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PREVIEW: Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma

And the romantic interests are not gender-restricted.

My favourite Runefactory era was back when it was still just 2d Harvest Moon/Bokujō Monogatari/Story of Seasons with a better combat, dungeon and crafting systems. But that could just be nostalgia blindness.

Very excited for this, 5 was my first Rune Factory game despite being really familiar with Bokumono. I enjoyed it for what it was but I could tell there were a lot of problems even without context of the other games. Especially performance since I got it on release and only had the switch version.

I remember they announced Rune Factory 6 at one point, is this it or is this a spinoff?

Cryten wrote:

My favourite Runefactory era was back when it was still just 2d Harvest Moon/Bokujō Monogatari/Story of Seasons with a better combat, dungeon and crafting systems. But that could just be nostalgia blindness.

Considering the general consensus around 5 was disappointment I would say that's a fair opinion. Especially when you consider it was the revival of the franchise after the series was cancelled and people were even more excited for it than usual.

MagicPolly wrote:

Very excited for this, 5 was my first Rune Factory game despite being really familiar with Bokumono. I enjoyed it for what it was but I could tell there were a lot of problems even without context of the other games. Especially performance since I got it on release and only had the switch version. I remember they announced Rune Factory 6 at one point, is this it or is this a spinoff?

The developers have stated Azuma is a separate spinoff from the numbered Rune Factory series (aka. the ones that have taken place in Norad). There still isn't anything on 6 yet beyond the announcement.

King Chicken wrote:

Cryten wrote: My favourite Runefactory era was back when it was still just 2d Harvest Moon/Bokujō Monogatari/Story of Seasons with a better combat, dungeon and crafting systems. But that could just be nostalgia blindness. Considering the general consensus around 5 was disappointment I would say that's a fair opinion. Especially when you consider it was the revival of the franchise after the series was cancelled and people were even more excited for it than usual.

Which makes it more interesting that the heads at Marvelous chose not to rebury the Rune Factory franchise again (like what Sega did after the lacklustre performance of the PS4 Sakura Wars revival game) but instead chose to go on with RF6 and Azuma (albeit without Hashimoto Yoshifumi's contribution).

How was the overall performance of the game? Did you have to deal with any slowdown or frame rate drops?

I really liked Rune Factory 5. It's not that I was frustrated with RF5's romance options so much as that I think the most interesting characters in the game were probably the ones that you weren't able to be paired with. Azuma looks like it has a pretty solid variety, and instead of just one single character I'm kind of feeling looks "eh, acceptable I guess" - there actually seems to be a quite a few I'm interested in meeting.

Overall, I'm looking forward to it now that the biggest question about the game has a concrete answer.

Purely anecdotally, Rune Factory 4 Special seems to have done pretty well for itself as a rerelease, and it's not like Pioneers of Olive Town (the mainline Bokumono which released that year/the year before) was without nasty performance issues and a fairly dull cast itself. And also fundamental design issues that frankly went deeper than RF5's way-too-big open world. There was no way they were going to bury the flagship series, so I guess I can kind of see why they might have been willing to write 5 off as growing pains, too. Or maybe I'm way off-base. Happy they didn't, either way.

Now I'm wondering why Sega didn't see the same with the new Sakura Wars and take its shortcomings as growing pains for a still-popular-with-fandom franchise trying to make a comeback (and I don't think Sakura was as niche as RF).It would also have been a golden opportunity for them to remaster the older games (esp. 1-4) and finally officially bring them to a Western audience.