Marvelous’s Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma had a successful launch early in June this year, with worldwide sales of 500,000+ units, and positive reception across Steam and Metacritic. Besides experimenting with the Rune Factory formula and trying out a new Japanese-style setting, another goal of Guardians of Azuma’s creators was to earn the playerbase’s trust with a smooth and trouble-free release, hoping to undo the series’ reputation of being somewhat bug-prone.
Game director Shiro Maekawa and producer Hisashi Fujii recently talked to AUTOMATON about the strict “zero bugs allowed” mindset they approached development with. When asked about the new entry’s comparatively low number of bugs at launch, Fujii explains, “From around the midpoint of development, I kept telling the team We’re not leaving any bugs.” To this, Maekawa humorously adds, “You also told us that we wouldn’t be releasing a day-one patch.”
Although he’s aware that releasing a completely bugless game without fixes is difficult to achieve in reality, Fujii considers this to be an important objective to adhere to during development. “I constantly emphasized ‘zero bugs’ to prevent a situation in which players can’t enjoy the game because of bugs. While zero is admittedly hard to pull off, I think the whole team united under that ideal, and I believe that as a result, we ended up with very few noticeable issues during regular gameplay.”
When asked about why he adopted such a stern stance on bugs for Guardians of Azuma, Fujii comments, “There was a general perception that there’s never been a bug-free Rune Factory game before, so my number one priority was to regain players’ trust. As long as I’m the one making it, I swore I wouldn’t leave bugs behind. I’ve always felt that, for this title and future releases, we need to make something fans can feel safe buying.”
Maekawa adds, “One of our lead programmers once mentioned to a friend that he was working on Rune Factory. Apparently, the friend’s reaction was, ‘Isn’t that the series that’s always buggy?’ He was really shocked (laughs). That frustration motivated him to work with real determination to get rid of as many bugs as possible.”
Besides determination, Guardians of Azuma’s quality was also aided by the knowledge the dev team gained from working on previous Rune Factory titles. Thanks to this experience, the developers knew which game mechanics tended to be bug-prone, like the system of characters being pulled between the main scenario and romance subplots, which is known to cause deadlocks in story progression. “To prevent that this time, we built in safeguards right from the design stage. We also simplified things wherever possible, for instance, by controlling progression flags only through scripts.”
Ultimately, as Fujii notes, the trickiest part of making Rune Factory games is how many different things it lets you do – with so many features and systems, unpredictable behaviors and glitches are bound to happen. However, the developers seem determined to reduce bugs to a minimum even as the franchise expands and introduces new features.
Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma is available for PC (Steam), Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2.
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