Thank you XSEED Games for providing us with a review code!

Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma begins with you selecting your character's appearance (male or female). After your character is selected and named, you’ll find them doing battle in the sky while riding a white dragon. Their opponent is the character that wasn’t selected who rides a black dragon. Unfortunately, your character loses the battle and wakes up without their memories and a friendly sheep-like monster named Woolby talking to them.

You awaken in Spring village, or at least what’s left of it. The dragon rider you were fighting against has been stealing away runes that sustain these season-themed villages. If you want to save the villages, their deities, and the world in general, you’ll have to face off against that dragon rider again. Until then, you’ll have to focus on revitalizing the towns and their deities first.

When you first arrive at these villages, their deities are so weak that they can only appear in your character’s dreams. To strengthen these gods, you’ll have to level up the villages by attracting more villagers, who in turn will worship them. Villagers will need food and housing, so you’ll have to ensure that there’s enough farmland and farmers to work the fields to produce food. Adding various buildings and decorations is also crucial to leveling up the village. Each structure you add will also boost your character’s stats, so it’s a win-win situation.

You can boost your relationship with the villagers by accepting and completing various requests they post on the request board. Outside of the villages are places to explore with many monsters to conquer or possibly tame. As you strengthen bonds with villagers and gods, they can be in your fighting party. You can have up to six party members, but can only have three active at a time. If a party member gets injured or KO’d, you can rotate them out with another.

The battles in Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma are real-time. The enemies and bosses have elemental weaknesses. As your character befriends gods, they’ll give you their sacred weapons that have unique attacks and elemental affinities to exploit. To use special powers, you’ll have to spend some of your rune points. Rune points and health points can be replenished in battle by consuming various food items and elixirs. Along with save spots, you’ll often find cooking areas where you can prepare foods before a boss battle. To save time, you can quick travel between save spots.

There are multiple ways to bond with villagers and gods. You can talk to them, hang out with them, give them gifts, or add them to your battle party. Your bond level with people will increase as you do things they like. After a few levels you may be able to do relationship quests, which is a prerequisite before you can start dating them.

Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma allows characters to date people of the same gender. After marriage having children with a same-sex partner is also possible. During the dating and marriage phase you can assign each other nicknames. One if the bachelors lets you assign yourself the nickname dumb*ss. I have to admit that this made me laugh.

Other language you’ll encounter in this game is the casual use of hell and d*mn. One of the villagers is a fortune teller who keeps telling you that your name is a bad omen and should be changed. When you visit beaches you’ll unlock swimsuits for the character accompanying you. Some of the swimwear is more modest than others. There is some sexual humor, but for the most part, this game is pretty tame in that regard. You can give hugs and kisses to your spouse. Taking naps together is an innocent option that sounds worse than it is.

Fighting and violence is commonplace, but there is no blood. Souls of defeated enemies are sent back to a place called the Forest of Beginnings. There is a character death in the game’s story, but I won’t be spoiling any of those details here!

Visually, Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma is very colorful, and all of the monsters and people are nicely detailed. This game is powered by the Unreal engine and it looks great! The boss battles have a lot of eye candy.

On the sound front, Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma does not disappoint. The characters are nicely voice acted and there’s a lot of variety there. The sound effects and background music are well done too.

I spent nearly fifty hours with this game and it went by so fast. While marriage is possible before completing the main storyline, it is much easier to do so after the final boss battle. After seeing the credits roll you can still play and grow your family, bonds, and villagers. If desired, you can re-write your fate by marrying different characters. I really enjoyed the dating scenes, and I highly recommend dating multiple characters before settling down. If you are a fan of Rune Factory games, Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma is worth checking out!