E.V.O.: Search for Eden

I played E.V.O.: Search for Eden

This is a 1993 SNES game developed by Almanic and published by Enix, released in Japan and America, but not Europe.

I played it via emulator.

I'm gonna talk about pretty much the entire game, from start to finish. :D

E.V.O. is a very unusual sidescrolling action game.

You play as a creature chosen by Gaia, the sprit of the planet earth, to evolve and travel through time in order to reach Eden.

Apparently this is some kind of trial set up by Sol, the sun, father of Gaia. The creature who can evolve and pass every trial will marry Gaia, and live together in Eden for eternity.

...There's also some kind of plot going on about mysterious crystals that are affecting the evolution of the planet's species in unexpected ways.

The game starts in 500,000,000 BC, Chapter 1: "The World Before Land". You begin as a little fish. 

You can swim around the water, and you can bite enemy fish.

When you defeat an enemy, it drops meat. It looks like a cartoon hunk of meat on the bone. 

Eating meat heals you a bit, and gives you "Evolution points".

At any time, you can open your menu and see your options for evolution.

You can evolve a body part by spending Evo points.

Body parts are evolved in a modular fashion. It's kind of like upgrading parts of a robot or a car... except here, it's evolution. 

There are eight sections in the evolution menu:

Jaws, Horn(s), Neck, Body, Hands & Feet, Dorsal Fin, Tail, Back of the head.

Each upgrade costs an amount of evolution points, normally the better ones cost more.

When you buy an upgrade, it is immediately applied - apparently your body can evolve immediately due to a "mysterious time stream". That's what it says every time you buy an upgrade.

Upgrading Jaws increases bite power. Upgrading Body gives you more defense. Upgrading your various fins (some of which are in the Hands & Feet menu) gives you more agility and HP.

And some options are mutually-exclusive - for example, if you upgrade your "Horn" to get a swordfish nose, it forcibly downgrades your Jaw to its basic form... I suppose you gotta choose between stabbing or biting. If you want the strong jaw back, you do have to buy it again...

Annoyingly, the game doesn't do anything to inform you about what each upgrade will do. You just have to buy it, and then check your stats menu to see if any of the numbers look higher. ...Generally, you want to go for the more expensive options, but there are a few upgrades here and there with unique properties - for example, the angler lure from the Horn menu will attract enemies towards you.

The upgrades are certainly useful for increasing your survivability. In order to complete this chapter, you need to solve a maze full of tough enemy fish, dash through a path of volcanic rocks that rain down, and defeat the boss of the chapter, a big shark. 

You'd be hard-pressed doing all of this without evolving into the best possible fish. So... you'd best get to grinding out those evolution points! Find a good spot to repeatedly kill enemies that yield lots of Evo points, and then just... grind 'em out. And if you keep getting bested by the high-point-yield enemies, maybe you could start by grinding on the weaker enemies first, and then come back to the stronger guys once you have a better jaw or something.

For better or for worse... this is basically the gist of the gameplay in E.V.O. You travel through a series of several very straightforward levels, you come across an insurmountable obstacle (usually a boss), and then you need to figure out which of the previous areas had the easiest grinding spot, so you can farm points to evolve your parts for better stats. And once you get 'em, you can continue. ...

To be honest, as awful and grindy as this sounds... I don't actually mind it too much. It's kind of an interesting task, figuring out how to grab Evo points as efficiently as possible, and learning which upgrades help you in what ways. And it's rather chill, just kinda hanging out in these areas for a while, rather than speeding through everything.

Though I certainly do have some complaints, but I will save them for the end... Let's continue.

...

So after beating the shark, Gaia intervenes and transports you ahead in time through a magical portal.

You arrive in 300,000,000 BC, Chapter 2: "Early Creatures of Land". 

Gaia gives you a new amphibian body, which has its own set of new upgrades to aim for.

You start the amphibian phase as a blank slate - all of your accumulated Evo points are gone, and none of your fish upgrades carry over or have any bearing on you for the amphibian phase.

...to be honest, it was a little bit disappointing to see that nothing I did in the fish era carried over at all. Chapter 2 is a fresh slate. 

Again, we can upgrade our Jaw, but now some of our body upgrades will increase our jumping power too. There is a new way of attacking enemies, in this new era - jumping on top of them, like in a platformer. We can upgrade jumping height, speed, and attack power by evolving various fins, gills, and tails.

The different methods of attack actually do have their own separate attack stats. The stat menu shows: "Biting", "Strength", "Kick", "Strike", and "Horn". Though even now, some of these are still not applicable... kicking, for example, isn't introduced until later.

The levels in this game are accessed via a world map screen, with each new level unlocking once you complete the previous one. And you have the ability to return to previous levels whenever you like. (for the most part).

The vast majority of levels in this game are....... extremely simple. Often consisting of nothing more than a flat straight line, with some enemies roaming about.

These areas are normally named after what kind of enemy you can find within. In the amphibian era, there is a level called "Land of timid Ikustega" full of weak ichthyostega enemies and nothing else. And immediately afterwards is "Land of bull Ikustega", where you see a bunch of tougher ichthyostega creatures. 

If you ignore the enemies, these types of levels take about 10 seconds to complete. It's literally, literally just a flat straight line. And not even a particularly long one either.

...I suppose the idea wasn't to make each level feel like a "videogame level", despite the Mario-esque world map presentation... but rather to make it feel more like an ecosystem, where each type of animal inhabits their own little part of the world, and you visit them in turn as you make your way through. I can definitely appreciate the intent, but....... I would have appreciated it more if these levels had some actual level design in them too. :/

Soon after, there is a fight against Boss Ikustega, which is pretty tough if you don't grind for Evo points to get some better jaws, skin, and gills. So, better hop to it! Go grind some better body parts.

The controls in this game are a bit on the janky side - there seems to be a bit of a delay when you jump, and it's not always obvious how far your bite extends in front of you. It's difficult to avoid taking damage in this game, which can be especially dangerous, since there is no invulnerability period after getting hit. You can take multiple quick hits in succession and die before you realise it. When you die, you don't lose progress, but you do lose half of your Evo points, so it does mean you gotta grind even more.

You don't get any healing items or anything (in fact, this game doesn't have an inventory at all), but you do have one way to heal - whenever you evolve, you also get all your HP back. So you can be fighting a boss, and when you're low on health, you can just evolve a horn or something cheap to restore health. Some upgrades do give you the option to spend points to remove them too, so you'll never be left without any available upgrades to use for healing. ...You can just keep evolving and un-evolving a horn to heal during fights as much as you want.

 ...it can get expensive to do this, but hey, that's what all that grinding was for, right? If you still can't beat a boss after upgrading every possible body part to maximum, you still have the option to grind more points to use for healing like this.

....to be honest, I do wish there was just a more direct "spend points to regain health" button in the game. Having to heal indirectly like this isn't exactly intuitive. ...Though it is kind of funny. It's not an oversight either, as the instruction booklet specifically mentions that evolving restores health.7

After that boss, you need to cross a desert full of sandworms. Having good jumping skill is useful here, because you want to be off the ground as often as you can. I do like how the environments, despite being extremely short and simple, still occasionally encourage you to make use of your upgraded body parts for different purposes. 

...

After fighting a big killer bee as the last boss for this chapter, Gaia again intervenes, transporting us into the next era.

It is now 200,000,000 BC, Chapter 3: "The Age of Dinosaurs".

Again, we are given a clean slate to work with. A brand new dinosaur body! ...And again, none of our amphibian upgrades carry over to this chapter.

...So, okay, there is actually a way for the previous evolutions to get another chance to shine.

This might be a good time to mention the coloured crystals. I'll get back to talking about the dinosaur era in a sec.

There are four types of crystals you can find in specific spots throughout the game. You can eat them to receive their effects. They do not come back once eaten.

Yellow crystals give you some advice. This is mostly for tutorial kinda things.

Blue crystals give a large amount of Evo points.

Red crystals temporarily transform you into a unique form that isn't normally possible to evolve into. The transformation lasts only a few minutes or so, so it's kind of like a temporary powerup. There are only about... four? or so of these in the game, two of which are quite well hidden. So this doesn't come up much.

and Green crystals....... let you recall a previously-saved configuration.

So. okay. At any time, you can pause the game, and save your current self into a logbook. There are 50 slots in this logbook, which is plenty to work with.

When you eat a green crystal, it adds a one-time-use option to the pause menu, "Review of Evolution", which lets you temporarily transform back into any one of your saved creatures. Once the timer runs out, you return to normal.

You can hold one green crystal at a time - eating another one will just waste it forever. You can't farm these, they are only located in a few specific spots throughout the game.

So... if you made sure to save your fully-upgraded fish or amphibians to the logbook, then yes, with the power of a green crystal, it is possible to play as your old evolutions again, albeit only as a temporary powerup. But sometimes that's all you need to get a head-start in collecting enough Evo points to upgrade your current form, especially if your old fish or amphibian can easily defeat a boss that your current dinosaur can't.

And it's even possible to save the rare red crystal transformations to the log book, if you want to use their power again. That's pretty cool.

And.... the fact that the logbook data is saved completely separately to the main save files means that you can enhance repeat playthroughs by using green crystals to temporarily turn into lategame creatures early. It's almost like a new game plus of sorts.

It's... actually a really cool system. Though to be honest, I did not fully understand how green crystals worked for the majority of my playthrough, so I didn't really use them much. But I very much appreciate this feature now that I know about it.

...

So anyway... Dinosaur chapter.

This chapter is rather similar to the previous one, with plenty of simple flat levels full of enemies to grind on. Though instead of ichthyostegas and bees, we now contend against various different types of dinosaurs. And just like "Ikustega", they all have names that vaguely sound like what they're called, but not really. Such as "Syrocosaurus" for styracosaurus, and "Tyrosaurus" for T-rexes. ... I wonder if these weird names come from SNES technical limitations, awkward localisation from Japanese, or are they like this just to add a bit of a fantasy flair? ...Or perhaps combination of all three?

Your dino body now gets the option to evolve a longer neck. This does improve your jaw reach, but it also makes it awkward to eat things off the ground. In fact, you pretty much just can't eat things that are on the floor at all if you choose to evolve a longer neck. In order to compensate for this, whenever you kill an enemy, the meat will levitate upwards until it reaches the same elevation as your head, so you can still get your Evo points. ...this is a bit of a clumsy solution tbh, but I guess it makes sense.

We also get the option to evolve into a dino who stands upright on two legs. Pretty cool, but it still suffers the same problem of being unable to eat off the ground..

Halfway through this chapter, we can find an optional level called Mt. Brave. You can climb up the mountain, and once you reach the top, there is a ledge, where you can bravely jump off. If you do so, you will suddenly evolve into a bird in mid-air.

The bird form is like a pteranodon, and it actually has access to pretty much the same upgrade list as the regular dinosaur. But... because it counts as a new form, you lose all your Evo points and have to start from scratch the moment you evolve.

This means that if you invested a lot of Evo points into your current dino form and don't particularly want to grind points all over again, it's probably best to stay as a dino. The added ability to fly as a bird is fun, but because the levels are so simple, it doesn't really help very often. (though there is a secret level that can only be accessed by flying). 

That being said, if you managed to reach Mt Brave without investing too much time into upgrading the dino beforehand, it probably is a good idea to opt for the bird form, since the bird has a strong kick attack the dino lacks, and the added maneuverability from being able to fly can be pretty helpful. It's all a matter of whether you're bothered by the extra grinding, I suppose.

In the Jaws section of the evolution menu, the best jaw is the T-rex jaw, which can be used by both the bird and the dino. There is a hawk-like beaked face available too, but it's just.... not as good as the T-rex one. If you want the best upgrades, your bird is gonna look a bit mismatched. I do kind of wish they made a special case where the bird-like face gets extra damage if you're in bird form or something like that, because there's no real reason to keep the bird face once you can afford the T-rex jaw upgrade. A bit of a shame. 

...

At the end of this chapter, we fight a herd of Tyrosauruses, but the action is interrupted by an asteroid shower. The famous extinction event that killed all the dinosaurs is upon us, and Gaia rescues us with a time portal, just in time.

It is now 65,000,000 BC, Chapter 4: "Ice Age".

Unlike the previous three chapters, you don't immediately get your current body replaced with a new one. So you can keep your dino body or bird body. But as soon as the chapter begins, you enter the "Cave of Judgement", and the ghost of the Syrocosaurus from before will judge whether you are worthy to receive a new type of body for this era... one of a mammal. ...I don't know if there is some kind of event I need to trigger beforehand in order to be considered worthy, but indeed, I was allowed to upgrade if I wanted to.

Unlike the transition from fish to amphibian, or the transition from amphibian to dino, the mammal upgrade is completely optional. It will reset all your points, but the mammal form does have some distinct advantages. For starters, mammals won't slip on the icy floors of the ice age, so it is already immediately advantageous to upgrade. And mammals also have a wide array of forms they can take - you start as a little lion cub creature, but you can mix-and-match parts from bunnies, horses, and rhinos, in order to create a creature with distinct attributes. Horse body has the best kicks, bunny body has the best jumps, rhino body has the best defense.

The Ice Age has one particularly difficult maze to solve - Fort Bird-man. A temple built by evolved birds who wield spears and swords. This is a bizarrely harsh spike in difficulty. Up until this point, the levels have been fairly straightforward, with a couple of small mazes here and there, but nothing too challenging. But now we have Fort Bird-man, which is an extremely confusing maze full of teleporters. It's confusing because the environments don't have distinct enough landmarks to easily tell where each teleporter sends you, and to make things worse, if you jump back in the same teleporter you came from, it goes somewhere else entirely! And in fact, the only way to reach the end is to immediately re-enter the same teleporter you just came from, once you arrive at the correct one.

 ... ... I eventually gave up and found a map online. I'm sorry, but I was starting to get really frustrated.

I'm not sure what's up with this ridiculous difficulty spike, nothing else in the game is quite like it, and I honestly find it rather unfitting.

Especially considering how all the previous levels in this game have mostly been flat straight lines.

...

Well, once you clear the Fort and defeat the boss of the Ice Age, a yeti, Gaia once again intervenes and transports us to the final chapter. 26,000,000 BC, Chapter 5: "Early Man".

This time, the small regular stages are full of more recognisable animals, such as grizzly bears, mooses, and alligators.

This chapter allows you to keep whichever bird, dino, or mammal you have, but there is now one new option, available only if you are a mammal.

There is now the option in the Body menu for the evolution into a "Ramothecus". ...which is another bizarrely misspelled name for... ramapithecus. Which is an early form of ape. ... I had to look up so many words for this review lol.

...anyway. This option is actually greyed-out and inaccessible. Because... it's apparently a bit of a secret.

So...despite this chapter taking place after the extinction event, you can still find some surviving dinosaurs, apparently being kept around by the strange evolutionary power of the mysterious crystals. (in fact, there were also still dinosaurs in the Ice Age chapter too...)

If you find a small patch of hidden stegosauruses, they will teach you the secret. You apparently need to have a cat's face on a bunny's body, and then the secret of the Ramothecus evolution will become available.

If you ever choose to evolve into the Ramothecus, you become locked-in to the ape evolution and can no longer return to four-legged animals. At this point your only evolution option is "evolve further". If you keep evolving further... you become a human man! A caveman. Initially holding a club, but if you "evolve further" one last time, the club will evolve into an axe. somehow.

Once you become a man, there are no further evolution possibilities. The only choice in your menu becomes to increase height and decrease height, which is good because at least you can still use that to heal when you need to. But being a human man is the end of the evolutionary line.

To be quite honest.... the human man evolution kind of sucks. His axe is as strong as the T-rex jaw's bite, which is pretty good, but other than that, he doesn't have much going for him. He can't kick, his jumping is average, his defense is okay, and his tackle is mid-tier. ... and most stupidly of all, he also can't eat things from the floor. And not for any sensible reason like the long-necked dinos. They should have let him.... use his hands? to pick things? from the floooor??? 

It would have been really cool if the developers went all-out to make the final secret human man evolution something wondrous to behold, but they really didn't. There really is no gameplay benefit to evolving into a man. The only reason you'd do it is because it "feels right" as part of the story of evolution, in order to reach the "end" of the upgrade chain. But for actually playing the game and beating the bosses, being the man is kind of a huge detriment. He's just not very good. :( And once you've got him, you're stuck with him.

anyway. uh. there's a part of this chapter where you have to save the whales from the "Rogons", evolved shark-people, who use laser guns and ride atop other sharks. They are bitter because the whales evolved to leave the ocean, became mammals, and then sought to return back to the ocean as if they owned the place... ... ... I think the story's gone a bit off the deep end here, haha. Not complaining though. This is great stuff. :D 

The final boss is Bolbox, a gigantic single-cell organism who claims to be the strongest creature in the world. It has absorbed the power of the crystals and intends to go to Eden itself. ... This boss is really difficult because it is a boss rush of six enemies in a row, some of which are really tough unless you know what you're doing. Hopefully you've got enough Evo points to make use of healing mid-battle, especially if you're stuck playing as the human man.

Once Bolbox is defeated, the player meets Gaia and is accepted into Eden. They are granted the intelligence to create civilisations for the future. 

It is then revealed that the strange crystals originated from Mars. A couple of Martians were trying to help Earth evolve by sending them these magical crystals, but they now realise that it is probably better to allow earth's creatures to evolve naturally.

It's an interesting ending that.....kinda explains what's going on, but not really.

And so that's the whole game!

...

My overall thoughts on the game....

Well, I do like it. I really do like it. The concept is very unusual and interesting, and the gameplay is fun enough. I really do like the diversity in the creatures you come across, and the game taking place through different eras of prehistory is honestly really cool, and something I haven't seen very much of in games.

The vague nonsensical story about the crystals that contain magical evolutionary power is a fun premise, although I do think it kind of gets in the way of the core concept of having the game be about evolution through the ages. ...I mean, if you can still find dinosaurs after the extinction event, it kind of undermines the whole thing, wouldn't you say?

Despite mentioning the grinding so much, I actually don't think that's the game's biggest problem.

I think the biggest problem is the level design. If they had made the levels take longer and be more involved, giving them more platforms, hidden alcoves, dead-ends, treasures to find, etc... then there would be a lot more going on than just the enemy grinding. Instead of the main gameplay being to figure out the best grinding spot, they could have made it so you naturally kill a bunch of enemies as you explore, which would certainly reduce a lot of the tedium. And having more exploration-focused level design would also make that awful Fort Bird-man less of a weird outlier. ...

I also take issue with some of the game's music. It's not bad music at all, but a lot of areas have very short repetitive tracks. They wouldn't be a problem ordinarily, but since the game expects you to grind so much, hearing the same repetitive music over and over certainly doesn't help the feeling of tedium.

...Since I don't mind the grinding too much, I did enjoy the game overall. Though some people may have different levels of tolerance for this kind of stuff.

So yeah. That's E.V.O.: Search for Eden. A very unusual action game for the SNES, and one I very much enjoyed playing! It has its issues, but it is definitely unique and charming enough to be worth a playthrough. And it's not all that long either! Good game. :D

Skies of Arcadia Legends

I played Skies of Arcadia Legends!

This is a GameCube game released by Sega in 2003. It is an expanded port of a Dreamcast game from 2000. I played the GameCube version.

The hero of the story is Vyse of the Blue Rogues, a young pirate who journeys around the world with his childhood friend Aika, and a mysterious maiden named Fina, in their quest to obtain the six Moon Crystals before the ruthless Valuan Empire can get their hands on them.

The game is a fairly typical JRPG in terms of gameplay and game structure. You can walk around, examine things, talk to NPCs, and there's an overworld with towns and dungeons to explore.

The world of this game takes place in a series of floating islands in an endless sky, and nobody knows what lies at the bottom of the clouds. Everyone travels around by airships, powered by the magical energy shards that fall down from the six moons.

The six moons sit in the sky above each of the regions of the world, each one influencing the climate down below.

The red moon of fire sits above the desert nation of Nasr.

The green moon of life sits above the jungle nation of Ixa'Taka.

The yellow moon of lighting sits above the power-hungry Valuan Empire, which is bathed in perpetual dark thunderclouds.

The blue moon of wind and water sits above the isolated nation of Yafutoma, located high, high in the sky.

The purple moon of ice sits above the uninhabited Land of Ice, a vast frozen expanse.

And the silver moon of void sits right above.... a mysterious shrine, located near Vyse's hometown? Hmmm...

The story involves Vyse's journey as he explores the world, finds the Moon Crystals, and fights the Valuan Empire. Along the way, Vyse will gain confidence in his abilities as a captain, and will eventually lead his own crew aboard a ship of his very own.

Vyse is the brave, dashing hero. Aika is his rambunctious and energetic childhood friend. And Fina is the soft-spoken, yet determined maiden from another world.

Along the way, the team meet three other heroes, who join and leave the party as the story dictates: Drachma, the old sea captain who is trying to hunt a giant whale. Gilder, the charismatic gunslinger who's always getting himself into trouble. And Enrique, the Valuan prince, who rebels against his family's cruel methods.

The characters and the storytelling in this game are quite well-done. The cutscenes are very well-animated, with plenty of bespoke motions for each scene. The dialogue between the characters is great at showing everyone's personalities and motivations. The faces and animations are also very expressive - Aika has some particularly funny expressions whenever she gets annoyed with someone. 

Even though the character models are simple, they are wonderfully animated and expressive.

The story of the game is a sort of action-hero kind of plot, with good guys versus bad guys, and Vyse always jumping in to save the day with his swashbuckling swordplay.

However, it isn't an entirely simplistic plot, and the story does become more serious as the stakes are raised and the heroes become more desperate toward the end.

The story is overall a good and satisfying story. And the cast of fun and likeable characters really makes you care about seeing it through.

...

As you explore around the environments, you can examine objects with the A button, and Vyse will comment about them, showing his opinions and giving us information about the area. There's a huge amount of flavour text for the environmental objects in this game, and they even update whenever it's relevant as the story progresses. It gives the world a huge amount of life to see all of this added detail. I like reading it all.

The NPCs in each village are just as detailed. The NPCs in this game all have unique and distinct character designs, which is something I always like to see in RPGs. Though the game does copy the same shopkeeper characters between each town, for some reason.

Each NPC stays in their designated spot the whole game, but their dialogue does update as the story progresses. And they do play with this in silly ways too - one NPC in Sailor's Village is always rolling around on the ground for some reason. And every time the dialogue updates, his reason for rolling around is also different each time. There's a subtle sense of humour here.

When you talk to NPCs, the camera zooms in to show them closer, so you can get a good look at them. And they all have very expressive animations too. There's a shopkeeper who fiddles with his moustache, there's the guild hall keeper who puts away his book when you approach... All sorts of lovely little touches that makes everything feel more alive. It's great stuff.

...

The world map is explored by airship - you can sail freely up and down in 3D space as you travel between the floating islands that make up the world. There is no fast-travel system, nor any teleportation magic - all travelling has to be done via the ship in the overworld

At first, your explorable area is quite limited, as there are barrier reefs and walls of wind preventing you from accessing areas too early. As you progress through the game, your ship receives upgrades that allow it to pass through more types of overworld barriers.

The progression of the game starts off unassumingly formulaic at first. It seems like it'll be a straightforward journey of collecting each Moon Crystal from each dungeon in turn. ...but partway through, things become much more complex, and the story strays from the Moon Crystal quest several times. It's always fun to see what is going to happen next.

At one point, there is a moment where you must amass 75000 gold in order to fund the construction of a new base of operations. And this isn't some sidequest, this is mandatory! The prior dungeon did give you a lot of gold for defeating the boss, but if you decided to spend that on weapon and armour upgrades, you'd better be ready to grind for money!

Honestly, I think it's pretty cool. I do like an RPG that isn't afraid to actually make you pay attention to its various systems, including things like how to earn money effectively.

...

As you explore the world, you may notice your compass spinning wildly - this indicates that there is a "discovery" nearby. A discovery is a hidden landmark of some kind, which appears in the overworld when you find it. It could be an ancient artifact, a manmade structure, a strange plant, a local delicacy, a natural phenomenon - there are all sorts of things. Every discovery you find has a little description which tells you more about it - the history, the mythologies, the local legends, and anything else that might be interesting.

When you make a discovery, you can sell the information about its whereabouts to the guild hall in town. You can also buy hints about the locations of discoveries that are yet to be found. When you sell a discovery, you get a lot of money if you found it all by yourself. If you bought a hint beforehand, you get less money, but still a decent amount. And if you leave it for too long, then a rival explorer named Domingo will have found it first. If you sell info for any discoveries marked as "Found by Domingo", then you only earn a paltry sum, just a token prize for reconfirming what they already knew.

I think this system is quite fun - this is a pirate game after all, we're supposed to be in an age of exploration, and the game provides that feeling well enough with these discoveries. This is a great way to flesh out the world with more interesting worldbuilding that allows the game world to feel bigger than what is playable. Some of the discoveries are little villages or towns that you don't get to visit... but just seeing that there are more settlements out there helps the world feel more realised. Plus, the system where Domingo can find them before you adds just a touch of urgency to keep you wanting to look for them. It's fun stuff. 

Though it has to be said, some of the discoveries can be very difficult to locate without using an online guide. There are 88 discoveries to find in total, and some of them are in some very hidden spots, and several of them move around! There's a particularly annoying discovery for a swarm of butterflies that flies around the whole world, high in the sky, almost out of view. It's difficult to find them even if you already know exactly what you're looking for. ...

Annoyingly, you do have to contend with a barrage of random enemy encounters while roaming the skies in your ship, so searching for discoveries without a guide can be a tiresome affair.

The guild hall also has another function - it has a selection of wanted posters, and you can choose to accept their quests to defeat the opponent and claim the bounty.

These wanted poster fights can actually be quite a lot higher-levelled than your team is at the point where they become available, which may force you to have to come back later. The prizes from these optional fights tend to be really good though.

I do enjoy when a game gives you the opportunity to fight way overpowered foes. Because it gives a particularly tactically-minded player an opportunity to test their knowledge of the combat system.

...

Your party members can equip one weapon, one armour, and one accessory each.

Sometimes the armour has specific attributes, such as "strong versus fire", but, to be honest... most of the time, I'm going to be equipping the armour with the best stats, and if the extra attributes ever end up helping, that's just a circumstantial lucky moment, I guess. I wonder if it would be beneficial to plan my equipment with the enemies in mind... but wouldn't that require me to already know what my foe is like before I fight them? 🤔

Well, it is actually possible to swap your equipment mid-battle in this game, which is good. But, I never...remember to. Haha. It's always a fiddly kind of thing to remember to do that.

The fact that there is only one accessory slot for each character is a little bit limiting. Because I found myself settling on a "favourite" accessory I never wanted to take off, which means that, for every new one I acquired, I would look at it, and then immediately disregard it because it wasn't better than my favourite.

For Vyse, I kept the Captain's Hat on him for the majority of the game, an accessory that significantly boosts Attack. For Aika, I eventually settled on an accessory that blocks status conditions, which is super-useful in avoiding being completely devastated when bosses use party-wide status-inflicting attacks.

The game has all sorts of accessories with all sorts of effects, but with the limitation of only one slot per character, I don't think there is much opportunity to make use of them all. Because I'm never going to want to remove the Captain's Hat from Vyse, the strength bonus is just too crazy good to not keep.

Even though it would make the game easier, I think it would actually be more interesting if characters had two accessory slots to work with. They could also make some bosses harder to compensate, right? Oh well.

Thankfully, whenever it's time to say goodbye to a temporary party member, all of their gear goes back in the inventory. It's good that I don't have to worry about them losing my stuff.

In addition to equipping your party members, you can also equip your airship with equipment. Various different cannons and various different armour platings and furnishings. Again, the slots are annoyingly limited, which means that some of the more unique items get left on the wayside in favour of the more practical ones.

The ship's stats are useful for the ship combat, which is a whole thing separate from the regular combat system..

...I guess I should talk about the combat system then!

...

The regular combat system is for the most part a typical turn-based JRPG combat system, though it does have a few unique aspects that make it stand out.

Your available commands are:

Attack, Magic, Super Moves, Focus, Defend. ...and Run.

Each party member has their own HP and MP, and there is also a shared party-wide SP gauge.

The SP gauge is always reset to its default value at the beginning of every battle, while HP and MP are persistent. The default SP value increases as your party members' "Spirit" stat increases via level-ups, though it doesn't increase very often.

Regular attacks are interesting for a few reasons. Firstly, you have the ability to select an elemental affinity for your weapon at any time, just by pressing the X and Y buttons to toggle between them. There are six elements, each corresponding to the colours of the six moons.

Unfortunately, it's a little difficult to actually make good decisions about your element, because the game never actually gives you information about the opponent's elements at all.

There is one boss fight against two guardians, one fiery and one icy, where it's pretty obvious, but aside from that, I never found it necessary to particularly care about what element my weapon was.

The elemental chart is shown in the game's instruction booklet, and it's kind of interesting - it's not particularly balanced at all. Fire and Ice are strong versus each other, of course... and Silver weapons don't have any elements that resist them at all. So if you are ever in doubt for which element to use, Silver will at least never be detrimental.

The other thing regular attacks have is that they can be countered. Any time you use a regular attack, there is a chance that the enemy will immediately respond with their own regular attack.

This actually goes both ways too - regular attacks from enemies can be countered by the player's party too. Which is pretty fun.

But this does lead to some interesting strategic decisions - if you are fighting a boss with particularly strong attacks, it might be a problem if they can get too many hits on the same character in a single turn. So it might actually be a good idea to select Defend instead of Attack in these cases, to eliminate the risk of taking a counterattack. It's an interesting little wrinkle in the combat system.

Every magic spell costs 1 MP to use, plus some of the partywide SP gauge. The SP cost is variable depending on the spell, but the MP cost is always 1.

All characters learn the same list of spells, but different characters learn them at different rates. Fina learns spells the quickest, and by the end of the game, it is likely she will have learned every spell in the game. Vyse learns spells at an average rate, and he will probably not have learned every spell by the end, but it could be done if you wanted to grind.

The element of spell you learn depends on which element weapon you finish combat with. If you set your weapon to green, then you will earn some Green Magic EXP. This applies to the whole party, not just the wielder, so you can have your whole team learn four colours at once by making sure everyone has their weapons set to different elements. .... this is the other reason why I never particularly bothered to care about the elemental effectiveness system when choosing my weapon colours - learning spells was a way more important reason to swap elements!

The spells are... honestly, I never felt like using them as much as my other options. At the beginning of the game, MP is quite limited. And towards the end of the game, my SP was FAR better used for doing Super Moves rather than magic.

Magic is useful between battles for healing, though, since the SP cost is irrelevant outside of battle. Even a strong partywide heal still just costs 1 MP. That's pretty good.

The best spells to use are the heals, revives, and party buffs. 

The worst spells to use are the enemy debuffs. Because... debuffing basically never works in this game. ... it's a common problem with older RPGs, where trying to cast debuffs on enemies often fails and wastes your turn. And Skies of Arcadia, sorry to say, is one of the worst examples of this problem I have seen. I have basically never gotten a debuff to work against a boss. And for regular enemies, there's no point in trying to debuff them when I could just damage them instead. ...

Another reason why spells aren't so great is because of items. There are items that basically do the same job a spell does. Healing, buffing, and even casting offensive magic, there are items that can do all of these things. And the difference is, it doesn't cost any SP at all to use an item! 

Quite often, I wouldn't have enough SP to use both a Super Move and heal on the same turn.... unless I stopped trying to heal with magic, and instead healed with an item. Then it's all good!

The downside of using items is that you have to spend money on buying more of them if you use them a lot... Which is fine for the game-wide balance, but for the in-the-moment balance, items are just plain better than spells. Which is a bit of a shame.

So, the Super Moves, unlike magic, are unique per character. They are learned by finding rare Moonberries, and using them on your party members, which unlocks their super moves. Moonberries are found in chests throughout the game, but they are also rare drops from certain enemies, so they are not a finite resource. (though they aren't good for anything other than unlocking super moves, so farming too many spare moonberries doesn't do you any good).

Super Moves are strong and unique attacks. Most Super Moves focus on dealing high amounts of damage, and they cost large amounts of SP to use. There are also some with unique effects too.

Vyse has the best super moves for dealing with single enemies. Cutlass Fury in the earlygame, and Pirate's Wrath in the endgame. They are Vyse's main heavy damage-dealers, and you always want to go for these moves during bosses. 

Vyse also gets an interesting super move, Skull Shield, that makes the team immune to regular attacks and counters, though it doesn't do anything if the enemy chooses to do something other than a regular attack... some strategy may be required to make good use of some of these moves, it seems.

Aika has the best super moves for dealing with groups of enemies. Lambda Burst hits every enemy, and does a lot of damage as long as they aren't resistant to magic. Her lategame move Omega Psyclone is even stronger. She also has a unique skill called Epsilon Mirror, which renders her completely immune to damage for one turn and restores 10 MP. 

Because of this MP restoration, I used Aika as my main healer between battles. Whenever she got low on MP mid-dungeon from all the between-battle healing, I'd make sure to get into a battle and use an Epsilon Mirror to get it all back for free. Free healing, no wasted potions. Pretty sweet!

Fina's super moves are interesting, as she has the ability to remove enemy buffs with Lunar Cleansing, cast regeneration on the team with Lunar Blessing, and with her most powerful super move, Lunar Light, she can completely revive all allies to maximum HP, including downed allies. That certainly came pretty handy in the hardest endgame fights.

I would say that, overall, Aika has the most useful super moves. If you keep getting into encounters with groups of enemies, Lambda Burst can very often just kill the majority of them right away. It's super good. Especially when dealing with lower-level enemies who you just want to get rid of. There were definitely entire dungeons I traversed where my strategy for every encounter was to just open with Lambda Burst right away. 

Focus is pretty simple - it spends your turn in exchange for adding some SP to the gauge. This is useful when you really need Vyse to use Cutlass Fury next turn. Having a buffer of SP is good.

And Defend will reduce any damage by half. Very useful if you want to keep Fina alive, since she is on the frail side, and her incredibly useful super moves aren't so good if she's dead. :(

.... Overall, I actually really enjoy the mechanics of this battle system. The partywide SP gauge is the main unique element that makes this game stand out. It's quite a strategic system, and some of the tougher bosses can be a real exciting test of endurance!

However...... the biggest problem with this battle system is that everything is really really slow! As a 2000s-era JRPG, the animations, the camera zooms, everything is just.... so.... slow... :(

You really do have to just accept that this is a slow-paced combat system, and just take it as it comes. Otherwise you'll get too frustrated and impatient. Slow down, leave your modern expectations at the door, and learn to enjoy it as it comes. ... ... ... ...Yeah, even then, I still wish it wasn't so slow.

There is a way to skip some of the super move animations, but it requires you to press the Start button at the very beginning of the animation. If you wait too long, the animation becomes unskippable. ... .... I'm not sure why that is. I actually didn't realise you could skip animations until a significant way through the game because the input is so specific. That's no good.

...

And as I mentioned, there's also an entirely separate combat system for fighting enemy ships. Ship-to-ship naval combat!

In these types of battles, you see a timeline that shows the enemy ship's status for the next four turns - green means no significant threat, yellow means a strong attack, red means a very strong attack, and if there's a "C" icon, it means they are extra vulnerable that turn. ...you have to then place four commands, one on each turn, in order to make the best of the situation. For example, if the "C" icon is on a red turn, that means you'll have to risk taking heavy damage in order to deal more damage to them. Or you could play it safe and defend on the red turn, and miss out on the bonus damage.

Your options are to shoot your equipped cannons, use magic, focus for SP, or defend. 

In this system, even the regular cannonfire costs SP to use, so you do need to manage your SP well.

Occasionally, some turns will be marked with a special cannon icon, which indicates that your super-cannon is possible to use on that turn. It costs a ton of SP to fire, but is also the main way to make a dent in an otherwise heavily-guarded enemy. You always want to be able to hit as many of those special cannon opportunities as possible.

Between rounds, you also get dialogue choices that affect what the next set of four turns will look like. The choices can be things like, "Vyse, should we approach from the top, or should we stay back?"

Depending on your choice, the timeline will look different, though it is not always obvious which choice leads to which outcome.

.....so, these naval combat sequences are honestly my least-favourite part of the game. And the main reason for that is that...... oh man, if you thought the regular combat was slow-paced, these naval combat scenes are GLACIAL. They are ridiculously slow. It's absurd. During one of these battles, you are very often just watching the screen, looking at two ships flying in the sky near each other, with nothing but fancy camera angles going on for an extended period of time. It's ridiculous. Between each turn in a round, there's like 5 to 10 seconds of just NOTHING happening. It's absurdly slow.

I wonder if it was designed like this in order to give the naval battles more gravitas? Since it is a battle between two huge war ships, it should feel grand and heavy, right? ....but I think it is a real detriment to the game, unfortunately. I really do wish there was a way to skip these slow animations and just focus on the strategising, which is the good part.

oh well. anyway. what next.

...

The dungeon design in this game starts off very straightforward. In fact, it's not until the third or fourth dungeon before you start seeing any branching paths to any significant degree. The dungeons start off straightforward and easygoing, so all you need to really worry about is making progress and fighting the enemies.

Later dungeons do introduce some more decisions to make about which path to take, but it never really becomes too complicated.

The dungeons are nicely varied in terms of aesthetics and enemy design, which makes each one stand out and feel unique, despite the simple layouts. It works out fine overall. I wouldn't call the dungeon designs one of this game's strengths, but they do their job and are on the whole not a chore to explore.

The most annoying dungeon was the mine with lots of trapdoors, where if you take the wrong trapdoor, it leads back to the beginning. This one is especially annoying because you're not allowed to leave until you get to the end, but there isn't a save point until just before the boss. ..... This means you have to basically solve the whole dungeon just to save. I really wish they just put a save point in the room you land in after taking the wrong trapdoor. It's a bit of a bad oversight in my opinion.

...

This game has a hidden "Swashbuckler rating" that determines Vyse's reputation as a pirate.

When you get enough points, your title will upgrade. You get swashbuckler points by selecting the correct dialogue options during the cutscenes. You always want to go for the options that make Vyse sound cool and brave and heroic. If you get the choice between something like "We have to rescue them right away!" versus something like "Maybe we shouldn't go in there just yet...", well, the more heroic option gives you more points.

Your Swashbuckler rank starts off as "Vyse the Unimpressive", and as you continue making the correct dialogue choices in cutscenes, the rating can improve. "Vyse the Determined", "Vyse the Admirable", "Vyse the Valiant", allll the way up to the maximum rank, "Vyse the Legend". I believe Legend rank also has some additional requirements too, such as attaining 100% completion in other areas. I'm not too sure on the specifics.

The rank doesn't affect much - some NPCs will mention it, and shopkeepers will be honoured to greet Vyse with a high ranking, which is a cute detail.

There are a few bonuses you get for managing to reach Legend rank, including Vyse's ultimate weapon, as well as a bonus secret boss fight. These are cool rewards. :D

Other than these, though, it's not all that important.

There is a specific interaction where, if you accept one particular wanted poster quest, Vyse's rank temporarily becomes "Vyse the Fallen Pirate". This is because the wanted poster is for a Vyse imposter, named "Vize", who has been going around stealing and tricking people and sullying Vyse's good name. I think this is a funny detail, I like it when story elements can affect the game systems like this, it's cool. And of course, defeating the imposter restores Vyse's reputation back to where it should be.

...

Later in the game, once Vyse properly becomes captain of his own ship, we establish a base on Crescent Isle, and Vyse also can start assembling his crew.

This system actually reminded me quite a lot of Suikoden. It works in a similar way. You can find recruitable crew members all over the world - if they have their own name and a cool character design, it's a good sign that they might be someone you can recruit. Some of them will join right away, but others may require you to meet some sort of criteria before they can join.

There are 22 crew members to find in total. .... not quite the 108 from Suikoden, eh? But still, it's a sizable sidequest to find everyone.

Each crew member has a role, and there are two of each role to find in the game. You can toggle between the two characters for each role, each one providing some kind of mutually-exclusive bonus during ship battles. For example, there are two Engineers: Brabham, or Hans. If you have Brabham active, your ship gets +20 defense. If you have Hans active, then your ship instead gets +20 magic defense.

Some of the crew members are actually usable as commands during a ship battle too. There are two Sailors: Marco, or Robinson. Having Marco active will give you a command that doubles your SP mid-battle. Having Robinson active will give you a command that reduces SP cost instead. ...To be honest, some of these differences don't actually make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things...

Each character will appear aboard your ship somewhere, and they have unique and story-relevant dialogue if you go and talk to them. It can be very fun to see what everyone has to say in between each story beat, but in practice, it's really annoying to actually do this, because they only appear on the ship if they are the currently-active member of their role. The other ones just disappear when you unequip them. So in order to see all the dialogue, you have to do the rounds of your ship, talk to everyone, then toggle all 11 roles to the other option, then do the rounds and talk to everyone again. 

I honestly wish that all 22 members were just always visible and interactable on the ship at all times, without having to fiddle around in the menus to get them to appear. That kind of annoys me to be honest.

But I guess it makes sense, the idea is that you only need one member of each role aboard at a time, that's the whole reason you gotta choose in the first place. ...But I kinda just want to see all the dialogue lol. The actual gameplay differences between each crew member isn't so important.

Each crew member also takes their place in Crescent Isle. Some of them set up shop, while others just hang around and have dialogue. It's really nice just to go around talking to everyone. It's fun to see the island become more lively as you recruit more crew members.

...And this is definitely a rather Suikoden-flavoured aspect of the game, heh. :D

...

Overall. ... ... I really really really liked Skies of Arcadia Legends! It has such a fun cast of characters, the story is well-presented and interesting, and the combat system is quite deep despite its slow pace. I'm super happy to have played this lovely RPG that's been in my backlog for an incredibly long time. I do wish that if Sega ever releases this game for modern platforms, they include a battle speed-up button!

Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma

I played Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma. This game was developed by Marvelous and released for Nintendo Switch in 2025, and other platforms in 2026.

I played the "Nintendo Switch 2 Edition" version.

Guardians of Azuma is an RPG with farming, town-building, and relationships. It's also a dungeon-exploration, monster-slaying action-RPG!

I've not actually played any of the previous Rune Factory games before. I've also not really played any of the Harvest Moon or Story of Seasons games either. Guardians of Azuma is my entry point into the series!

At the beginning of the game, you get a choice between two protagonists: Subaru or Kaguya. Of course, many life-sim style games let you choose between a male or a female protagonist, but I do enjoy how in this game, the one you don't select also becomes an important character in the story who you meet later on. That's not something I see too often. (I think Pokémon is the only other example I can think of right now)

The two characters do actually have distinct personalities as well, they are not just gender-swapped identical copies of each other. They are also not silent protagonists - they have plenty of spoken dialogue during every cutscene. It makes them feel like fully-realised characters.

I chose Subaru for my playthrough. Which means that there exists an alternate playthrough with Kaguya that I have not seen at all. I know the same general story will play out regardless, so I don't think I'm missing anything important... but one day it may be interesting to play through the game again with her.

This game features both English and Japanese voice acting. I decided to play with English voices, and I have to say, I was quite impressed with the sheer quality of the voicework. The actors did an excellent job at bringing the personality of every character to life, and I'm also pleased with how the vast majority of scenes have full voice acting, even many optional scenes. Good stuff!

The characters don't voice the protagonist's name since you have the option to rename them yourselves, but they do voice the name of the other protagonist you didn't choose, because they go by their default name when they show up as an NPC. kinda interesting.

It does feel a bit off-putting to see so many mentions of your name appear in the script but to never hear it spoken out loud. ...I guess there wasn't much they could do about that.

but anyways. Let's see what kind of game this is.

Rune Factory Guardians of Azuma is a half life-sim, half action-RPG kind of game.

The game takes place in Azuma, a land inspired by traditional Japanese folklore. There are cherry blossoms, shinto-style shrines, and plenty of youkai, spirits, and oni wandering around. The visual design in this game is very beautiful, with lots of Japanese inspired scenery and landscapes. I like it a lot. :)

Azuma has been poisoned by the blight that has been spreading ever since the 'Celestial Collapse' occurred many years ago.

The world's energy is being drained, and the people are becoming ever more desperate as resources are dwindling. Subaru (or Kaguya) is an Earth Dancer, one who is tasked with cleansing the world of the blight and restoring the balance.

They wake up in Spring Village without any of their memories. They meet Woolby, a floating sheepy looking critter who acts as a helpful partner throughout the story.

Woolby is a good character. He feels like a typical kind of anime-esque fluffy mascot character, in that it's easy for everyone to tease him, and he's easily swayed by food. And he's the hero's best friend! 

Woolby accompanies the hero throughout the whole story, giving us information about the world, and he has plenty of dialogue during the cutscenes too.

in Spring Village, we meet a few other important characters: the village elder Sakaki, the teahouse owner Iroha, and Iroha's little sister Suzu. We also meet the kind-hearted god of spring Ulalaka in our dreams, who gifts us a divine drum from within the dream world.

The drum manifests itself in the real world after waking up, and with it, the Earth Dancer is able to rejuvenate the sacred tree of the village.

Ulalaka has been hiding herself within the tree for a long time in order to escape the Celestial Collapse, but her powers as a god have been dwindling as the blight infests the world.

Upon re-emerging from the tree, Ulalaka and the townsfolk task us with restoring Spring Village back to its former glory. And with this... we learn about the farming and life-sim systems of the game.

...

So, to begin with, this game runs on a time-of-day system - one second of real-world time equals one minute of in-game time. At night time, you need to go to bed, but it is possible to stay up past your bedtime if you wish. Though staying up too late drains your health and eventually gives exp penalties.

Spring Village has a designated "development zone", a rectangular area near the middle of the village where the player is free to place down farmland, buildings, and decorations. In order to create farmland, you need to find rocks and weeds here and there, and then Woolby will use his powers to transform them into soil. And then he can turn soil into usable farmland. 

The farmland goes into your inventory, and you can place down your tiles of farmland anywhere within the development zone. And if you don't like the layout, you can pick it back up and put it where you prefer.

As you progress through the game, you can unlock a few more development zones located in specific spots around the village, which gives you more room to work with.

You can buy seeds for crops from various shops, including Iroha's teahouse. You can plant one seed per farm tile. When you wake up next dawn, the crops you planted previously will have grown by one stage, but only if you remembered to water them beforehand. If you neglect to water your crops, they will instead wither.

Watering a crop is a simple matter of pressing the A button while standing near it, and it stays watered for the whole day.

In addition to walking up and interacting with your farmland, you also have the option to go into a birds-eye view within your dev zones, where you control a cursor on a grid to more efficiently place down tiles and buildings, and you can also plant, harvest, and water in this mode too. I'm glad I have this option - sometimes it's difficult to highlight the correct tiles when I'm walking around the dev zone as my character, so being able to just control things directly with a cursor is very much appreciated. The Switch 2 version also lets you use the mouse controls when in this zoomed-out view, which is fun, but I never particularly felt like the button controls were lacking, so I didn't really use this option.

The first crop you get is turnips, which take 3 days to fully grow. 

If you use Ulalaka's drum in your farm, it will create a shockwave that will instantly grow a crop into its next stage of development, which can be done once a day per crop (the crop gets a little drum icon next to its name to indicate that it has been drummed today). This means that a turnip that takes 3 days to grow can actually be fully grown after just one night's sleep. All you gotta do is drum it the moment you plant it to turn the "3 days left" into "2 days left", and then the next morning, when it says "1 day left", drum it again to make it immediately harvestable.

Whenever you harvest a crop, you gain several of the resulting veggie in your inventory, and conveniently, you also get the seed back too. This means it's not possible to waste seeds unless you let plants wither completely. 

The drum will also revive any withered crops. So there is more leeway here than you might expect.

Beating the drum uses up 3 RP. RP are Rune Points, this game's version of mana. RP recovers very slowly over time, but you can also use recovery items if you have them. You don't start with much max RP, but as you level up by defeating monsters, it will increase of course. And there are also Rune Lanterns placed around the fields and dungeons, particularly before boss fights, that recover RP too. The lanterns refresh every new day.

...

So in addition to farming in the village, you'll also be exploring in the fields nearby. As Earth Dancer, your task is to clear the lands of the blight, and restore the world to its natural balance. Which also involves fighting off the monsters who prowl around.

The explorable areas are fairly open-ended, but the dungeon interiors are fairly straightforward. You have a very generous map that allows you to fast-travel to any savepoint you've been to, so it's very very easy to get around.

This game uses a realtime action-RPG style of combat where you attack enemies directly with your equipped weapon. At first you get a short sword, but as you progress through the story, you can gain access to more weapon types. You can use bows, longswords, talismans, and dual-blades. 

Personally, longswords felt too slow for me, and talismans were too awkward for me - they shoot homing projectiles, but they move through the air in an unusual trajectory, and they don't tend to hit something that's right in front of you. I mostly used short swords and dual blades, which have fast attacking speeds.

Each weapon has a few basic combo / followup moves you get when you press the attack button repeatedly.

The bow is a special weapon - if you have a bow equipped, it can be shot in two different ways. If you just press the attack button normally, it shoots projectiles straight ahead, with its own combo followup attacks just like the other weapons. But you can also hold down the ZL button to freely aim the bow and shoot it anywhere you like in 3D space. I really like this. It means the bow can actually act like a bow rather than just being an alternate weapon type. It can be both! ...I will complain that the bow's range might be a bit short for my liking, and the arrows don't travel all that realistically in the air. ...but maybe that's the Legend of Zelda fan in me speaking. It behaves perfectly fine for this game.

The bow is actually a really good weapon for staying out of trouble. Early on, when I was still really low level, like level 5 or something, I encountered a big oni enemy who was level 20. This guy will kill you pretty quickly, but with the bow, I could just keep hitting it from a distance, and the enemy wasn't able to make its way over to me, so I could just keep hitting it until it ran out of health. I gained several level-ups at once from just one enemy. From level 5 to 9 or something like that. hehe. I always like being able to kill higher level enemies that I'm not "supposed to" be able to kill yet. Makes me feel clever.

There's also a dodge button, and if you dodge an enemy's attacks with the right timing, you'll go into a slow-motion mode where you are free to counter-attack the enemy with invincibility for a short amount of time. It's pretty fun, and it's actually surprisingly lenient. Very often, I can even get it to activate by dodging towards enemy projectiles - it seems that just being in the dodging state within the radius of the attack is enough to trigger the invincibility slow-mo, even if that means dashing right into it. It's always fun to go for once you realise this. Sometimes you even want to deliberately go out of your way to dash towards errant projectiles just to get some of that sweet slo-mo going.

You can also bring some of the characters from the village (including gods like Ulalaka) with you, as computer-controlled party members. You can bring a party of three, and later you unlock the ability to have three others in reserve who can all be swapped out at any time. They have their own skills and special moves and all that - Sakaki can debuff the opponent, Ulalaka can heal you. You know. Stuff like that. It can be useful, but for the most part, it never felt important to pay attention to what they do. The game wasn't difficult enough for me to have to really consider whose abilities would be the most helpful or anything like that. You can kinda just bring a couple whoevers, and... yeah, they'll probably help somehow. ...I do like how them being KO'd does not actually prevent them from gaining EXP. That means I don't even need to pay attention to them at all, really. That works for me!

This is not a difficult game overall. Combat starts extremely easy, and by the end of the story, it gets ...marginally challenging, but still forgiving. There are three difficulty settings, "Story", "Balanced", and "Hard", and I decided to stick with Balanced. Maybe I would have found the difficulty more up to my speed if I had chosen Hard, but right about the time I was considering raising the difficulty, I got defeated by a high-level bear enemy, so I didn't feel like changing it anymore haha. 

When you kill monsters, they drop materials that can be useful for crafting things back in the village. Claws, furs, feathers, horns, all sorts of stuff. Boss fights can drop rare or sometimes even unique materials, and so the game does let you re-fight any bosses, though only once per day per boss. 

Later in the game, there's a particularly notable fight against an enemy black dragon, who drops very valuable furs and scales upon defeat. These special materials aren't really used in many crafting recipes, but they do sell for a TON of money. Despite being a notable story boss, the fight is actually really simple, so if you want, you can just make it part of your daily routine to refight this boss to get some extra cash every day lol.

The game's extremely generous fast-travel system meant that I never really had to properly prepare myself for any outing. If I didn't bring enough healing items, I could always kinda just pop back into town for a bit, grab some more food, and warp right back where I was. And since the Rune Lanterns are so plentiful around the world, I never really had to care about my RP management either. Mid-dungeon, whenever I was getting low on magic, I could so so easily just warp to a previous area with a Lantern, get my RP back, and then warp back to the dungeon I was in and continue.

To be honest, I think so many of the game's interconnecting systems kind of just break when you make heavy use of the fast travel feature. ... But what am I gonna do, not use it? No way.

...

Aside from combat, there's plenty of other stuff to find while out exploring. There are frog statues to find that give you new recipes (both food and crafting), there are jizo statues that you can tidy up to gain gifts, and there are miscellaneous other quests to complete, such as finding hidden archery targets that give you... eggplant seeds as a reward for hitting them. alrighty then. 

...for non-eggplant veggies, you may also come across patches of vegetables here and there that can be retrieved to obtain the seeds - this is the main way to obtain seeds for crops you haven't got yet. 

These veggie patches do not replenish, instead, seeds will become available in the shops in town for you to buy again if you need more.

So there are plenty of things to find while exploring around, and I quite like it! Feels fun to uncover everything, and thankfully the map / minimap tracks every collectible on it, so it's no problem to find everything.

There are patches of blight all over the lands, some of which can be restored with Ulalaka's drum. ....however, not all of them can be removed this way. There are plenty of blight patches, both in the fields and in the village, that require a different divine relic to purify...

After doing a bunch of quests and adventuring around, purifying blight, improving your farms... eventually you get to a point where everyone is happy with your progress in the Spring region. The village is back on its feet, everyone who needs rescuing has been rescued, and things are going fine. So at this point, it's time for the Earth Dancer to make their way over to the other regions of Azuma to help the other towns.

Woolby transforms into a gigantic divine dragon of pure white - Mokoshiro, descendent of the great Mihoshi Habaki. This is his real form, it turns out he's not really a little sheep! ...well, he wasn't really hiding it from us or anything, we just have amnesia and forgot.

...Interestingly, when Woolby is Mokoshiro, he speaks with divine grandeur befitting of a deity, rather than the casual buddy kind of speech he normally has. 

I find this fun. Woolby is Mokoshiro, they are not distinct characters or anything...So I just sort of get the feeling that Woolby chooses the speech style that kinda feels right for him depending on which form he is currently assuming.

And on Woolby's back, we can fly through the skies over Azuma! 

In the skies, there are several floating islands. Each one has a little bit to explore, a few monsters, a few treasures. Some of them even have additional sidequests.

We don't have access to all the floating islands from the start, but as you progress through the game, more of them become available.

The floating islands are cool, but I wish there was a little more substance to them. You spend the vast majority of the game elsewhere - if you need to go fight specific monsters, it's generally easiest to find them in dungeons. And if you're out and about gathering resources in the wild, it's generally gonna be on the ground. Once you've explored each island in turn, there's never really much reason to go back to them, aside from like a couple of fishing spots up there that have a higher chance of rarer fish. and other very specific things like that. ....which is a bit of a shame, I do wish the sky islands were a more prominent part of the game, because it feels so magical flying through the air and exploring them.

All of the latter-game dungeons are accessed via the floating islands, and it can be useful to return to these dungeons to gather lategame resources. However, you don't tend to actually return to them via flying on Woolby, because you can just use fast-travel to go anywhere. It's a bit sad.

I do enjoy the convenience of the extremely generous fast-travel system in this game... but it has to be said, it can remove much of the magic from the world itself. The game designers created a brilliant white dragon for us to fly on, and then also implemented a system that makes it a waste of time to do so.

I wonder if there was something they could have done to make the sky overworld feel more relevant without just removing conveniences. I'm not too sure.

...There are some oddities in the game that imply that maybe fast-travel wasn't always going to be so strong? .... for example, in your menus, the bestiary category for the "Skies of Azuma" enemies doesn't get unlocked until you land back in Spring Village from the sky. but if you just use fast-travel to get everywhere, then this menu category could inexplicably remain locked for the whole game, since fast-travel makes it never a requirement to actually land back in Spring Village manually. it's weird. During development, was fast-travel more limited or something?

...

So. Here's where the progression of the game becomes apparent. Once you're done with Spring Village, you fly in the sky and land in Summer Village. There's a new set of people who greet you - Tsubame the shrewd and savvy merchant, Hisui, the old fortuneteller, and Kusatsu the cheery innkeeper. And the god of this region, the hotheaded Matsuri, is trapped and needs rescuing. Just like Ulalaka, Matsuri speaks to us in the dream world and gifts us her own divine relic - a big flamey sword!

Now that we have access to two villages, we have more people to talk to and more types of crops. Additionally, Matsuri's flame sword can be used to destroy purple blight that the drum couldn't. If we go back to Spring Village with it, we can unlock some new Development Zones, and expand our town even further by removing all the purple blight.

After completing everything in the Summer region, we fly next to the Autumn Village. Just as before, there's a new set of characters, new set of crops, and a new god to rescue. The god of autumn is the introverted yet opinionated Kurama, and his relic is a fan that blows a wind gust, and also makes you run faster. This fan can destroy green blight.

And in Winter Village, the final village, we have the winter god, the gentle and sensitive Fubuki. He gives us his umbrella of water, which splashes a big deluge of water around you. And it destroys red blight.

I do want to say that I think these four divine relics are particularly cleverly designed, as they are useful in both combat and in farming.

Ulalaka's drum will expedite crop growth as I mentioned earlier, and it can also heal you and your allies in combat, as well as interrupt enemies with its shockwave.

Matsuri's sword can be swung at harvest-ready crops to transform them into a large amount of seeds, with a chance to upgrade them into higher-level versions of the seeds. (there's a whole crop levelling up system i don't feel like explaining. higher level crops make better foods that heal you more and sell for more.) ...it also can be used in combat to do big fiery slashes at foes.

Kurama's fan blows a small whirlwind forwards, which automatically plucks harvestable crops from the ground, saving you the effort of picking them individually. It also does lots of damage to enemies!

Fubuki's umbrella splashes water all around, which can be used to water crops in a wide area, and it also hits enemies all around you.

I do really think it's so incredibly clever how each of the four main divine relics' attacks are used in both fighting and farming. It's done in a way that feels so natural and intuitive. 

...I won't extend the compliments to the remaining two divine weapons you gain towards the end of the story however - the dark and light weapons. The oni mask lets you do sumo moves to attack enemies, and the light staff lets you summon butterflies that auto-target enemies. Neither of which help your farming in any way. Oh well.

I think it would have been cool if they could have done something to the crops as well. 

... ... ... ...You know, this game contains a system where crops can sometimes grow gigantic instead of normal, and there's currently no way to influence that. .... maybe they could have done something with that. Maybe they could have made the oni mask's shockwaves make crops more likely to grow gigantic or something? ...Would that have been too overpowered? I dunno. I'm just making things up. There also exist golden crops - maybe the light staff could have done something with them??? eh. I'm not the game designer. I just wish that all of the divine relics could have this cool double-use to them because I thought it was really clever the way it worked with the first four.

...

As long as I'm complaining, I want to complain a bit about one aspect of the combat system. This game does have extensive tutorials about most aspects of the game, but an area the tutorials don't cover is what the stats do. You have STR, INT, VIT, MND. ...and not a clue what they're for! STR seems to affect base weapon damage, INT seems to affect divine relic damage, and the others are for defense. I think. ...but I always find it annoying when RPGs just assume you know this stuff already. Because each game does it differently! It's not as standardised as these RPG creators seem to think it is! ...This game contains a tutorial for walking up to NPCs and pressing the A button to talk to them. You'd think that, if they decided such a basic tutorial like this was necessary, they'd maybe want to explain what the stats do at some point too??

. .. ... But anyway.

So, what do you do once you have your turnips nicely grown then? Well, you can eat them raw to recover three hit points if you want, but that's a huge waste. The main two things you can do with your harvested crops is cooking and selling.

Cooking is done with recipes - you can find the recipes as rewards from exploring or quests. Mostly they are obtained by finding frog statues in the exploration / dungeony areas. (and there's also an NPC who keeps track of how many frog statues you've found - it's a gamewide sidequest to find them all). 

When you go to any restaurant (such as Iroha's teahouse), you get an option to use the kitchen and select which recipe to use, showing which ingredients it requires. There are also cooking pots found in the wild areas, as well as a cooking spot in the shrine you use as your home.

Cooking doesn't use up any time, so you can make as many dishes as you want.

Cooked dishes can be eaten to recover HP and RP, and some dishes also grant temporary buffs (such as "+5% strength" etc). And, yeah, bringing some food items out with you as you explore the wilds can be useful. But for the most part, food dishes are mainly good as gifts for the other characters, which you can give them in order to become closer friends with them.

... but we'll touch on the befriending systems in a bit. I still have to talk about selling crops.

So the main way to earn money in this game is by selling things. The main thing you'll be selling is your harvested crops. Enemies don't drop money in this game.

Nearby your farm is a shipping shed - a storage area where anything you put inside will automatically be sold for money by the next day. Of course, it is also possible to just go to a shop and use the "sell" option like any regular RPG too. 

... okay, pointless tangent time, but....someone like me who spends way too much energy thinking about gameplay systems might ask: so what's the point in a game having two different ways to sell items? Two different systems that accomplish the same thing?

 Well... the shipping shed is important in order to justify within the fiction of the game how a village can earn so much money with its crops. I mean.... yes, gameplaywise you can just sell every turnip you harvest to Iroha's teahouse, and the game systems will turn out the same: the turnips turn into money. The game doesn't go into such nitty-gritty detail as to consider how much room Iroha has in her storage for hundreds of turnips or how she could possibly have the funds to pay for them all by herself, or why she would be willing to accept such a huge surplus of turnips that she can't possibly use by herself..... No. None of that. It's just an RPG shop menu that works as you'd expect.

 .... But if you're making a life-sim like this, well, you've got to have systems in place to make the world make a bit more sense than that. So the shipping shed is there to explain that, ostensibly, we are generally shipping most of our produce to other regions in order to make our money. That's fine. The village's finances are managed offscreen by unseen accountants I suppose. Or maybe Woolby does all the admin. haha.

Though there are gameplay benefits to using the shed too. Using the shipping interface allows you to more easily sell many items at once, and it also lets you change your mind if it turns out you need something later in the day that you were initially planning to sell. 

But I'd say the main purpose of the shipping shed is to review what your villagers automatically put in there. And to take anything out that you actually would rather keep for yourself.

So... yeah, in this game, you can attract generic villagers to your town and assign them to jobs. This allows you to automate much of the farming and moneymaking process.

Villagers will naturally arrive at your town if you raise your Village Level, which is done by fulfilling lots of little mini-tasks that improve your village. "Harvest X many turnips". "Harvest X many potatoes". "Complete X many sidequests". "Place down X many decorations" and so on. Each mini task you complete will give you Village EXP, and after a level-up, the capacity for villagers in your town increases. The maximum village level is 10, and the maximum number of villagers is around 30 per village, to give you an idea of scale.

You can also find new villagers by killing monsters - sometimes, a monster will turn out to have been a magically transformed villager, and they will join your town after you rescue them. Though this stops happening once your village is full - it's not a sidequest where you need to find a specific finite number of transformed villagers or anything like that, but rather, it's a random chance that any given monster you kill will become a villager, but only if there's still room in your town for any more. And the moment you evict a villager from a full town, you can find a new one to replace them pretty quickly by going around killing a bunch of monsters.

....but why would you want to evict a villager? Well, they have randomly-generated stats. Including how productive they are, how big an eater they are (which in gameplay terms means how much money it costs each day to have them in the village), and which jobs they prefer.

Though farming crops is the most important job (and is where most of the money comes from), as you progress through the game, you will unlock the ability to assign villagers to other jobs too - logging, mining, herding, fishing, and shopkeeping.

If a villager isn't suitable for what you have in your town (they don't have the ability to do a job you need) then you can just evict them so you can find a replacement.

The villagers do their  work..... very slowly. It takes the player less than half a second to water a tile of farmland, but it takes a villager like 30 seconds to do the same thing. ...Same with planting, same with harvesting. This means that, in order to automate the process to the extent that you actually earn anything, you need to assign a good amount of them to farming.

Villagers assigned to logging also work very slowly. You can plant trees in your development areas, and once a tree is grown, it will be a source of lumber, which is a necessary resource to construct buildings.  (the trees never get fully cut down, they just become gathering points for acquiring lumber).  Logging isn't useful for much besides this, so once you have enough lumber, or once you've built as many buildings as you're gonna need, then logging kinda just.... doesn't help any more. But if you don't have at least one villager assigned to each job, then Woolby complains, so I do keep at least one logger around anyway. ...just for them to accumulate wood uselessly I suppose. Because nothing ever gets naturally spent in this system, resources only ever get used up when the player decides to craft something.

Villagers assigned to mining.... I guess they do it offscreen? Because there are never mineable rocks in your village as far as I saw. You just accumulate ores in your storage shed faster the more miners you have. Okay.

Fishing works similarly, though they do put the fish in the shipping shed instead of your storage, so I often do find myself rescuing some of the fish from being sold at the end of each day if I want to keep them.

And shopkeeping.... is pretty simple. It seems that having a villager work as a shopkeeper just gives you a bunch of extra income at the end of the day. That's all there is to it. There is no simulated shopping going on between the villagers or anything. No, it's just a flat increase in earned money when the end-of-day summary screen appears. However, you do need to craft and place down the shops somewhere in your development zones in order to assign a villager to them. Unlike mining where there are probably some rocks offscreen somewhere, the shopkeepers do need specific shops to work at. ...Since this is just a flat income bonus, if you can get enough shopkeepers in your villages to offset the daily feeding costs, then you'll never have to worry about there being a net negative day again.

You can maximise the income by placing down as many shops and stalls as you can. Though each shop you place down means one villager needs to be a shopkeeper instead of a farmer. I wonder what the best balance for money-earning efficiency is? Bigger farms with more farmers, or lots of shops instead? Hmm. I don't know.

Herding is interesting. There's a whole system of taming monsters and setting up barns in your development zones, and the herders will gather resources from the monsters.

For example, there's a chicken monster you can find in the Spring region, and if you befriend one and put it in a barn, a herder can be assigned to collect eggs from it.

You can actually befriend pretty much any monster in the whole game, aside from human enemies and some very specific story bosses. Even the biggest meanest oni can come live in the barn, which is a bit weird considering how the oni are shown in several parts of the story to be a civilised people who live in their home of the underworld. But apparently they can also be barn animals too??? The game never goes into detail about this haha.

But anyway. This whole villager system doesn't have too many moving parts. Once you've got the villagers with the jobs you need, who all have high enough productivity and low enough appetite, then you can pretty much just leave it running forever. Villagers never organically leave or stop working or change preferences or have a bad day, or anything. It just stays exactly the way you leave it. It's not a very detailed city-simulation game to be honest.

...Though I never really bothered with fully optimising my selection of villagers. I don't mind that it's not as fully productive as it could be, because it didn't really bother me that I had a few slackers or a few big eaters. The only time I evicted any villagers was when I needed one with a specific proficiency that nobody currently had, so I had to kick a few out in order to make room for new ones who hopefully did have them. ...I think the game might bias newly-generated villagers in the player's favour - if you've got an empty construction shop and no-one running it, then I think the game will likely give you a villager with woodworking expertise next. Not 100% positive that this is how it works, but in my experience, I never had to wait too long for the game to generate someone with the exact proficiency I needed.

...I understand why the system is so simple, because it's only one small part of a game made out of many different parts. But at the same time, it is a system that kind of resolves itself into irrelevance partway through the game, which is a bit of a shame.

...

So about the dev zones, It's not just farmland and shops you can place down, but also decorations. These are crafted using materials, and they can be all sorts of things - statues, buildings, lamps, benches, ornaments, barrels.... basically anything. Each decoration grants a bonus to a stat once placed down in the village. This can either be a villager stat or a combat stat. A tough statue of a demon might give you a +STR boost when it's placed down for example.

Villager stats are stuff like "Farming +0.5%", "Trading +1%" etc, basically stuff that makes villagers more efficient at their jobs. Usually it makes thematic sense, like putting a watering trough gives a +herding bonus, or putting a maneki-neko gives a +trading bonus. Sometimes it only kiiiinda makes sense, like putting a bonsai gives a +logging bonus. Sure.

They don't have to be anywhere near the relevant shops, just anywhere is fine.

Most decorations can give their bonus up to four times, if you put one down in each of the four villages. So a +20 STR bonus from a cool lantern can be a +80 bonus if you craft four of them and put one down in each village. Though some specific decorations only "work" in one of the villages, such as an igloo that only works in Winter Village for example. You can put the igloo down in the other villages if you want, but you're not getting that +22 MND bonus unless it's in Winter Village. It's not trial-and-error, thankfully, each decoration's item description does have little icons that let you know which villages it works in, and which villages you already have one in. That's very helpful.

My priority was gameplay over aesthetics, so I kinda just jam-packed my development zones with as much junk as I could in order to reap those sweet sweet stat buffs. Unfortunately, the amount of space available within the dev zones does feel rather limiting. At their maximum levels, each village only has four small-ish dev zones, except Autumn Village has two big ones instead. But they are absolutely not big enough to put one of everything down. ...You can almost put one of everything down, but then during the lategame you can unlock some ridiculously gigantic shrines and towers and such, including a replica volcano ornament that takes up a quarter of a dev zone all by itself. So the hope of putting one of everything down in every village goes out the window pretty quick.

It's a bit of a shame, I do kinda wish we had more control over where we put our buildings and decorations within the towns. I kind of wish we weren't limited to these "development zones" at all, and could just put things wherever we wanted. I understand why the limitation is there, in order to not complicate the game too much, but at the same time...... i kinda would have liked it if I had more free reign anyway.

The shrines that the hero uses as their home in each village (yes you have four homes, what of it), each have a rather large backyard area that I was hoping would be unlockable as a personal dev zone later on, but this never happened at all. Instead there's just a big empty backyard that never has anything in it. I don't like that.

...I should also mention, despite being able to place all these buildings down into your town, there don't exist any buildings you can go inside in this game. The four shrines that serve as your home, plus Kusatsu's inn in Summer Village, are quite literally the only buildings that even have an interior at all. There are a few cutscenes that take place inside other shrines and houses, but you can only look around while in the dialogue scene, and never when actually playing. It's a bit of a shame. The inability to go inside houses does remove a lot of the roleplay fantasy from this life-sim game, and honestly I think is a real detriment.

....And as long as I'm complaining about this, there's a character you meet later in the story, a shrine maiden named Rin, who seems to only exist within the cutscenes too. She literally cannot be found anywhere when playing normally, despite the scenes making it clear that she's always around, keeping things running in the background. Why can't I find Rin outside of seeing her in the cutscenes? It feels extremely weird. And I think this also significantly messes with the roleplay aspect of the game.

...

I briefly mentioned a friendship system earlier.... and, well, the generic villagers who do your farming have nothing to do with that - you try to talk to them, and they don't have anything interesting to say. No, rather, you can become friends with the "main" characters of each village. I already mentioned a few of them - Iroha, Sakaki, and all the gods like Ulalaka. These are the characters with whom the player can befriend.

There are 30 befriendable characters, 15 of whom are also romanceable. 

A cute detail is, when you unlock the later villages, you'll be seeing these characters in every village - they move around and visit the other villages as they feel like it. Their dialogue also comments on the current village too - they may complain about the cold when visiting Winter for example. I do like this. As you'll be spending a lot of time in the villages, it's nice that everyone can move around, and it's not just a static world where everyone stands in their designated spots all day.

So anyway. The befriending system. ... Every day, you have the option of hanging out with each character, once a day. The hanging out menu has four choices for activity, one of which is always "give gift". the other three are randomly available, and are things like "talk about weapons", "muse about monsters", "go for a walk by the river", "grab a bite at Iroha's teahouse", "talk about family", "share spooky stories", "talk about your hometown", "mull over fortunes", "visit a shrine", "talk about fashion", "ask for advice", "talk about dreams".... okay there are a LOT of potential activities that can show up.

Each one can take up either 10 minutes, 30 minutes, or 60 minutes depending on what it is. When you select one of these, you don't really see the full conversation. You just see a quick animation showing that a good time was had, the clock skips ahead, and then it cuts back to them saying "that was fun, thanks!", and you gain some bond points. With enough bond points, your bond with that character levels up. Each character has their own preferences to the types of activities they enjoy. If they really like something, then they earn more bond points.

When you select "give gift", you select an item from your inventory to give to them, and if they really like the item, it can give a huge boost in Bond points. 

In the character profile menu, you can even see a big list of liked and disliked items, which fills in as you give items to them.

...actually figuring out which items each character likes is kind of a guessing game. Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes the game doesn't really take into consideration something that should be liked but isn't. For example, it's mostly food and materials that characters respond to, but you can give them weapons and armour too. But nobody has weapons on their "liked items" list, not even the God of Swords Matsuri. Instead her most liked items are various fried foods and hibiscus flowers. ...

To be honest, I would just recommend looking up characters' preferred gifts using a guide, because it's a bit of a fool's errand trying to work them all out intuitively.

Because it skips ahead the clock, you can't really do activities with everyone every day, you might have to pick and choose. But honestly, it's not really a big deal to waste time in this game, because there's no deadlines or time limits for anything really. 

Gaining a level 1 bond (very easy to do) is what unlocks a character for use as a party member for exploration and combat.

The higher bond levels require more interactions, but they also give more benefits. Higher bond levels will unlock more special moves and raise their combat stats. Level 6 bond unlocks the option to cook with them, which can unlock some special character-specific recipes.

It takes quite a while to raise a character's bond level. You can only do one activity or gift a day, so there's not really a way to raise it quicker than a little bit every once in a while.

As you keep raising your bond levels and progressing through the main story, you'll unlock each character's side quests. Only the 15 romanceable characters get to have sidequests... the others don't really get anything...But these quests are self-contained little storylines that give you an opportunity to learn more about each character. The quiet hunter Pilika's quest involves villagers asking her to kill a bear in fear it may attack, and the quest resolves with her refusing to kill the bear in order to not disrupt the local ecosystem, and teaching the villagers about the natural order. 

Murasame the samurai's quest involves his mission to become the greatest swordfighter in the world, to the point where it's revealed he made a pact with a demon. The quest resolves with us exorcising the demon from him.

It's nice to see these characters have their own plot threads separate to the main story.

Once you reach level 7 bond and have completed their questline, a new option becomes available when talking to them - "I love you!". If you select this option, it unlocks the dating scenes. These are additional sidequests where you go on fun little dates with them, and some of them even tie up a couple of lingering plot threads too.

You can actually initiate dating with as many characters at a time you like. There isn't anything preventing this. It does feel kind of weird that you can do this, because the protagonist does in fact proclaim their undying love to the person they date. ...so I decided not to date multiple characters at once. I dunno.

Once you have completed all the dating scenes and reached bond level 10, it unlocks a marriage option. A very sweet ceremony scene plays out, and credits roll as the two newlyweds ride through the skies on Woolby's back. It's very sweet. 

Being married... doesn't change a whole lot in terms of gameplay. The character you chose to marry will live with you in your shrine, and will give you a food item in the morning if you talk to them. ...you're still limited to just one interaction per day with them. Which kind of just feels a bit...wrong. If I was the game designer, I personally would have lifted the limit so that you could shower your loved one with gifts as much as you like. But what do I know eh? 

Marriage also unlocks the ability to have children. After several in-game days of being married, you will be asked if you want a child. If you say yes, then eventually, after another several days.... it will happen!

The game then skips the calendar ahead 5 years in order to grow them up into a child who can talk.

...

The child basically joins the village as another character whom you can give gifts to and interact with. They don't really do much else. The whole child system seems to exist purely for the roleplay and not for any real gameplay benefit. Which is fine, except for the fact that.... I think it completely destroys the roleplay, actually?

Okay. Let me air my grievances for a bit.

When games depict the passing of time, they have to walk a fine line between believability to the player and feasibility of development. With a linear storyline, it's not a problem to create a story where a timeskip works. Just create a before world, and an after world. But in this game, the timeskip for the child to grow up isn't in any particular point in the story, it happens whenever the player makes it happen. And it has to contend with the already-in-place calendar system as well. So they kind of have to make something that can happen at any time, while also not messing anything up gameplaywise. 

What they ended up doing is... the "5 years" pass, but basically nothing actually changes. The layout, population, money and literally everything else about your villages are exactly the same "5 years later" as they were yesterday. You kind of just have to ignore everything for it to work. ...It kind of calls into question, what kind of world is this where you are the only person who ever gets married, the only person who ever has a child? No matter how much time passes, there is no such thing as change for any of these people. It really makes me start questioning the fiction of the game. Questioning the reality these people live in.

...This stuff I suppose I could wave away, but the worst aspect that I truly cannot ignore is how Suzu, the little girl who works at the teahouse, doesn't grow up after 5 years. Every other character is either a grownup or some kind of youkai where it can be believable that they haven't changed much after so much time. But not Suzu. She is a normal little girl, and after five years, she is the same exact little girl. ... I honestly wish they had invented a teenage Suzu that gets swapped into the game after the timeskip. Because this is truly the breaking point of my immersion into this world. It's even weirder when you talk to Suzu and she has dialogue about playing with your child.... like, they even acknowledge this nonsensical situation in writing??

But it gets worse. Because you can have a second child. And another 5-year timeskip occurs. And..... both of your children look the same as each other. They are the same height. There is no big sis, little bro dynamic or anything. They don't even really talk or play with each other, they just independently walk around town as regular NPCs and it just feels so wrong. And Suzu is STILL the same too! After ten years pass, Suzu is still a little girl? What am I supposed to do with this completely insane situation you are showing me, videogame????

Basically. Having children in this game adds nothing to the gameplay, and serves only to introduce a myriad of temporal inconsistencies and makes the player start questioning the reality of the world.

I am not a fan of this at all. I actually think the entire child system is nothing but a huge detriment to the game, to be honest.

But I guess the idea of marrying and having kids is important to the fantasy of the game? Is it really? ...I really wish they spent more effort making it make sense instead of just shoehorning the idea in in a way that doesn't really mesh with the rest of the game.

Having a child is the quest trigger that unlocks the final postgame dungeon. It's really annoying because you can't even ignore the child system if it bothers you, because you need to have a child to reach the final ending of the game. It's so unnecessary to make it mandatory like this. :(  Especially because the child doesn't have anything to do with the final dungeon, it's literally just the trigger that allows you to play it.

It's also annoying because the daily quest board (which i haven't mentioned until now) keeps giving you quests to slay enemies that only exist in the postgame dungeon, even before you have access to it. So you have to just ignore every daily quest until you get to the point where the trigger to have a child occurs. Yet another reason why this system feels like nothing but a detriment. Though this could have easily been fixed if they just locked postgame quests from appearing until you were actually in the postgame proper. Why didn't they do that?

...

Uhh.. So anyway. Overall, I actually did have a really good time playing Guardians of Azuma. I found the RPG adventuring fun, I found the townbuilding decently fun too, but it was also somewhat annoying with the limitations.

The bonding and personal quests are interesting, and the characters have a ton of personality that make them fun to befriend. I overall had a great time with this game, despite my hangups about how the children were implemented.

I may want to check out some of the earlier Rune Factory games at some point in the future, but they are not a priority for the moment. I'm very glad to have had this game as my introduction to the series! I had a good time exploring the world of Azuma!