Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma

• Genre: Farm-sim Action RPG
• Spoiler Free Review: Pretty much, other than the screenshots.
• Time Played: 60 Hours
• Too Short/Long: Actually maybe too short? I felt like I was left off wanting more.
• Soundtrack: It's okay, it fits the setting and such, and it has some unique effects an queues, but nothing I'm in a hurry to listen to on it's own.
• Why I played: I've always tried getting into the Rune Factory games, generally I like their style, and some of them have pretty fun game play. It's the gameplay loop that always had me fall off. Guardians of Azuma just looked so good I had to give it another shot.
• Did I cry: Almost, but not quite.
• Jank: It's pretty solid. There might be a couple very tiny issues where you climb something/don't climb something correctly, but it's mostly pretty tight.
• Difficulty: I think the difficulty is highly dependent on how well you balance what you do and how efficiently you do it. If you focus too much on progressing through the story, it'll make it harder. If you focus too much on just farming and pursuing relationships, it'll make things take longer.
• Recommend to others: I definitely would recommend this to others. At least for me, it's a great balance of farming/management and action rpg. The story is okay, but the dialog is very fun and the characters are great, and there are a lot of ways to approach how to play the game and I think that's why a lot of people will enjoy it.

Upon finishing Guardians of Azuma, I read some review of it which seemed... a little unfair. Now maybe from the perspective of long time fans of the Rune Factory series, there may not be enough of this or that, but I really liked Guardians of Azuma. Maybe it's something superficial and the better visuals or more Japanese inspired designs drew me in, but I think that it's a little more what I like, and maybe a little less what the typical cozy farm sim enjoyer likes.

There is a clear story when you start off Guardians of Azuma. You're engaged in a battle to stop the destruction of the world, and you are tasked with restoring it. You start off modestly in a small village inhabited by the goddess of Spring and eventually venture to towns for each season. Each town has some npcs, "development areas" where you do your farming/building/customizing, and outside the town each has it's own pseudo-open area, followed by a dungeon. Some of the development areas are rather small, making it a bit tricky to manage what you can work with, while some give you plenty of room for customization. Some are large enough to basically make a whole town within them.

But by far and large the biggest sections of the game are those where the action occurs. I find that a lot of these farm-sim/action rpgs usually have much smaller dungeon areas, or at least less focus and not quite as many large areas. There are many areas that cannot be fully explored in a single cycle. Thankfully there are shrines/save points that allow you to pick right up where you left off, should you need to return to town and rest. One thing that bugs me is having to always start from the beginning of an area, and this game thankfully respects your time to be pretty generous with those shrines which also act as fast travel/teleport locations.

The combat isn't anything mind blowing, but it has a variety of weapons, each with their own moves and upgrades, along with divine weapons, which allow special kinds of attacks and usually provide navigation abilities as well. I do think it takes a little longer than it should to get high RP point numbers, which allow you to use your divine weapons. Since it costs points to use those weapons for traveling aspects, I tended to underuse them early in the game when it came to combat, but they're actually very useful. It also helps later on - always giving you access to every element in the game. I feel like too many games that have a element/weakness system underutilize it by restricting your access to these elements. With this, you'll almost always have access to them when needed. There are also ultimate attacks and stuff you can do with party members.

My only real complaint about combat is the fact they should have allowed you to always have a bow equipped. L2 readies a bow for first person aim when you have one equipped, nothing else uses L2. You frequently have to hit targets that can only be hit with a bow. So if you don't have a bow equipped and are exploring a new area, you'll constantly have to switch back to it. It's a shame because there is another ranged weapon I really like, but I find using it without a melee option to be inadequate. I wish I could have just always pulled out the bow without going to the equip screen.

I think that's where some people are disappointed though - the more actiony game play is the focus. The farming allows you a free from character view to place items easily, perform all your farm actions, and move on, all while stopping the "day clock". A day isn't very long, 20 minutes or so, and I do think the 20 minute day is a bit short. I often felt like I wish I had just a little more time to do what I needed and waited to the last possible second to sleep before I got penalized. Thankfully, when you have your hoe out, and are in a development area, time stops. You can spend as much as you want placing buildings, objects, and farming. I guess if you like you can manually farm, but I prefer going into the overhead view and essentially clicking everything real quick. You also have residents who will perform farming, but I find they do it the least efficient ways possible and opted to perform the farming myself nearly every day. Or at least start my day racing to beat them to it. I could have just made them do other jobs, like logging, mining, fishing, etc., but I always kept some farmers on. Eventually, late game when I had plenty of mining and end game materials, I let them handle it, but it took me the majority of the game to get to that point.

One slight disappointment I only realized real late in the game though - none of the main npcs will do anything to interact with the development zones. I feel like that's a missed opportunity to have them interact with the environment a bit more, essentially since the level of customization is pretty significant. It would have been nice to see who liked which kind of items you placed.

For me, 6am-9am were my farming times. Even though the clock stops when you have the hoe out, I still had to use divine weapons on the farm for bonuses, and running from farm to farm. 6-9 is only like three minutes. Then I spend the rest of the day interact with the story/character/fighting enemies. I started to find the repetition a bit monotonous toward the end, but it went by so quickly it never became too much. I could have, of course, let my villagers handle it, but I wanted to perform things the most efficient way possible. The only repercussion would have been extending the time I spent playing the game.

 
Some of the character you get pretty late game are my favorites, so maybe I was just rushing to get to them too fast, thinking I would slow down and enjoy the game a bit more once I got to that point, but once I did, before I knew it, the game was over. I didn't play it any short amount, for sure, but I still felt like the ending was sudden. As much as I said the game seems to place more focus on the action than the other points, I imagine if you focused solely on that, and the story, you could "beat" the game in half the time. That said, with the type of game it is, the end doesn't have to be the end. Depending on when you actually end it. If you paced yourself more, or played it more like a "cozy farm sim", and were okay with only accomplishing little-by-little each day, maybe by time you finish it you'll have done everything you wanted. But otherwise, you may have further relationships to build, each coming with it's own missions, more ways to improve your towns, or just enjoy customizing your towns with new items, and not just making sure one of each item is placed for the max stat bonus - like I did. There are also unique events that are later in the calendar. I played exactly 60 days, of the 120 day year, of the 2 years. A quarter of the allotted calendar. What happens after that? I don't know.