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!