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Forum - View topicGAME: REVIEW: Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma
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BlueRex666
Posts: 249 Location: El Paso, TX |
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Has the rest of the dub cast been revealed?
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FireChick
 Subscriber Posts: 2764 Location: United States |
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I plan on getting the Earth Dancer edition because RF games' LEs add DLC to their carts. But man, the wait is going to be painful.
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MFrontier
Posts: 20003 |
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Really looking forward to this one!
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LinkTSwordmaster
 Posts: 816 Location: PA / USA |
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It's not just Tsubame but Yachiyo as well.
Brace yourselves, I'm about to go on a rant with my opinion. I'm getting really agitated that the dev team for this series just kinda seems to consistently give us some really interesting older-age NPCs but then stick them in this "look-but-don't-touch" category when it comes to interacting with them, particularly in regards to the female side of the cast. I've noted before that it's imperative to make sure the romances aren't gender-locked, as I don't want to be told that my pick of main character locks me out of romance options right off the top of the game. Furthermore if you have a game like Wonderful Life that only has (originally) like 3 romance options per gender, locking them is taking an already-small cast and further reducing your options in a game where marriage is game-endingly-mandatory, and you might just not be interested in what's been presented to you. It's enraging to me that Lumina in AWL is coded as being too young (they aged her design up in the remake), but then the guys in the cast can be coded as older (aged down a pinch in the remake). When we get to Rune Factory 5, the dog girl (Fuuka) you can romance reads as being too young, and the dog guy (Murakumo) reads as being older than your character. They keep repeating this shite cycle of making the playable character seem young or waifish, and then romance-able guys are allowed to be older and mature, but practically all of the female romance-ables have to be similarly waifish or cutesy. It's driving me nuts & gaslighting the hell out of me, in what has long been one of my favorite game series. There's a scene in Rune Factory 5 where you full-on princess-carry Misasagi, and as I understand it, the playerbase was pretty vocal about being disappointed she was not a romance option. What's their answer in Azuma? Misasagi's overly-young daughter from RF5 is older & romance-able now.... yaaaaaay.... Is the dev team just pulling the exact opposite lessons from player feedback or something? I've talked before about how I feel like some elements of the Japanese audience is sabotaging the longevity/potential of the series, in that the superstition of "fated" or "one true pair" has wiped out the Romance Rival system - some players don't feel comfortable interjecting between characters that go on to automatically marry if choosing that romance-able character means their potential NPC mate is left in the cold.... so they just don't include that system anymore, or remove it from remakes of games that used to have it - the world feels a little less-alive with it missing.
Now, to Azuma's credit, its main characters seem a little more sturdy than RF4 and 5's have. Ulalaka and Kanata seem to be coded as being a lot more mature than a character like Iroha. That's not a bad step in the right direction, but then you get to Matsuri and she reads as more "rambunctious" or "cool"-coded.... but also smaller/seemingly-younger again. On the guy side, you're allowed to have big adventurous characters with muscles, but none of the women are allowed that sort of aesthetic. I'm actually a bit more impressed with the cast of bachelors this time than I have been in a LONG while and might go that route and try to forget/ignore everything else. At the end of the day, what I'm complaining about is not the entire game - it would be stupid not to play it just because some character designs are weirding me out or missing my approval. I regret between performance hiccups on RF5 (go buy the PC version!) and some character design problems and aspects of the game design being a bit thin, that I went to town and got an RF5 collector box no-questions-asked and it felt like it bit me in the arse later. I'm still going to give Azuma a fair shot, but it's going to be after it discounts to hell & back this time, given that it still seems some of my RF5 issues persist here. I've said it for Persona, and I'll say it again and again, I want to play older college-age or adult characters. Somehow Fire Emblem Awakening got that bit somewhat-correct with its character creation system back on the 3DS, otherwise it seems not to be a common consideration given in the JRPG space - as I get older it becomes increasingly frustrating to be stuck over & over repeating the same coming-of-age shenanigans and it's tiring me out. With things like Genshin becoming massively successful by making its cast as generically-youthful and attractive as possible, I'm not hopeful that this is going to be a trend that is course-corrected soon, unfortunately. Thanks for covering it Jean-Karlo, even if it's not quite what I was hoping for in some aspects. I'll get around to playing it eventually.... |
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Loogoo T Lexter
Posts: 25 |
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It's kind of funny to read this because I remember Japanese players complaining RF5 catered too much to American players with the update focusing on matching the American localized version with having same sex marriages and didn't focus on adding more content or romanceable routes like Hina's. I assume Hina being in this game and now romanceable is an apology to those Japanese fans who were upset. Although they changed her design so I wonder how many of them will care at this point. I guess people will always think they're not being listened to and the devs are catering to other people besides them. |
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FinalVentCard
ANN Reviewer
 Posts: 926 |
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Hina's design is different because she's older; she grew up (she was just a child in RF5) and joined SEED, hence the outfit (it's the SEED uniform). |
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LinkTSwordmaster
Posts: 816 Location: PA / USA |
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Speaking objectively, it's actually a really cool return in the grand scheme of Rune Factory's worldbuilding. Supposedly, all of the RF games generally take place in the same timeline/universe as each other and each successive game typically contains a nod to the previous one in some capacity. It's not anything particularly profound, storytelling-wise, but is a nice nod to people that have stayed with the series for a while. There's concept in character design, where you want the character's silhouette to be distinct and identifiable so that viewers/players recognise them visually in an instant. It may be unfair to apply that "rule" to Rune Factory given its general aesthetic, but sometimes I wish the character design or color palette in general was a little bit more varied. - I wonder if the metric they use that decides a design or a returning character reference has more to do with the player recalling memories from a previous game of someone they liked rather than making something 100% new.... |
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MiniMarps
 Posts: 187 |
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Rune Factory 4 remains one of my all-time favorite video games; Rune Factory 5 was a huge letdown. It’s been a long time since I’ve been nervous about a game the way I am about this one.
I am intrigued by the village-management system though. Personally my least-favorite side of this quirky ARPG/life-sim/farming-sim hybrid has always been that last part – watering turnips can feel like a chore compared to fighting monsters and befriending/romancing townsfolk. Now you’re telling me I can acquire peasants who will water the turnips for me? I don’t even care if they’re not very good at it, that sounds like a great idea. I am somewhat disappointed to hear the combat hasn't improved much from RF5. It's not that the combat in RF5 was terrible, exactly, but it could/should have been better. I understand that the combat is never going to be the main selling point of Rune Factory either way, but the same is true of, for example, Kingdom Hearts, and yet KH2 featured better combat in 2005 on the PS2. The last thing I want to say is that for all this talk of Switch vs Switch 2, I'm going straight for the PC version. Besides not really having to worry about whether or not the hardware will be up to the task, modability is definitely a factor. Modding was fun for RF4S and helpful for RF5. Whether GoA proves to be a good or bad game, I'm sure the ability to mod it will once again be greatly appreciated. |
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ZelosZoidberg
 Posts: 1065 |
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After playing around with Mario Kart World I purchased the switch 2 upgrade pack for my earth dancer edition of the game (the game and Switch 2 came on the same day last Friday) and I'm proud to report the game both loads fast and is buttery smooth on the S2. I've only played with the mouse function for a quick second just to confirmed it worked but I can see myself using it alot when it comes to rearranging my buildings and farm. I will say I'm not a fan of the auto advance dialog option on non voiced scenes because I miss 2-3 words before it disappears.
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