s often not much of an incentive to retread old ground either.

With village building lacking substance and exploration being limited, it's the character events that really carry Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma. I enjoyed getting to know the main cast, chatting to them daily while unlocking new friendship and romance events.

Like with the main story, events are all fully voiced with both an excellent English dub and what seemed like solid Japanese voice acting (though I used the former for most of my playthrough). Combined with the more expressive character models, this is the best events have ever been in Rune Factory.

What’s strange is that, despite having strong character events, the actual main story is mostly terrible. Things aren’t so bad starting out, as you get to visit each village and meet its inhabitants. But after that, the story becomes very sloppy and poorly paced, with multiple characters or plotlines introduced and dropped at a moment's notice.

Like with some elements of exploration, there’s a feeling that major parts of the story had to be cut at some point. It all culminates in a main plot that just ends up being rushed, despite still taking a while to complete.

I also can’t talk about the story and characters without specifically highlighting that multiple characters have events locked behind day 1 DLC. With events being the highlight of the game, I can’t really condone cutting some of this from players who don’t want to pay more at launch.

Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma Review | Final Thoughts

Strong character events and improved presentation aren’t enough to carry a weak story and cut-down content. There’s still fun to be had when it comes to Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma’s characters, but here’s hoping Rune Factory 6 improves upon everything else.

Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma was reviewed on PC with a copy provided by the publisher over the course of 50 hours of gameplay - all screenshots were taken during the process of review.