Azuma is an unfortunate land, losing its Runes as monsters threaten its inhabitants, while the crops that sustain it become difficult to grow. On the surface and the floating islands alike, there are growths of blight damaging the environment, and the guardian gods who should be protecting the land have gone into hiding. This all started 50 years ago, with a collapse of order and nature. Luckily for Azuma, there’s hope in a single individual: you, dear player.
If you’ve played aRune Factorygame before, you know how this goes. You’re an Earth Dancer (which is just the Eastern term for the series’ Earthmates, something which is stated outright), a person who can feel the land crying out for help and has the power to heal it from the rifts that plague it. You also have amnesia, because this is a Rune Factory game, and it’s tradition, damn it. This did make me roll my eyes - there’s a greater focus on the story this time around, but we’re still dealing with a pointless memory problem that adds nothing to the plot and gets resolved pretty early on. Amnesia is a boring plot device, especially when it’s clear from the introduction what the main character’s actual history is.
Rune Factory? More Like Rune Corporation
The story itself is a simple one - you travel to four different villages, help the local gods regain their powers, and get forced into being the local chief. This is obviously a weak excuse to give you control over the villages’ development areas and order the villagers around to do what you need them to, and it’s almost comedic around the third time it happens. While this structure serves the game’s mechanical vision of village development, the narrative justification feels thin and repetitive. Once you’ve got all four villages under control, the narrative kicks into a second gear, with flecks of intrigue popping up, but this is yet another Rune Factory where the story is forgettable. Where this series thrives is its gameplay, right?
Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a step back from previous entries. Village management, the big new draw, is a very simple matter of getting large flat grids and placing items on them to rack up bonuses to your stats (why does placing a Bakery Cart in my village make me harder to kill?) and prettying the whole place up. While dressing up the villages so readily handed to you is satisfying, at a certain point, you realise that you’re placing buildings that you’ll never enter for villagers who don’t seem to live there, items that don’t often suit the environment, and roads and rivers that do nothing but inflate an arbitrary ‘decoration’ score. The lack of interactivity with this mechanic is disappointing.
Farming and crafting also take a severe step back here, feeling very generic - these mechanics could have been lifted out of any cheap Stardew Valley rip-off on Steam. Gone are issues of soil quality and discovering recipes through experimentation; heck, farming is reduced to an autonomous task performed inefficiently by villagers unless you fire them all and handle it yourself. You don’t even have to worry about seasons, which is bizarre for a farming game. Instead, the four villages you have control of are themed around a season each, and each crop thrives in a certain village as a result. Your winter crops can be grown year-round, because winter never leaves the winter village.
The villages don’t have names, either. They’re just [Season] Village. Bit underwhelming.
On the other hand, where Guardians of Azuma shines, it shines quite brightly. There’s a slimmed-down cast here that feels far more enjoyable to interact with than previous rosters. The kids aren’t annoying, the old fogies aren’t caricatures, and the cast is overall more interesting and well-written than those offered by competitors. Something I really appreciated was the fact that you’re not limited to simply talking and gifting to get to know people. Instead, you’re given a range of options each time you decide to spend time with a person.
This can range from picking a topic of conversation to inviting them to a different place. Each character has their own interests and preferences in terms of activities, which feel natural to discover through their personalities and dialogue, which is a far cry from the frustrations of past games forcing you to gift them everything under the sun to find out what presents make the relationship bar go up the quickest. I romanced Fubuki, one of the gods, and I didn’t give him a single gift outside his birthdays. The fact that this is possible makes relationships feel far more dynamic.
Combat is also a highlight and easily the best this series has ever offered. You’ve got a decent selection of weapons to choose from, a handy dodge and riposte mechanic, and enough difficulty to keep things interesting once you reach the later stages. An interesting wrench in the works is Sacred Treasures, which give you magic-like abilities (since you don’t get spells in this game). A drum lets you heal your allies, a fiery sword produces grand arcs of pain with each swing, and a parasol lets you blast foes away with water. They make combat satisfying to play through, adding a bit of flair to what could have been a boring button-masher.
Sacred Treasures are also used to unlock areas by ridding them of blight and can also be useful with farming.
The water parasol, for example, can be used to water crops quickly, and the healing drum speeds up crop growth. It’s situational, but a nice way to make these plot-relevant power-ups feel more useful than simple weapons.
Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma is a game of two halves. You have the village management where you’re decorating empty spaces and making numbers go up - this is the half that’s generic and shallow. The other half is a more-than-decent action-adventure populated with a pretty great cast. The gameplay cycle keeps you flipping between these two halves often enough to keep you interested and distracted, but when you look at Azuma with a few steps taken back, it’s not the prettiest sight.
