Rune Factory: Guardians Of Azuma Lost Too Much In The Spin-Off Process

By 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Ryan Thompson-Bamsey

Published Jun 2, 2025

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168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma is not a bad game. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:I scored it 2.5/5, which in my eyes is a passing grade. There are interesting ideas put to work and places where it excels, but there are also some significant drawbacks that don’t give the positives enough breathing room. I’ve put dozens of hours into it at this point, and these conflicted feelings are primarily down to the massive departures taken in the name of spinning off a beloved series. There’s a fun cast to bond with and pretty gr🎃eat combat, but the missing links are stark.

What Makes A Rune Factory?

When I think about the past Rune Factory games that I’ve sunk hun🌃dreds of hours into, ♐there are a few things that immediately jump out to me as central, vitally important mechanics that define the series. Farming is first - in a sea of cute, cosy games, it manages to make things like soil management and efficiency engaging, with mechanical depth and palpable rewards for your efforts. Keeping track of the seasons and capitalising on the vast range of seeds you can get your hands on with your limited farming space is a puzzle that feels triumphant to overcome.

The second is crafting, with systems that are grindy but without ever feeling super🌳fluous. You end up crafting far more things than you’ll ever need in the name of boosting your skill levels, but the g🌞ames also have serious money drains, so the grind is necessary, forming a complete, satisfying gameplay loop.

If these are the two pillars of a Rune Factory experience for me, then Guardians of Azuma barely qualifies. Instead of capitalising on proven winners in these deep mechanics, we instead have flashier combat and a shallow village management system. The result is a game that fꦦeels like a generic offering that somehow managed to get the rights to Woolies and Buffamoos.

Azuma Is Wide But Shallow

Eating Dango with a child character in Rune Factory Guardians of Azuma.

Farming is still here, yes, but ca🌼n be totally automated by your villagers. They’re not good at it, though, planting random crops in random tiles in ways that make me want to tear my hair out. I ended up firing all 𒈔my farmers and spent the beginning of each and every day completing all the farming tasks myself - if they can’t keep different crops separate and harvest them efficiently, they’ll spend the rest of their digital lives in the mines.

There are still plenty꧒ of items and meals to craft, too, but with no skill progression gating what you can make. Instead, you can spend the entire game not cooking a single meal but somehow be able to produce the most splendid parfait in the universe because you somehow sourced💫 the best milk by killing high-level Buffamoos. There’s no experimentation, no intrigue; just scores of recipes that function like shopping lists.

I’m almost convinced that the game would feel better to play had it removed farming and crafting altogether, rather than leave them in as half-baked mechanics that make me yearn to boot up Rune💖 Factory 4 again. At least that way, the game would have room to be the Genshin Impact-like its visual style and combat focus clearly aspired to. As it stands, Guardians of Azuma is a lo🤡w point in Rune Factory history that forgets what made us fans of the series in the first place.