Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma, the latest reimagining of the original series, released on June 5 this year to widely positive reception. While mixing traditional Rune Factory elements with novelties, the game was also commended for its numerous playability and QoL upgrades compared to the previous titles in the franchise. Recently, AUTOMATON got together with director Shiro Maekawa and producer Hisashi Fujii, who shared some details about their user-friendly approach to development, including how they looked to other titles in the genre to improve Guardians of Azuma in this aspect.
As Rune Factory is in many ways a pioneer of the fantasy life sim genre, Maekawa and Fujii found it quite difficult to find works outside the series that they could use as a benchmark for balancing the game. “That’s why we kept playtesting over and over, making refinements over refinements, and we finally settled for the current balance of the game,” Fujii explained. Apparently, as most of the staff were busy with development, Fujii took it upon himself to do test the game – playing it nonstop for around a whole year and giving feedback to the developers in the process.
While the feedback loop continued for a long time and presumably yielded a lot of changes throughout development (the cycle for a child to be born got cut significantly shorter per Fujii’s request, for example), the producer’s main focus was making the game accessible to players and easy to pick up. Though, that feeling also overlapped with the frustration he felt playing the same game over and over again, Maekawa added jokingly. “I was told many times to just make the game more user-friendly,” he said reminiscing on some of the feedback he received from Fujii.
Notably, Guardians of Azuma introduces a simplified crafting system with a more straightforward format than past entries. Additionally, the skill system was revamped into a more organized skill tree, as the devs found the traditional system sometimes didn’t make it clear enough what players needed to do in order to advance skills. Small details that made gameplay tedious – like having to level up weapons from scratch when switching – were also done away with.
Besides devoted playtesting, Fujii also actively played a lot of other life simulators and RPGs to see how they compare in terms of playability. “Playing recent games, it’s extremely noticeable that a lot of them are heading in a very user-friendly direction – and we’ve kept that in mind when creating Guardians of Azuma.” As a series that offers tons of different features – from farming and romance, to dungeon crawling and boss battles, Rune Factory may seem like quite an intimidating title to get your hands on. However, applying their knowledge of modern games, the developers were determined to make the new title in the long running series easier to pick up – in every sense of that word. Maekawa added that the team extensively researched other RPGs to check which controls were assigned to which buttons on controllers, implying that they were aiming to set them in a way that was already familiar to players.
Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma is out now PC (Steam), Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2.
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