The latest entry in the long-running Rune Factory series is here. This time, Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma takes players to an eastern setting inspired by ancient Japanese culture instead of the usual fantasy and steampunk-ish settings from the previous games.
Rune Factory has stood out from other farming sims due to its inclusion of robust dungeon crawling elements and charming stories. One of the best parts of Rune Factory is that you’re able to tackle all of its different game mechanics at your own pace. If you want to focus on tending your farm, you can dedicate as much time as you want without the urgency of continuing story progress.
As the second Rune Factory game on Switch, Guardians of Azuma performs much better on Nintendo Switch (and Switch 2) than the last game, Rune Factory 5. There aren’t nearly as many debilitating framerate issues this time around, which makes Guardians of Azuma a much smoother experience.
How long is Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma?
Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma is as long as you want it to be. Because of its flexible gameplay mechanics, you can spend dozens of hours simply farming, going out into the wilds, mining resources, and killing monsters for drops without advancing the story all that much.
However, it’s worth balancing your time between farming and going further into the story as you’ll receive new tools to tend to your farm. These can help expedite your process and make things easier.
A full playthrough at a normal pace while engaging with the side activities like farming and hanging out with villagers will take about 40 hours to complete. Guardians of Azuma is a meaty game with plenty of content that rivals modern Japanese RPGs.
You can also max out the bond levels of your villagers and companions to learn about their various backstories and even romance some of them (there are a total of 16 romanceable characters). Same-sex relationships are supported, too. So whether you choose to play as the female protagonist Kaguya or the male protagonist Subaruru, you’re not short of any options.
Completionists are looking upwards to more than 120 hours in order to see everything that Guardians of Azuma has to offer.
Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma launches on June 5 for the original Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, and Windows PCs.
