Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma - Discussion Thread

[RodCopper Fishin]

I finished the game in four days! It was amazing. I love the characters, the story, and the scenery. It feels like being in the Inuyasha universe, which is a dream for me and my inner 10 year old. I am now happily married with two demigod children.

**ALSO** I’ve seen a few comments lamenting the lack of an auto aim function, but if you press the right joy stick down on Switch, that activates auto aim. You can then move the stick around to switch your aim to different enemies, and press the stick again to disengage auto aim. This is something not explained in the game as far as I remember, but I remembered this function from RF5 and I decided to try it out here and it’s the same. Unfortunately I don’t know the PC controls for this!

[FarmingForDaysMan]

Sorely disappointed in the romance system, I was hoping to see a kiss with my man Mauro

[shurachroma]

Hi!

I used to frequent these threads back in the DS days. Eating crumbs waiting for international releases... Posting fanart...

I made an alternative boxart for RF:GoA, drawing from Iwasaki's key art for past games. I can't get it to show here, but it's in this GDrive: https://tinyurl.com/rfgoa-fan-boxart

And a full link in case you're sus about the shortener: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

Enjoy

[Lilianaanony]

My Review of RF GOA from getting close to the end of the story:

Pros:

The characters, this is the first time I've actually struggled picking a single character and they are ALL well written and bounce off one another so well, I hope marvelous and RF company keep this trend up cause holy mother.
Combat feels better than RF5, less variety with weaponry but I like the streamlined process of less is more regarding crafting, I do miss some of the grind of crafting but not the unhinged levels of stuff you have to craft to get good stuff.
Storyline is really good and I especially appreciate that they

Spoiler:

brought back perma-death to a character that you can choose to go with or not

spoiler for major spoiler.
The divine weapons are a nice spin-off, especially with being able to use them in and out of combat as well as farming.

Med

Farming: Streamlined but it's nice you can use divine weapons to increase the quality, water, and quickly harvest items.
One of the weapons, it ignores benign enemies and boxes so that does kinda bite, but is quickly remedied with upgraded fan anyway.
Villagers: I place them as med because while they are excellent additions and makes it feel like you're not solo-ing everything all the time, I was very annoyed that there's no customization for the farming stuff, I've been managing the farms completely because they will just rando drop crops instead of something more orderly, they also don't keep to the same level so my field of lvl 9's goes down to 2-3 and haphazard. So they've been banned from farming, otherwise they're awesome.

The cons:

Combat is better but enemies on hard are super easy to kill, I haven't died to a boss yet and I'm very close to the end of the story.
Storyline is too quick, even with there being more than I expected, much more there's no imposed breathers for time which I kinda miss with other RF games. It gave space for other characters to respond and for you to level up (which isn't necessarily a con but levelling is extremely easy to do in this game, went from lvl 37-70 in the span of 2 in game days) MAJOR spoiler for reason:

Spoiler:

when Subaru dies you can pick costs to bring him back, one of them is experience, it dropped my level from 75 to 37

. The other reason why this is kind of a negative is that I will be done with the game (if I chose to) before winter which isn't so fun, I kinda prefer some time to be taken.
Affection goes up way to quickly, by autumn (close to the end where I am now) I am level 10 with most characters and didn't have to do much for it, I think they should've allowed to 3 to be easy and then grind from there.
Lack of festivals, there's a lot of optionals which I like but the established ones are kinda short and sweet.

Overall hands down the best iteration imo, RF4 only outmatches with the beyond 10 friendship and the fact that they stacked qualities of crops (which I miss very dearly) between the characters, storyline, and overall environments and improvements from RF5, and you don't have to wait forever to get to the last act, I do kinda wish they gave space to every « Harvest Goddess » though, even if it's just like 2-3 days.

[JustABeautifulGuy]

I know RF6 is probably ages away but I wonder what they'll do for it. I'm 26 hours in right now and honestly, I love how everything is far more streamlined. It's just a bit more than needed at times. Still, going back to the clunky ways of core RF games might be a bit hard now lol.

I'm very much enjoying this game the more I play it. I think it was definitely worth my bucks but it definitely could feel more polished. So far my pros and cons remain fairly the same. I definitely think this would be a much greater game if it had more of the core RF features.

Well, atleast I won't have any farming fatigue by the time Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar comes out. Makes me wonder if this is why they kinda just let these games release so close to each other.

[Rey The Gamer Dog.]

I think Rune Factory 6 will go back closely to the old farming way. This has a different way of farming because it a spin off of rune factory like ToD and Frontier. I like everything but the farming part. But yeah, I think this just be for GoA. However, it seem better then ToD and no stupid Rune spirit thing like Frontier

[Milo]

It being a spinoff may be a good excuse for them to try out radical new features in order to see what players like. Then the popular features can be imported back into the main series while the unpopular ones can be dismissed as just a one-time thing.

[BrokenHearted]

How are people saying it's too easy to level up relationship? At first, it did feel like it was easy to increase levels. However, once you start unlocking the other villages, there are so many villagers, it becomes overwhelming. I ended up having to stop talking to villagers all-together once I got to the winter village. Socializing just didn't leave me enough time to progress the story or clear out the zones.

I'm not done with the game but these are my impressions so far.
Negatives:
- Village building : why does every life-sim game need to become a village building game? I hate them so much because not only am I not particularly creative, but I can't stand having to build a village when not all functionalities/items are unlocked. Are we supposed to redo the village everytime we unlock a new item? Waste of time!
Game developers need to stop thinking we all want to build our own villages. Stop making us the mayor/chief!
- The conversation system to increase levels with villagers. Why do the actions have to use in-game time?
- Building/crafting/forging are all done by NPCs : If these actions are done by NPCs, why do you even have unlockable skills? You, the player, aren't even the one actually doing to building/crafting/forging!
- Having four villages for the four seasons instead of just one village. It makes the in-game world feel disjointed.
- Too many characters, and affinity quests are too long. I've actually started to avoid socializing to avoid setting off yet another several minutes-long cutscene...
- 1am time limit to go to bed.
- Character designs. Not a fan of many of the characters designs, especially the males.

Positives:
- Game is much more dynamique than previous games. Crop planting, watering, harvesting, etc. are all done quickly. Many teleport points allow you to quickly get around the world map.
- Characters are more fleshed-out
- Simplification of a lot of gameplay elements, such as growing crops or taming/taking care of monsters.
- Combat is more developed.


Overall, I'd say what I dislike the most about this game is that they've tried too hard to make it a village-building simulator. Game feels more dynamique, fast-paced yet at the same time suffers from having too many characters and too many cutscenes. I hope 6 will be better and won't have a town you have to build...

[Meowie]

I think it's a great game but it could be greater. That's what I think about this game after just beating the main story. I'll keep everything short and only talk about the selling points this game had.

Story: Loved it. Huge upgrade over RF5. My favorite media piece is Avatar The Last Airbender and any other media having a similar premise/narrative easily wins over my heart.

Characters: Adored them. Extremely well done personalities. A bit too many so it got me a little overwhelmed but I'm throughouly impressed with the efforts they put in for them. So glad that this aspect was the highlight of the game for me. I've been reeally disappointed with SoS and RF missing this mark as of late so it's nice to see they're getting back on track.

Mechanics: Village building was definitely a lot more polished and fun than I expected but I despise how little the space they gave us.

Social/hang out system was nice but I didn't like how rare encountering cutscenes from it was. I was so disappointed when I was midway my gameplay and I had just unlocked a cutscene from it. I was like "wait this is so cool, this should've happened way early in the game". I highly think this social system is great but it needs some reworking. I would've loved if they were able to make unique dialogues for each option you'd pick. Probably an insane of effort but I'd love to see them try this in future for RF6 or another Guardians of spin off. I was also expecting much better interactions post dating but I ended up feeling a bit disappointed.

I think this game was really fun and I 100% recommend it. It doesn't seem to be selling that well as I expected honestly which makes me a bit sad because this game clearly has a lot of efforts put into it.

[Rey The Gamer Dog]

It being a spinoff may be a good excuse for them to try out radical new features in order to see what players like. Then the popular features can be imported back into the main series while the unpopular ones can be dismissed as just a one-time thing.

If they make the town building more engaging. I down for another round. But I prefer my farming game for me to farm more then this.

[Kikki]

I think this game was really fun and I 100% recommend it. It doesn't seem to be selling that well as I expected honestly which makes me a bit sad because this game clearly has a lot of efforts put into it.

It's actually selling quite decently. It's on almost every platform, and each platform's sales numbers are low but in the range of what you'd expect from a Rune Factory game, so add those all together and it's really pretty respectable. Plus the numbers we know don't even include both physical AND digital. So it's doing pretty darned well. Especially for a spin-off rather than the actual official Rune Factory 6.

We also only know solid numbers for Japan, rather than worldwide. If you try to figure out all the sales when you add worldwide numbers on all platforms and in both physical and digital, I think this game is probably doing fantastic. But we don't have solid numbers for most things.

EDIT: It's weird how much people hate RF5. I played it on Switch, the worst option, and though it certainly had problems, it was still a fun game. I would have liked a little more to the story and a few more characters I was into romantically, and it copied RF4 too much so it felt formulaic, and yeah, it had performance issues, but my game never once crashed or made me lose gameplay, and it was fun, so...

This comes up because when you look at sales numbers, I see a ton of people saying they were or still are hestitant to buy GoA because of RF5.

Maybe I need to go back and play RF5 again, to refresh my memory. I don't recall it being BAD, just a bit of a weak copy of RF4 that was still lots of fun.

[Rey The Gamer Dog]

I think this game was really fun and I 100% recommend it. It doesn't seem to be selling that well as I expected honestly which makes me a bit sad because this game clearly has a lot of efforts put into it.

It's actually selling quite decently. It's on almost every platform, and each platform's sales numbers are low but in the range of what you'd expect from a Rune Factory game, so add those all together and it's really pretty respectable. Plus the numbers we know don't even include both physical AND digital. So it's doing pretty darned well. Especially for a spin-off rather than the actual official Rune Factory 6.

We also only know solid numbers for Japan, rather than worldwide. If you try to figure out all the sales when you add worldwide numbers on all platforms and in both physical and digital, I think this game is probably doing fantastic. But we don't have solid numbers for most things.

EDIT: It's weird how much people hate RF5. I played it on Switch, the worst option, and though it certainly had problems, it was still a fun game. I would have liked a little more to the story and a few more characters I was into romantically, and it copied RF4 too much so it felt formulaic, and yeah, it had performance issues, but my game never once crashed or made me lose gameplay, and it was fun, so...

This comes up because when you look at sales numbers, I see a ton of people saying they were or still are hestitant to buy GoA because of RF5.

Maybe I need to go back and play RF5 again, to refresh my memory. I don't recall it being BAD, just a bit of a weak copy of RF4 that was still lots of fun.

Don't forget, people hate is more louder then actual people enjoying the game. Look at the Switch 2 and the Pokemon series. Lol It's might be louder, but might be really small.

[-Frey-]

Hey everyone! How’s it going? :3

Let’s be honest – everyone has their own preferences, and that means it’s pretty much impossible for the devs to make every player happy, even though I’m sure they’d love to!

Take the whole village/farm customization thing, for example. I’m not a huge fan of it myself, but if it’s just about customizing my own little patch of land, I can live with that. (I still have nightmares from HM: A New Beginning – having to customize the entire town? Pure chaos )

Now, about the villagers helping out with tasks – I totally get both sides. But as someone with serious perfectionist tendencies, if I had to chop every single tree in every village every day, I’d end up trapped in a hellish productivity loop. It would turn into a to-do list instead of the cozy escape I was hoping for xD
So I really appreciate the new feature where I can water the crops if I want to – but I don’t have to. It makes the world feel more alive and relaxed, like it’s running on its own a bit, which is super nice.
Maybe it’s just me, but after playing so many HM/SoS/RF games, I sort of know the rhythm by now. But I was still surprised during the tutorial in spring – I hit a cutscene on spring 7, and the villagers were talking to me like we’ve known each other for months?
Story-wise, sure, that's true – but as a player, it felt super sudden. I think the issue is on my end though... I tend to rush through games instead of taking them slow and cozy like they’re meant to be. Probably because I’ve got a huge “pile of shame” backlog

[PSI_Nightshade]

Haven't checked in a while. Month has been busy. I've played 6 hours so far (I've sort of boxed myself in a corner where I can only play it one Wednesday per month (though I'm gonna cheat this month because there's a 5th Wednesday) so I'll be progressing very sloooooowly.

But so far I got the first 3 days done (which is crazy to think that 3 days took me 6 hours) and I'm really impressed and liking what I'm seeing. I had the Earth Dancer Edition so it was a Switch version but I went ahead and bought the upgrade pack so it became a Switch 2 version.

Thoughts in random order:

• Activating the Terra Tiller to enter Builder Mode stops time which mean I can be as chill as I want during farming time. This does remove the stress of taking care of the field as fast as possible because of the clock and I appreciate it.

• I really love the Mouse Mode available in the Switch 2 version (which is likely also present on the PC version). I can harvest, plant and water just by dragging the mouse around the soil tiles. You can place roads, buildings and decoration that way too. It scratches the city building vibe a tiny bit. Plus I can flip back to normal if I just want to be more up close and personal.

• RP being relegated to a regular "magic point" system is an interesting take. On one side, I can fight, farm and collect as much as I want. On the other side, I never ran out of RP. I wonder if this will change once I get more sacred treasures which replaces spells.

• The skill trees are a big game changer. While it was true that getting skill ups in past games were giving you stats, it wasn't that obvious to track unless you look for it. With the skill trees, it's all laid bare. It gives you reasons to go and use all weapon types and activities as each gives their own dedicated XP which you can use to get more stats. Plus some skills you unlock through those trees can carry over to other similar activities. Some buffs you acquired in a weapon skill tree is applied regardless of weapon you're currently equipping. Unlocking the trait that gives you a chance to not spend material on your next cooking/building/etc. applies to all and each category has that trait to unlock. I can only expect that these stacks up. Overall, it really gives the incentive to do everything unless you want to resort to All-Purpose XP.

• Being able to jump again is nice. Plus there's places you can jump onto and obstacles you can "climb" onto if you just move into them and they're short enough. I like.

• Crops yield is ridiculously high. It's only been 3 days and I already harvested 150+ turnips. It's insane. Obviously the game is probably balanced upon this so I'll have to see how this compares to the usual.

I'm still early game and like I said I won't be able to binge it, but I already feel like I'm gonna have fun with this one.