Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma | Switch Review

Rune Factory (developed by various studios and most recently by Marvelous) is a long-running franchise that can be categorized under a ridiculous amount of genre tags. When it first came out, it was described as “Harvest Moon, but with a story and monsters to fight.” Nowadays, you could describe it as “Stardew Valley, but with a story and monsters to fight.” Farming crops, befriending monsters, making social connections and eventually marriage proposals, all alongside a battle to save the world from some unspeakable evil, while making time to attend the bean-throwing festival with everyone in town. Yeah, it’s that kind of game.

Who Needs Memories?

Rune Factory tends to follow a simple pattern: you play as an amnesiac protagonist who falls out of the sky (for whatever reason) and lands in a small town filled with quirky characters. You immediately are given a rundown farm because there’s always a rundown farm, and told it’s yours to do with what you will, and eventually get wrapped up in some sort of conflict that has you exploring the world and battling evil.

Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma is no different: you fall out of the sky into the Spring Village, promptly lose your memory, and are thrust into a battle against an evil dragon draining the magic out of the sacred tree holding the village god. After driving off the dragon, the god is freed and you have your quest: journey to the other villages (Summer, Autumn, and Winter), free those gods too, and save the world. Also, restore the various farms and plant some crops, people have to earn a living!

Once you venture out into the world, it’s effectively an action RPG: you have access to a variety of weapons (swords, bows, magic) that you can use to beat up monsters. You’ll also be able to gather resources, learn recipes from purifying frog statues and shrines, and cleanse the corruption that plagues the land. The combat itself isn’t terribly difficult, with simple combos and a dodge move that can activate a brief bullet time where you can lay into enemies.

Back to the Farm

The farming is a combination of old and new mechanics. On the one hand, you still plant your crops and water them, but there’s also a new overhead view that makes it very fast and easy to sort out your farm. This also works with the Switch 2’s mouse mode quite beautifully, though mouse mode in general requires a claw grip that isn’t comfortable over long periods. Still, it’s fun to put the Switch 2 down, pop out a joy-con, and have precise mouse control over your farm. 

Another new addition to the farming aspect is the ability to place shops and ornaments in your farmland. While at first you may be focused on raising crops, you’ll eventually have more fields than you really know what to do with, and you can dedicate either a portion or an entire field to creating your own section of the town. This both lets you advance the capabilities of each village, and every placement also provides either a boost to your farming or your character’s stats. Much like Animal Crossing, you can potentially create a bustling market street right out of feudal Japan. Or, if you suck at decorating like I do, you can just cram all your ornaments into a corner for the stat boosts, then use buildings to wall it all off and hide your shame.

Quality of Cozy Life

One thing that’s a departure from previous Rune Factory titles is monsters you befriend no longer operate as farm workers. Instead, you get…farm workers. Every day you’ll recruit villagers who can be assigned to work the fields, chop wood, mine ore, or run any shops you place. This works wonderfully if you want to automate the farming aspect of the game. Villagers will water your crops, pick them when they’re ripe and automatically put them in your sell box, and plant seeds from your inventory. That said, you don’t have any fine control over what they plant or where. You also, unlike previous games, can’t tell them not to plant seeds. If they’re assigned to the field, they do it all.

Naturally, you’ll meet an eclectic group of characters who you can befriend, with the requisite waifus and husbandos who will eventually want to marry you and have a kid. This game also lets you have outings with both your friends and potential romantic partners alike, which consume time but give an easy boost to your relationship with them (so you don’t have to remember everyone’s favorite item to gift them every dang day). As you improve your relationships, you’ll unlock personal quests with the other characters, and these give a deeper insight into their personalities and provide rewards to boot.

I Was Promised Bean Throwing

For all the positives the game provides, it also includes some puzzling design choices. Aside from not being able to fine-tune tasks for your workers, there’s fewer weapon options than previous games. You’re only afforded swords, longswords, dual blades, a bow (which is a series first, at least), and talismans that shoot elemental magic. However, the different talismans all have the same animations, and only differentiate by color and damage type. You don’t get to throw big fireballs or manifest geysers or send rock waves at enemies. It feels like a missed opportunity, considering there’s fewer weapon types than past titles in the series.

Festivals, likewise, are severely limited in this game. In the numbered titles, you would have several festivals throughout the year. In Guardians of Azuma, each village can hold its own particular festival, but you have to manually activate it yourself, and there’s far fewer of them.

Granted, Guardians of Azuma is a spinoff title, and those tend to be more experimental. There are quite a few quality of life improvements that would be wonderful to see in the next mainline Rune Factory game, alongside perhaps a more robust farming system and a bigger world. And a better story. The story here is ultimately serviceable, but nothing special. It does have tie-ins to previous Rune Factory games, which is fun for long-time fans, but nothing so deep that a newcomer would be confused. It’s maybe a 20 hour game until you see the credits, but that assumes you’re purely focused on rushing the main story and nothing else. The rest of it (farming, gathering, romance, sidequests, etc.) can easily balloon that number.

Should You Buy It?

Bottom line, if you’re in the mood for a cozy action RPG with farming and romance and riding a giant dragon through the sky, Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma is a top contender in that regard. Even if you’re not currently in possession of a Switch 2 (or a gaming PC), Guardians of Azuma is still solid, even with framerate dips on the original Switch. At $60 USD for the Switch 1 (and Steam) and $70 for the Switch 2, it’s a great title for whiling away the hours farming up the perfect golden turnip or attempting to make your fifth marriage work. Fifth time’s the charm, right?

To hear me talk more about Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma, be sure to listen to the June 4th, 2025 episode of The Gaming Outsider Podcast around the 48:02 time stamp.

This review is based on a Nintendo Switch copy of Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma provided by Decibel PR for coverage purposes. It is also available on Nintendo Switch 2 and PC via Steam.