A spin-off can be difficult. If someone is buying a game from a franchise, it's usually because they like that franchise. Even the smallest change can make someone dislike it. Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma is an interesting take on the long-running, fantasy-farming franchise. While it maintains everything that made the franchise popular, it also expands it, moving from simply farming to full-on town building. Thankfully, it works out well, and Guardians of Azuma is one of the most enjoyable entries in the franchise to date.

Guardians of Azuma puts players in control of an individual with amnesia, as happens in almost every game in the franchise. You wake up one day in the extremely Japanese land of Azuma, having crashed through a temple roof from the sky above. It isn't long before a visit from a flower-themed deity awakens your character to their power as an Earthmate. Now, it's up to them to clean a blight that threatens the land and restore the various villages to their full potential.

Going into Guardians of Azuma, perhaps the most important thing to note is that it's a Rune Factory game, but it is one that changes its priorities. Farming is still a major part of the game, but it is no longer is the central part of the game. Instead, the basic premise is that you're actually running entire towns full of people, rather than focusing on one specific farm or giving the occasional edict between adventures. There's still farming, romance, and fighting, but the town building adds a much-needed wrinkle to the basic mechanics.

The core gameplay has a lot of similarities with the other Story of Seasons and Rune Factory titles. When you start the game, it might be easy to assume that it's identical. The earliest parts of the game go over tutorials for the most familiar parts of Rune Factory. You learn how to hoe land, plant seeds, farm lumber and stone, and more, interspersed with learning to fight. It's all comfortably familiar, and if a player really wants to just play the game as a standard Story of Seasons title, they're able to, but that would ignore a bulk of the game's mechanics.

Where things start to change is once you gain access to your full Earthmate powers and the ability to start building a town. There are multiple towns in the game, each based around a specific season, and in those towns are large areas where you can freely build things. You can set up farms, houses, shops and more. The further you progress in the game, the more things you can build and, in turn, the more you can customize your town. That means you can specialize and customize for maximum profit and resource gain. You can even use your powers to give your town smaller boosts, such as causing half-grown crops to instantly grow to full maturity if you desperately need something to ship and can't afford to wait.

Since you're running an entire town, there's also a greater sense of micromanaging. Instead of having to do everything yourself, you can hire and assign villagers to various tasks, and each villager has different attributes. Some might be better at mining, some at farming, some might have the ability to run shops, and more. Not all of these traits are necessarily positive or negative. There are certain villagers who refuse to go to other towns, which means you can't send them off to a village where they might be more useful.

Of course, this all comes at a cost. Everything you build in Guardians of Azuma requires resources, and keeping your villagers employed and happy means you need money. The good news is that any money your towns make goes right into your personal coffers, but the bad news is that you need to pay for everything. If you're not careful, you can end up in a situation where your village lacks the resources and materials it needs to thrive, and people start to leave. It's a level of fiddliness that isn't normally found in the Rune Factory titles, but it adds some much-needed spice to the franchise.

Rune Factory wouldn't be Rune Factory without the combat. While your village can thrive on its own, the world outside the villages is full of dangerous monsters and areas to explore. The moment you step outside, you're beset by monsters and bad guys, and you need to beat the ever-living crap out of them while you search for rare resources and materials that you can use to boost your town. While a good chunk of the areas you explore are plot-mandated, there are enough side paths and secret areas to explore that it's worth it to poke around. If nothing else, you can find an absurd amount of frog statues, and each unlocks new building options.

Combat is straightforward, but that isn't bad. Your default weapons come in a variety of different types, ranging from swords to bows to magical laser talismans. (The latter is my favorite by far.) You can have two weapons equipped at once and swap between them, allowing you to do things like use a sword for close-range combat and then swap to a bow for long-distance combat. As is the norm for games these days, you have an evasion move that gives you a Perfect Dodge bonus if you time it just right, so getting up close and personal has its benefits.

You can also access magical instruments. These instruments, which also serve purposes in the village-building segments, are basically magical tools. By fighting enemies, you build up points to spend on powerful instruments to attack, buff and debuff your foes. Your starting drum can be used for potential healing magics or a powerful earthquake spell. Each instrument is elemental-focused, which is important because enemies have strengths and weaknesses against various elements. You're rewarded for swapping between various abilities based on what you're fighting.

Combat in Guardians of Azuma is fun, but it's straightforward. It's a lot more in the realm of simple button-mashing with some enjoyable optimization and customization. Elemental damage is overwhelmingly powerful, and it can make things feel repetitive, especially against weaker enemies. The boss fights tend to have enough meat on their bones to make the system enjoyable. Like the franchise as a whole, the combat does a good job of being fun, but it doesn't overshadow the other aspects of the game to set it apart from just being an action RPG.

Of course, it wouldn't be a Story of Seasons spin-off without the romance options. Guardians of Azuma lets you woo a shockingly huge selection of bachelors and bachelorettes, ranging from a simple innkeeper to literal gods. When not busy running the town or fighting monsters, you can woo these characters by talking to them, giving gifts, or taking them on adventures with you. This is still going to feel mostly familiar to fans of the franchise, and there isn't much reinventing going on, but it's also tough to complain about them sticking with what works. If nothing else, I feel like Guardians has a much stronger potential candidate pool than Rune Factory 5 did.

Speaking of which, Guardians of Azuma clearly learned a lot from Rune Factory 5 in terms of visuals and presentation. While the graphics are still fairly basic, the animations, cut scenes and character animations have all seen a huge step upward. The game looks quite a bit better than its franchise predecessor. If there's one major problem, it's that the game doesn't run very well. Perhaps it isn't a huge shock considering that the game is releasing alongside the Switch 2, with its own distinct version, but there are a ton of slowdown and frame rate issues in both gameplay and cut scenes. The core gameplay is paced slowly enough that it doesn't make the game difficult to play, but it's distracting even at the best of times.

Overall, Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma is a very solid spin-off of the franchise. It does a good job of capturing what makes the Rune Factory games enjoyable while throwing enough twists and turns into the mix that it doesn't just feel like Rune Factory 6. The town building is engaging enough that I worry that a Rune Factory without it might feel lacking now. The combat is solid but simple, and the cast is likable but not super special. Only the general poor performance drags down the game somewhat, but fans of the Rune Factory franchise should find a lot to like.

Score: 7.8/10