Rune Factory is a series I’ve always been curious about but never quite had the opportunity to dip my toes into. Rune Factory 4 came out around the time I was still in my Mass Effect sicko phase, while Rune Factory 5 got critically panned. It seems everything worked out for the best though, because Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma has proven to be a decent entry point for newcomers, and an all-around solid cozy game for genre fans.
Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma starts off with the most anime ass opening. You pick between a male or female protagonist. Then, you’re launched into an exciting cutscene with both male and female characters battling each other on dragon-back while flying against a stormy backdrop. It’s dramatic as hell. Then boom, your character wakes up. It was all just a dream. But of course it ends up being so much more than just a dream.
Guardians of Azuma wastes no time in getting you acquainted with the basics. Right as you gain control of the player character, you’re immediately thrown into the farming mechanics, combat, and NPC interactions.
Surprisingly, I found the combat to be the highlight of my playthrough. Things start off relatively simple with just a hack-and-slash motion with your sword, but once the game introduces your secondary weapon type and other party members, combat in Guardians of Azuma becomes a lot more interesting. All of a sudden you’re switching between your sword and bow on the fly, activating cool abilities with your party members, and everything just has such a seamless flow to it.
Supplementing the combat system is a very extensive skill tree and your Bond Levels with party members. The skill trees feature a ton of nodes for basically every skill you get access to in the game. There are skills for weapons, skills, cooking, and crafting, just to name a few. Because the combat is so smooth and fun in Guardians of Azuma, I found myself engaging more with the open-world and the enemies it had to offer just to level up and see what else I could unlock.
There’s value in bonding with your party members too, of course. Not only can you romance them (more on that later), they’ll also become a lot more useful in battle as you get closer. For instance, they’ll provide stat boosts or learn new abilities to help with healing or make your party tankier.
There’s a lot of satisfaction to be had in strengthening your character and party members, so it’s a shame that combat quickly becomes a trivial affair just a few hours in, even on the highest possible difficulty setting. There’s not enough enemy variety and their attack patterns are so predictable, so it’s not even like combat was tough in the first place. When you start developing your party, the gulf between the enemies and your party widens even further and exacerbates the situation.
I guess it’s a good thing, then, that combat isn’t meant to be the focus in Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma. It’s all about the farming and the romance, baby.
There are a total of 14 characters available for lovin’ here, so anyone should be able to find an NPC that caters to their preferences. The bachelors and bachelorettes of Guardians of Azuma run the gamut of cute tsundere to beautiful charmers who can sweep you off your feet.
During your free time, you’ll likely spend it chatting with your favorite NPCs and asking them out on dates. There’s nothing to write home about here as it’s all stuff you’ve likely already seen in other life sim games, but it works. You’ll pick the best dialogue options, shower them with gifts, then do quests for them all in the name of intimacy and romance. You can pursue multiple romantic interests, but you can only marry one person, so choose wisely.
It’s a shame that Guardians of Azuma doesn’t have much to offer in the way of story and open-world exploration outside of that. While the fun combat can carry you through the early hours, you’ll soon find that all of the environments are actually pretty samey, and there are no interesting NPCs outside of the potential party members. You do get accompanied by a pretty cute sheep mascot named Woolby so there’s that, but that’s about it.
When you put the bland environments together with a combat system that falls off so quickly, you really have to count on the other life sim elements to carry the rest of the experience. Now don’t get me wrong, the farming and romance aspects are solid, but they’re just not good enough to cover the game’s other shortfalls.
That said, I thoroughly enjoyed my time with this game. It served as a good introduction to the Rune Factory series, and I was content with living my simple little life with Subaru at the end of the day. Whether you decide to invest in Guardians of Azuma will ultimately come down to what you’re looking for in your life sim games. If you just want a breezy and casual farming/romance experience and you’re not bothered by mediocre environments and combat, then this will serve your purposes just fine.
A review code for the game was provided by the publisher. You can check out our review policy here. Reviewed on Switch.
