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When you first start playingRune Factory: Guardians Of Azuma, you might think that the game isn’t particularly big since it doesn’t introduce a lot of mechanics during the early game. However, as you progress, you’ll quickly start running out of time each day, making it important to choose the right things.
Every second equals a minute in the game, meaning you have roughly 18 minutes before a day ends. Thankfully, there are quite a few strategies that you can use to make each minute count, letting you progress much quicker.
Pay Attention To Map Icons
As soon as you enter the main world of Rune Factory: Guardians Of Azuma, which starts with the Spring Village, you’ll notice that it’s mostly open-world. While there is usually a path laid out for you,you can also climb various ledges and side bits for some secrets, making it important to keep track of where you are.
Thankfully, both the minimap and the big one have specific icons for nearly everything you can interact with, includingFrog Statues, Jizo Statues, Red Shrines, Wood, Ore, and even some side quest spots like Onigiri holes. Following these markers will usually take you to all the secret paths in each area.
Some secret paths require you to get a specific Sacred Treasure, so ifyou can’t find a way to get to it, it’s likely locked behind progression.
While you can see a bunch of Frog Statue icons on the map when you enter the area,some of them only light up when you get close. Hence, it’s important to regularly open your map and check out any newly-revealed icons.
Villagers Give You Various Hints
It won’t take you long to realize just how important bonding with villagers is in Rune Factory: Guardians Of Azuma, even if you haven’t played previous games in the franchise. You’llget introduced to a bunch of these characters not long after you start the story, and you can track your bond progress with each one.
There are many activities to increase your bond with these characters, butone of the most important ones is giving them the gifts they like. While there is a lot of trial and error involved in finding the right gifts for each character, you can make it easier for yourself by paying attention to all the dialogues in the game.
This includes therandom dialogues that you get when you interactwith the characters each day.
Some of these dialogues can reveal the taste of different characters. For example, if you talk to Suzu often,she’ll tell you that Hina doesn’t like tomatoes and mushrooms. If you give her these items, you’ll lose bond progress.
Maximize Your Daily Income
As you progress through the game, village management will become one of the most time-consuming mechanics since thestate of your villages decides whether you’re going to make a profit or a lossat the end of the day. If your villagers are earning more than their salary, it’s a profit, which is quite easy to achieve.
However, simply getting a profit won’t be enough since youalso need a ton of money to create new buildings and equipment. This makes it important to boost your daily income to the maximum by recruiting the right villagers, evicting the ones that aren’t particularly helpful, and doing some of the work yourself.
Farming is one of the mechanics that thevillagers can do, but aren’t particularly good at. You’d want to do the farming yourself as much as possible.
Check Back Each Area Regularly
As you unlock newer villages like Summer, Autumn, and Winter, new exploration areas won’t be the only thing you unlock. You’ll also noticenew items like mushrooms or fishing spots being added to the mapyou’ve already explored. Moreover, once you’re done beating a boss, you may go back to their battlefield and relive the battle.
Both of these, alongside the new side quest markers,make it important to check back on each area regularly. To make this process more efficient, you may also regularly take a look at the Ema Plaque requests as these usually ask you to defeat a certain type of monster that you can only find in a specific area.
Don’t Ignore The Side Quests
you may access the quest menu in Rune Factory: Guardians Of Azuma through the main menu, and it’ll look fairly empty at the start. However, with time,this area will have more quests than you can do given the limited time in a day. When that happens, it’s important to make the most out of your time.
The main and the bond quests take up most of the narrative aspect of the game, but alot of these quests ask you to sleep and get to the next day after some dialogue. When that happens during the early times of the day, it’s important to check on the other quests in this menu and see if there are any you can continue.
Some quests also require you to reach an area at a specific time, andyou have to plan your day according to that.
Of course, the other quests aren’t going anywhere so you can do them at your own pace as well. However, if you focus on one quest at a time,you’ll be wasting quite a bit of time in the game.
Furnish Your Villages
As you explore different parts of Azuma,you’ll get showered with recipes for both buildings and decorations. Both of these can be crafted by either talking to Takumi or a carpenter if you have one in your development areas. While crafting these, you’re able to see the villages you can put them in. If youhave them in a certain village already, their icon will be highlighted.
Many buildings work as a business, letting your villagers bring money into the village, while the decorations mainlyserve the purpose of boosting your stats while making the development areas look beautiful. The boosts provided by the latter become highly important during the late game, so it’s important to spend some time maximizing the decorations of each village.
You Can Stop Time While Farming
As mentioned above, you’ll likely end up doing a lot of the farming in your village by yourself. However,harvesting the crops, planting them, and then watering them again can take a long time. If you use the Drum Sacred Treasure on the crops, you can harvest some of them daily, which makes this process even longer.
However, it’s nearly impossible to have that kind of time every day. Thankfully, there’s a great strategy that you can use to save all your time while farming. If you bring out the Terra Tiller inside a development area, it puts you in the Village Building Mode. Time completely stops when you’re in this mode,and you can freely harvest, plant, and water crops in it.
Of course, when you’re using the Drum or the Sword on the crops,the time will start passing again.
Essentially, whenever you’re spending any time in your development area, you should be in the Village Building mode as much as possible since this saves you a lot more time than you may imagine.
Make The Most Out Of Each Day
Finally, this tip is mainly for people who want to be as efficient as possible andmaximize the value you’re able to get from each day you spend in Azuma. Apart from the quest-maxxing and time-stopping strategies mentioned above, there are a few other things you can do to make the best use of your time:
