Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma

Written by Eric Hauter on 6/13/2025 for SW2  

The Rune Factory franchise has been steadily growing in my estimation over the last few entries. Following the series' very enjoyable leap from its early Harvest Moon-style visuals to a 3D anime art style in Rune Factory 5, the new Guardians of Azuma takes another confident step forward, evolving Rune Factory further into what has become a very reliable franchise for fans of the social/farming/town building genre. (I refuse to lump these games together under the banner "cozy"—a term which I despise almost as much as "walking simulator.")

Until now, Rune Factory games have delivered friendly and fun variations that follow along a familiar pathway: wake up in town, get to know the townspeople, farm for money, go engage in light combat for materials, remember to give everyone presents on their birthday. Make friends, maybe romance someone, enjoy the pretty graphics and the fun writing. The formula is tried and true, and Rune Factory 5 refined it to a shiny near-perfection.

I was interested in learning how Rune Factory Guardians of Azuma was going to differentiate itself from the games that came before it. And it turns out that there are plenty of tweaks to the formula that help this new entry feel like its own thing while still adhering to the series’ core tenets.

Let’s take the farming, for example. When the game started, I jumped right into the expected workflow: clearing land, hoeing plots, planting seeds, watering seedlings, harvesting turnips. It is a comfortable gameplay loop for a certain kind of gamer, and we all know how it works, right?

So, imagine my surprise when an hour or two into the game, I was asked to assign villagers to take over the farming duties. Yes, I could still hoe and plant and harvest if I wanted to, but I didn’t need to. My automated army of citizens would happily work the fields and drop produce into the selling box all by themselves, thank you very much. I could still plot and plan, but they would do all the clicky-click work tasks. At the end of each day, I would get a little profit/loss statement that told me where I needed to focus going forward. Amazing.

And then there’s the town management. In addition to planning out the farming fields, I was suddenly adding shops and factories to my town and then assigning townspeople to work in them. And then an entire second town entered the story, and I was managing it as well. And then a third. And a fourth. And the story was sending me willy-nilly back and forth between them, and I was making friends all over the place, and there were so many birthdays to remember and so many requests to deal with and so many fun little tasks to perform that hours were evaporating without me realizing any time had gone by at all.

And then I realized—oh, this is the difference. The core of the experience is still Rune Factory. It’s just a lot more. Each aspect of the game is streamlined just enough that it never feels overwhelming. Like the previous games in the franchise, you can engage more deeply with the things you enjoy, but in this iteration the game will keep up with you instead of you running in circles trying to keep up with it.

The story in Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma is familiar but fun. The world is recovering from an apocalyptic event known as the “Celestial Collapse,” which sent a meteor crashing down into the land, smashing everything to bits. The protagonist (you get to pick their gender) wakes up in a barren village. It is the players’ job to reawaken the village (and then several others) by restoring agriculture and trade. But you must also awaken each area’s deity, as the gods of nature were weakened and vanished after the big boom.

Interestingly, once these gods are awakened, they kinda make themselves at home in their respective villages, essentially becoming townspeople themselves. You can befriend them, hang out, and even romance them if you wish. Like the rest of the characters in Guardians of Azuma, they each have interesting and fun personalities, and it’s well worth your time to pursue their individual questlines to get to know what makes them tick.

Combat is also expanded, with a ton of new weapons to mess around with and master. In addition to the standard short sword/long sword, you now have a bow you can use as a secondary weapon, and more types of primary weapons open up as you play. These include “Talismans,” which essentially give the player a magic attack. Each weapon type has its own skill tree, and they all earn XP independently, so the more you use them, the stronger they get. I eventually settled on dual blades to carry me through the game after tinkering around with the other options, as I enjoyed the speed of the attack. I would draw (the rather simple-minded) enemies in with a bow attack, then slice and dice them into oblivion. Quick, easy, and satisfying.

The protagonist is also granted a series of “sacred instruments” from the village gods, which do double duty. Their primary use is to clear various environmental obstacles, but they can also perform ultimate-style attacks and heal party members. This probably all sounds like a lot, but in practice it is simple and fluid. The player can take along up to three other CPU-controlled party members, who tank baddies quite nicely. Nothing here is too difficult, and I generally found combat to be a light way to pass the time each in-game day. Need to kill a few hours waiting for that homie to arrive at the restaurant? Go wander around and kill some toad archers!

I played Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma on Nintendo Switch 2, and I found it to be a grand game to use to break in my shiny new system. The graphics look bright and sharp, whether in handheld or docked mode. Though the visuals are of the cartoonish/anime style, the animations are smooth and delightful, and I got the feeling that the Switch 2 wasn’t exactly working overtime to render them. I saw no sign of the stuttering and framerate issues that the original Switch displayed when playing Rune Factory 5.

The only Switch 2-specific functionality GoA includes is the ability to use the mouse for precision on the city planning screens. As Rune Factory has refined these mechanics to the point where they are already industry-best with a controller, I didn’t see the need to return to this function after dutifully trying it out. I feel for the folks that worked hard to make this mechanic function to check a box, but I’ll never really use it.

In the end, Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma doesn’t need any gimmicks to succeed on Nintendo’s new hardware. The game stands on its own merits, bringing enough heart and fun to carry the day. The developers of Rune Factory have honed this genre even further, advancing what could have been just another life sim until it feels refreshed, if still comfortably familiar. Guardians of Azuma confidently walks the line between old and new, delivering a satisfying experience for fans and yet another great on-ramp for new players.