Best Rune Factory Games Of All Time

I'm in complete agreement of this. Guardians of Azuma is the best Rune Factory game period. While it simplified the farming system (that should just be with the Story of Seasons anyway), it introduced a completely fresh socializing system and village management. This should be the brand for Rune Factory going forward, less farming, more combat, more socializing, more management. Keep farming to Story of Seasons but evolve the social aspect of it.

Excellent excellent title, I hope they keep these features for Rune Factory 6.

I'm surprised guardians of azuma is number one. Might just be recency bias, as I would rate 3 and 4 above it comfortably. They are all very good games, but guardians of azuma just had so much tutorialisation and bordered on style over substance in areas. Honestly, after 20 hours, I feel completely done with it even with the story only 1/2 finished.
Interesting to see what is popular though

Guardians is great, probably the second best one for me, but I wouldn't put it above Rune Factory 4. This is a cozy series for me and faster farming and automating certain things isn't something that I prefer. To me, these games are about taking your sweet time with them and slowly leveling each thing by actually doing it. It's also a bit too easy for my taste. Having said that, it's a fantastic game.

1 - Cool concept, but it's got that first game jank. Sequels have done it much better, can't recommend going back.

2 - Second half of the game is fantastic, but the first half is a horrible slog since so much is locked off. You're going to spend a long time waiting to be able to actually play the game.

Frontier - Maybe I would've enjoyed this game if Runeys didn't exist...

3 - Perfection. They nailed the formula, and there simply are no annoyances I can complain about. Best cast too.

4 - Largely the same as 3 with some small iterative improvements. But I didn't like the characters nearly as much, and the final story arc is infamously locked behind RNG in a way that walled me for far too long. I heard this may have been fixed in Special though, can anyone confirm?

Haven't played the rest.

Guardians of Azuma is by far the best one I've played so far, it just feels more "big budget" compared to the rest. It has the best fighting, best social mechanics, best visuals, great town management, makes farming not a chore anymore and has the most voice acting than any other Rune Factory.

In second I would put Tides of Destiny, that was my first ever Rune Factory game and it's what got me into the series.

I just replayed 3 (Special) and found it to be fantastic.

Haven’t played Guardians of Azuma, but frankly, I’m not sure that it’s what I’m looking for in a RF game. Visually, it looks to me like a bland BotW clone.

Frontiers wins for me because…. Brodik.
All the others, no Brodik =no win

Sure I'll get Guardians of Azuma someday on the Switch 2, but not before Fantasy Life i.

5 being last is deserved but I'm surprised 4 and 4S are middle of the pack.

Just obe more week until the Earth Dancer edition of GoA arrives in the US and I can finally play it...

Rune Factory 3 and 4 Special should be ahead of their DS and 3DS counterparts since they both have HD graphics.

Glad 5 was last cause everything about it was bad. Nostalgia makes me want 1 to be top but it has to be 4 for me.

@JohnnyMind Someone out there pointed out that it STILL runs terribly on Switch 2...somehow. :/

Frontier was such a wonderful game. It got me through rehab of a tough injury.

4 may be the better game, but I preferred the characters of Frontier. It was an amazing moment when the series came to Wii with such an amazing game.

Meanwhile, I just know it as that life sim series that caught my intrigue cause I saw a character with kitsune ears advertised at some point. No idea which game, or if I'd like any of them.

Stopped reading at one of the best series entries "not truly excelling at anything" and its predecessor "feeling more modern in all aspects" (except for all the added QoL stuff and a town feeling like a town, I dare assume?). RF4 is pretty great in and of itself - comes with being a Rune Factory game, - but RF5 is a series-typical step forward from it whose only "sin" is a comparatively short step courtesy of the hiatus that was long thought to be for keeps. Azuma, while the jury's still out on it being the best due to the side games usually marching to their own evolution beat, has evidently regained the figurative growth pace Rune Factories are known for, and it's been officially designed in pursuit of pushing the flagships further yet as well, so its own offerings sure spell a bright future for the in-development RF6, but RF5's alleged inferiority also looks destined to remain as much of a fanbloid myth as its "abysmal" Switch performance I've been waiting to experience over three years since preloading and starting the thing. Foundry on, guys.😅

@KiaraIris I've already said elsewhere that Azuma's farming system ultimately balances its changes with fewer actions required in the usual routines on the one hand and the introduction of additional stuff (gathering resources for and crafting the farmland itself) on the other. But lowering the aspect's importance all the way down only makes sense in fellow genre representatives like My Time at Portia which focus on a different one from the start; Rune Factory's very titular lore is built on connections to the land and the power to make use of them. There's a reason pretty much every protagonist is an "Earthmate", an "Earth Dancer" and so on. Pure action RPGs are never in short supply as it is.

Right, because making the protag for a Rune Factory games the leader, the village chief, the prince, can't make them absorbs the runes if they're not the one farming? really?

Making farming less of an emphasis and focusing more on relationship, combat, and domain management fit Rune Factory brand even more than old titles. You're not inheriting your farms like any Story of Season games. If anything, Azuma finally made me realize that the farming and ranching in the game feels disconnected with the story when your character has always been the Guardian of the Earth. Bless the earth like Azuma protag and let your people run your farm.

rf4 should be wayyyy lower-rated, that game is infamously buggy. sure, special looks awful, but to my knowledge it wont make me delete my save for committing the grievous sin of choosing to marry vishnal.

include the piczle cross games so that rf5 can be ranked even lower, you cowards! i still think about how they developed frontier so much earlier, yet rf5 got so much wrong. frontier loads instantly, has a charming and well-designed town and the runey mechanic discourages sleeping to skip months at a time. meanwhile rf5 takes too long to load even on switch 2, the town is babys first 3d model and the game just discourages you from playing it entirely. i havent played azuma yet since i refuse to pay €10 more than pc players, but i REALLY hope they learnt their lesson after rf5. although i guess the town-building mechanic means the lifeless town design will be the players fault this time around?

Still like RF3 mainly because it has the most bachelorette choices/variety. Let’s be real that is the main draw that makes the series stand out.

There is better series if you want farm sims and/or combat.

1- Really boring game.

2- Not played.

3- Perfect.

4- great Gameplay improvement but boring characters.

5- Dropped After 10 hours out of boredom, too slow and boring characters.

Frontier- Dropped

Tides of Destiny - haven't played it.

@missingno_fgc I feel exactly the same about 3 and 4.
4 have better dungeons, gameplay and music, but the entire cast is sooooo much less appealing than 3.

@Arawn93 Maybe some games do it better if they separate combat from farming, but as a series that offers both and other things like crafting and cooking, it's my favorite so I wouldn't say that it's just because of the relationships. Closest is Stardew Valley and while I can appreciate the game, I still prefer RF games by a long shot. I do agree that the relationships are one of the best things about the series though.

Tides of Destiny is worth it for the soundtrack alone

I've never played a Rune Factory game before, but with just getting the Switch 2, Guardians of Azuma is awfully tempting. It's hard for me to consider paying $70 when TotK was the same price when it released. Perhaps one day I'll get it.

Rankings are weird to say the least when the DS and Switch versions of the games are several positions apart.

Either way, 3 is pretty much perfect. Cozy village, great villagers, very nice gameplay loop. I didn't like the setting in 4 as much, though the cast was good.

I don't think Guardians is as good as either of those. Definitely don't want the main series to move in this direction. The farming wasn't as nice (the scaling of it was strange) and the villager system was very unpolished. Maybe it'd work for me if you could instruct them to work in specific dev zones.

Having four locations ended up feeling tedious. Since I actually want to do the farming - that's part of the draw of the series - it got annoying to teleport around every day. It's a problem that is "solved" by putting villagers on it, but all the villagers really did was remove gameplay elements. And you need so much lumber to build stuff! Sure, you put villagers on solving that - but again, we're getting a solution to a problem that seems to mostly exist to justify the solution? The idea of managing the village IS compelling, but it needs to be much better executed to be appealing to me.

The skill trees were terrible. They should have just stayed with the more passive skill ups. There's nothing less appealing than meaningless skill nodes. I loved getting the little "SKILL UP!" jingle, not having it in Guardians is just sad. The idea of a general XP pool that you can dump into a stat you're not keen on grinding is a good idea though. I wouldn't mind seeing that in a traditional title.

That said, it was certainly a good game with a great cast, and the social system should absolutely be kept. It was probably the highlight of the game. Plus, the inventory management was so much better. And auto-looting enemy drops!

@abbyhitter What HD visials? Rune Factory 4 special looks absolutely horrid. Especially on Switch 2.

@JohnnyMind @Joeynator3000
In regards to this, I haven't yet tried it myself but a stable 30 is huge for it, graphically I never found it particularly poor.

Yesterday I ended up trying out Sonic Frontiers on Switch 2 and was blown away, then went back to it on Switch and dam, it really is night and day, yes it is still only 30fps, but that is locked in, it looks so much better, while pop in does still exist (which exists on all versions) it is definitely better.

@tanaka2687

Might just be recency bias

Totally. It is just absurd to rank any game in "best of" lists with less than one year.