Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma seems designed for those who enjoy farming games but don't like the built-in waiting and potential tedium that the genre has standardized. Instead, this side game to the main Rune Factory series throws a well placed curve ball that allows players to divine both their own water sources and the pace of their adventure. There's more to see and do in the world of Azuma than might be apparent initially and up to even halfway through the experience, and what ended up standing out the most was the freedom I had to live my Earth Dancer life as I saw fit.

After choosing your male or female protagonist (Subaru or Kaguya), birthdate, and difficulty level, Guardians of Azuma doesn't quite start at the beginning, as it relies on a bit of flashback to reveal more and more about the amnesiac player character's background. Rather, you're pushed right into tutorial mode, and the process is a smooth and effective one, guided largely by your sidekick Woolby, whose reactions made me laugh on multiple occasions. It takes only an hour or two before most of the major features of the game will be second nature, and what ends up being the case is that the larger story takes a bit longer to emerge while smaller matters and exploration buoy the first half of this action RPG, farming hybrid.

The gameplay division into three separate but related segments represents that player freedom I alluded to earlier. If you want to sink your teeth into farming and raising livestock, you'll be rewarded with the produce and funds to power up your character and your inventory of restorative dishes and beverages. The sacred instruments you acquire can really speed things up by helping crops grow faster or making watering or harvesting your fields a snap. Another element is the construction and organization of each of the four seasonal towns of which you will end up becoming chief, and this entails building houses, shops, production facilities, and decorations to boost the population and overall level of each town. Of course, the better and more thorough your construction efforts, the more raw goods you'll have to process and the more citizens you'll have to take care of your farms and work your businesses. Yes, you can literally set and forget your crops and fields and the townsfolk will take care of the rest. Your functioning commune life awaits!

Perhaps you're less interested in the agricultural and architectural aspects of this Rune Factory experience? Then there's a satisfying, balanced action combat system that takes you though caves, plains, dungeons, and even any underworld city. You can initially invite a trio of friends from the different towns to join you in exploring the slightly larger spaces outside of each town as you complete different main and side objectives to push the narrative and your relationships along. The fighting itself can be fairly button-mashy, but the ability to dash and score perfect dodges, in addition to elemental tools with their own individual skill trees, mean that there are a bevy ways to take down smaller enemies and bosses.

One downside to the action portions are the limited number of different enemy and boss types, with many being palette swaps and rematches. Fighting the same tree or horserider boss multiple times grows stale; a saving grace is that you and your team are constantly leveling up and picking up precious monster parts that can be turned into equipment or traded for building materials. The slow upward slope on which your opponents increase in difficulty pushes you towards upgrading your weapons and armor, in addition to preparing edibles and potables for the road ahead. Your inventory and storage are constantly being filled up, but it’s simple enough to move things between them.

Another enjoyable aspect of Guardians of Azuma is the interactions with your fellow townspeople, many of whom can join you in battle. As you increase your bonds with them, not only will they become more stout combatants, but they'll also allow you to spend time with them in different ways, such as cooking together, chatting about one of their hobbies, or if you’re lucky, huddling together under an umbrella. Once you reach a certain threshold with the marriage-able characters, you can enter into a relationship with them and eventually tie the knot and even have children. All of this does take a fair bit of time and a few specific items, but with consistent effort you can entice the boy or girl of your dreams to marry and start a family with you. The cutscenes and events that open up along the way do much to help you get to know these characters; for my chosen partner, Iroha, I became a pivotal part of her journey towards making her teahouse as successful as it could be. My Subaru, who now affectionately goes by Handsome, couldn’t be more proud of his darling Iro.

One of your primary tasks and methods by which you open up the explorable combat environments is by ridding them of blight, which takes the form of elemental infections of the land that often gate your progress. As you acquire sacred treasures from the gods and goddesses of each village, you are able to remove these blighted spots, which both opens up the world and also improves your standing with the associated town. There is even blight that can be blocking off a section of town, and by removing it you gain access to new plots of land to develop.

Other mini goals include activating frog statues to gain new cooking recipes and fulfilling requests made to the job board in town. As your recipe book expands, you'll gain more and more options for how to outfit yourself, your villages, and your team members. Everything you do seems to have a positive impact on the growth of the people and places of Azuma, except for when you choose to share a disliked activity with a friend or more-than-friend. When you're bored of the four towns, you can even take to the skies to find new islands to explore with their own treasures, and naturally, some good fishing spots, too.

With a dedicated Switch 2 version of Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma also on the way, it’s worth considering the performance on the original Switch hardware, which is what this review is based on. Because the game itself is quite snappy, with multiple loading screens, there were many opportunities to become frustrated with the amount of time I was staring at a black screen, but fortunately the loading is quite minimal. Action sequences against singular bosses or smaller groups of enemies yielded a fairly consistent frame rate, but larger groups and busier animation sequences did lead to noticeable slowdown and stuttering–noticeable but not a major detraction from my enjoyment. Object pop-in is a frequent occurrence, but worse than this would be the appearance of distant villagers and even enemies, whose pace would slow to a pixelated crawl until you walked closer to them. Fortunately, there were no crashes or bugs that I encountered in my 25-plus hours. All in all, I found the experience tolerable, but it did serve as another reminder of how sorely needed the Switch 2 is at this point in time. We’ll have Switch 2 focused performance impressions closer to the console launch.

Having previewed it earlier this year, I was delighted to see Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma deliver on its promise of being an approachable, varied adventure that expedites some of the slower, more mundane trappings of the farming game genre. It deftly blends multiple systems without overcomplicating them, and provides ample freedom for players to explore its world at their own pace. The farming and construction mechanics are designed for expedience and ease of use, exchanging realism for simplicity, a real bargain given the satisfying main story and likeable characters. Even the helper/partner Woolby ended up growing on me by the time I had rolled credits. Guardians of Azuma may do as much to spoil farming games as invite players to earlier Rune Factory entries, but it’s a worthwhile dance that marches to the beat of its own, confident drum, and I’m hopeful we’ll see more like it.