Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma (Switch/Switch 2) Review

I’ve never been one for farming games. They often require a lot of micromanagement and optimisation, making sure you have the right crops and the right yields to make enough money to last long enough to do the same thing the next day, and that kind of gameplay doesn’t vibe with me. Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma is a different story, though, because while it does still require some of that busywork, it’s also a fantastic RPG. 

The story setup in Guardians of Azuma is pretty straightforward. You play as an Earth Dancer, a talented and gifted individual whose kindness and spiritual connection to the land makes them ideal for revitalisation of tainted lands. After an epic battle atop ancient dragons, you fall to the tainted land of Azuma, lose your memory, and start helping out the people of the Spring Village. 

From there it’s a story of awakening gods and goddesses, who watch over and provide blessings to the four seasonal villages, while you revitalise the land, re-establish farming production, and help the villages be the best they can be. It’s a solid story, though it does feel very rushed at times — your visit to the Summer village sees you landing in the village, retrieving a sword from the wilds, and then leaving for the next village almost immediately afterwards. There are plenty of reasons to return, of course, but in terms of story that’s pretty much all you get. Other villages and aspects of the story are much more fleshed out, but it’s hard not to feel like the game is just getting all the pesky story out of the way so you can focus on the day-to-day gameplay. 

And that’s where Guardians of Azuma shines. Yes, there’s a lot of farming, but it’s not all busywork you have to do yourself. Once you’ve got a village restored and farmlands established, villagers start moving back in and are more than happy to pull their weight. You can assign villagers to certain jobs, like farming, wood gathering, mining, or shopkeeping, and with enough villagers your villages eventually become self-sufficient, generating passive income while you’re free to live your life elsewhere. 

That said, relying on villagers is a bit frustrating at times. It takes seconds for you as the player to plant an entire field of seeds, water your crops, or pick them once they’ve grown, and villagers absolutely don’t work that fast. If you have enough villagers they’ll usually get all the required work done by the time night falls, but it’s by no means guaranteed, and when it’s quicker to just do it all yourself, you might find yourself just spending a few minutes in your morning routine doing it all anyway. There is an upside to this, though, because it means you can assign your villagers elsewhere, like shops, which generate passive income in a way that you can’t really do yourself, so it does balance out in the end — villagers are essentially there to help, not to do all your work for you. 

Your free time is valuable, because it lets you spend time with the dozens of characters you meet throughout your journey. Some of these characters are more fleshed out than others, but they’re all at a baseline fairly interesting and intriguing, and progressing through their relationships and bonding quests is a lot of fun.

There’s some great writing in here, and for the most part there’s not really anything overly uncomfortable or creepy from either a writing or design perspective. Some of the women in this game are very well-endowed in the chest area, as you’d expect from a game like this, but it’s never over-the-top, and the camerawork doesn’t dwell on those body parts. Importantly, every character has an actual personality, with thoughts and interests and character-specific goals and worries, and none that I’ve engaged with have been overly sexualised or objectified, which is fantastic to see. 

It’s also great to see that there are no restrictions on same sex relationships. If you’re a guy and you want to romance another guy, you’re 100% free to do that with no restrictions or limitations at all — it all plays out exactly the same as if it were an opposite sex relationship. It might not seem like much, but it’s these small pieces of representation that really make a difference in the long term, especially when so much of the game is focused on building these relationships. 

The other primary aspect of Guardians of Azuma is the exploration and combat side of things. There’s a decent amount of exploration through large, open areas, with lots of collectables to sniff out and gather. These are often in the form of statues – like frog statues you have to find and bless – but there are some fun challenges in there as well. Every map has a target to hit with an arrow, for example, and they’re often hidden away and difficult to find and reach. There’s also an ongoing questline to find and deliver specific food you’ve cooked to creatures that live in holes, usually based on a few hints in songs they sing to you. It’s a lot of fun working out what they want and how to get your hands on it, and it makes exploring every nook and cranny – and engaging with the game’s systems – much more rewarding. 

The rewards for exploring and engaging with these systems are often crafting recipes, which give you new meals to cook, decorations to make and place throughout your villages, and weapons and armour to smith. There are also plenty of sidequests to keep you going, too, and while some are simple fetch quests, like killing a certain amount of archers or gathering a certain amount of cucumbers, some are multi-step quests that have you engaging with every part of the game. 

The combat is surprisingly solid, too. It’s relatively fast, action-based gameplay, with multiple short-range and long range weapon types and plenty of different playstyles on offer. I was actually a little bit surprised to see such an in-depth combat system in what is ostensibly a farming game, but it feels delightful to wallop enemies, turn their bits into stronger weapons, upgrade your skills and attacks, and then go back out into the wilderness to wallop a few more. 

In terms of presentation, Guardians of Azuma delivers a mostly solid experience on Switch. It looks very good most of the time, and hits its frame rate targets 90% of the time, with a few hitches here and there, especially during frantic combat scenes. It’s not enough to make it unplayable by any means, but with a Switch 2 Edition upgrade just around the corner, I’ll be very interested to see what improvements can be made. I suspect that a solid 60fps at a reasonably high resolution will be more than doable on the new hardware, but we’ll have to wait and see. 

Load times can also stretch just a little bit too long when fast travelling between different regions, something that will undoubtedly be improved on Switch 2. The good news is that once you’re in a region, fast travel within it is effectively instant, so it’s only really when you’re travelling between, say, the Spring Village and the Autumn Village that you’re left waiting. 

Nintendo Switch 2 Edition
After having spent a few hours with the Nintendo Switch 2 Edition of the game, I can say that it looks and runs fantastic in its upgraded form. The frame rate is at a near perfect lock, with very occasional minor drops – as low as 55fps by my count – during the most taxing scenes. It looks fantastic, with art style helping a lot in that respect, and jaggies present on the Switch version are all but eliminated here. Load times are also noticeably faster too, from 30 seconds or so on Switch down to a snappy 5-10 seconds on Switch 2. It’s not as transformative an upgrade as something like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, but the base game was already very solid, and for just $15 extra it’s hard not to recommend going for the Switch 2 Edition if you’ve got the hardware in hand or are planning on upgrading very soon. 

Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma is a fantastic addition to the series and the genre as a whole. It’s got plenty to enjoy for farming game fans, life sim fans, and RPG fans, a lovely cast of characters, and mostly solid presentation that makes it a delight to play. There are a few shortcomings here and there, but it’s hard not to recommend it to just about anyone looking for a nice, laid-back experience with lots of charm. 

Rating: 4/5