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Digital Trends
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Digital Trends
Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma is a solid first RPG for Nintendo Switch 2
Sometimes you need to put a game down in order to appreciate it. That's exactly what happened to me while playing Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma. For its first six hours of the RPG, I was thoroughly unimpressed. I enjoyed its town-building and farming systems enough, but a dull story left me feeling like the niche series simply wasn't for me. I put it down and switched to the next game on my queue, Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time. It was far more similar to Rune Factory than I expected, using the same action RPG meets life sim hook. I sank a good seven hours into it before a surprising thought crossed my mind: I missed Rune Factory. Recommended Videos That anecdote speaks to the ultimate power of Guardians of Azuma. What starts as another run-of-the-mill farming game soon blossoms into an obsession thanks as its sticky hooks reveal themselves one at a time. Even with a bland story and thin combat, there's an engrossing adventure here that will give Nintendo Switch 2 owners their first meaty RPG to sink their teeth into. Learning to love Rune Factory Like previous entries in the long-running Rune Factory series, Guardians of Azuma is an RPG that's just as much about slashing enemies as it is tending crops. This entry follows a (surprise) amnesiac hero looking to heal a world thrown into chaos by an event known as the Celestial Collapse. There's a whole lot of story here, and that's consistently the weakest part of the package. While there's some thrill in battling dragons and uncovering the Gods of the world, flat writing and long bouts of dialogue can feel like more of a chore than, well, the actual chores. While that turned me away initially, the fact that I came back is a testament to what Guardians of Azuma does so well. More central than the high stakes story is the farming and town-building hook surrounding it. This time, my hero needs to take care of four different villages in towns named after the seasons. Each one has polluted plots of land that I can clear out and start building on. I start small in Spring Village, making a 3×3 patch of vegetables that I water, harvest, and sell in a shed. Then, I begin to expand. First I create a blacksmith's shop so I can upgrade my weapons. Then, I'm adding extra business like flower carts to give my town character. Soon enough, I'm obsessing over every detail down to the placement of small decorations. There's not too much thought behind my decision making at first. I'm simply crafting whatever items I can and placing them in spots that seem nice with a grid-based decoration system (it's much easier to use a classic overhead view to decorate than trying to place objects in third-person). The deeper I get, the more I start to pick up on the nuances. Certain shops will raise my stats, while others will give a boost to stats like trading. I begin to make more deliberate decisions, just as I start amassing villagers and assigning them to tasks. Soon enough, I'm making thousands in passive income each day. It's around this point that I bounced off of it and moved on to Fantasy Life. At first, it was a relief. It's a much more streamlined life sim despite having a lot of the same hooks. I spent hours picking up eggs and chopping down trees, happy that I didn't have to keep a spreadsheet to keep track of it all. But as my chores began to feel tedious, my mind started wandering back to Rune Factory. I began to miss my fully automated villages and the dozens of stats powering them. I yearned for all those complicated RPG hooks that gave me a constant sense of progression. Before I knew it, I picked my Switch back up and went back to that digital life. What I found calling to me was the incredible sense of automation that's possible in Guardians of Azuma. In the countless games I've played like it, my constant input is needed to keep the world running. I need to water the flowers, to harvest the crops, and to bargain with merchants. Here, I feel more like the mayor of four towns that can run themselves so long as I'm willing to invest in the right infrastructure. If I build houses, I can court more capable workers. If I construct businesses, they'll make money for the town. If I lay down soil, my farmers will take care of the rest. My job becomes more that of a financier who is setting these towns' economy in motion. There is a sense that the world moves even when I'm not there, and that's a very rare feeling for a video game to truly nail. Of course, there's plenty of work for me to do even when I'm not creating functional towns. The action side of the story has me flying to floating islands and slashing my way through dungeons full of orcs and tanuki. The combat is fairly repetitive, mostly requiring me to mash one button to attack and time dodges to activate slow motion counters, but I even come around to that with time. There's a lot of character building to be done through dense skill trees, equipment to upgrade, and spells to learn that are tied to tools like drums and umbrellas that are unlocked through the story. Most of my fights still tend to go one way as I slash enemies with my dual blades and poke their weak spots with a bow, but I have a lot of control over my build as well as six slots for party members. But frankly, I'm in no rush to see the story through to the end. After trying to blaze through it initially, I've found it more enjoyable to slow my roll and make my villages better piece by piece. I love hunting for frog statues out in the world that unlock more food and decoration recipes. I'm trying to tame as many beasts as I can and turn them into farm animals that hang out in my towns and produce goods. I'm still deciding which of my companions to marry as I go through each one's surprisingly lengthy side-stories that are often more engaging than the primary quest. And above all else, I simply love waking up on a new day and seeing a giant list of yields pop up in the corner of my screen, showing me just how much work my villagers did while I was out adventuring. Guardians of Azuma requires a lot of patience from players and that's something that may keep the Rune Factory series firmly in its niche despite a more vibrant art style that makes it look as grand as a Fire Emblem game. Give it enough time for the wheels to start spinning, though, and you'll find that it's hard to get it off your mind. Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma launches on June 5 for Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.
Digital Trends
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Digital Trends
The Nintendo Switch 2 gets one more last-minute launch game
The Nintendo Switch 2 is getting one more launch game on June 5 in the form of Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time. Players who currently own it on Nintendo Switch will be able to upgrade to a Switch 2 edition for a fee. Released last week, Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time is a new game by developer Level-5. It's a sequel to Nintendo 3DS cult hit Fantasy Life, a 'Slow RPG' in which players take on various jobs from woodcutter to chef. The game was a surprise hit when it released on May 21, surpassing 65,000 concurrent players on Steam at its peak. While it's already available on Nintendo Switch, it will get a Switch 2 Edition in time for the console's launch. Recommended Videos Fantasy Life i's pricing is a little unusual compared to other Switch 2 games. It will cost $62.58 to buy it new, while those who own it on Switch can upgrade for $2.59. Level-5 says that it won't won't give the game's Digital Deluxe Edition a separate Nintendo Switch 2 edition, so players will need to buy the Switch version and then purchase the Switch 2 upgrade to get it. The Switch 2 Edition will come with a few 'significant' improvements over the current Switch version. Level-5 promises reduced loading times, improved visuals, and a more fluid frame rate (though an exact frame rate wasn't revealed). Level-5 reminds players that the Switch 2 Edition's upgrades will not be available when playing on the original Switch. Fantasy Life i is a welcome addition to the Switch 2's sizable launch line-up, which includes Mario Kart World and Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour. Last week, we praised the RPG for its laid back life sim gameplay and called it 'a sweet little game for those who love doing little digital chores and feeling rewarded for every single one.' Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time Switch 2 Edition launches on June 5. The base game is currently available on PC and Nintendo Switch.
Digital Trends
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Digital Trends
Steam has a hit new life sim and it will brighten your day
As part of this job, I watch a whole lot of Nintendo Directs. Hundreds of games are beamed into my eyes every year and I try my best to retain as many of them as possible. As you can imagine, some fall through the cracks. That was the case with Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time, which was first revealed on a Nintendo stream in 2023. Even after making an appearance in February's Nintendo Partner Direct, it still didn't stick in my mind. I'm not sure why. Maybe it got lost in a sea of recently announced life sims, like Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream and Tamagotchi Plaza. For whatever reason, I didn't expect it to make much of a splash. As it turned out, I underestimated the power of Nintendo 3DS nostalgia. Fantasy Life i is out now and it's doing exceptionally well on Steam for a niche game. At the time of writing, it has reached a peak of over 47,000 concurrent players and 92% of its user reviews are positive. That only accounts for PC players too, not those jumping in on Nintendo Switch. The success got me curious enough to hop in and start my own life. I'm glad I did, because Fantasy Life i is a plesant little vacation that has made my days just a little brighter. Developed by Level-5, Fantasy Life i is a brand new entry in a cult hit life sim series that started on the Nintendo 3DS in 2012. Since then, its only other installment was a mobile game that was discontinued in February 2023. That makes Fantasy Life i something of a long-awaited sequel for fans of the original. And those fans were clearly hungry for it. Recommended Videos I can understand why as soon as I start playing. Described as a 'Slow-Life RPG,' Fantasy Life i is about an archeologist who is accidentally sent to a mysterious world where labor is valued. There's a big central story here that involves bone dragons, time travel, and the fate of the world, but that makes everything sound more stressful than it is. The real appeal? The fact that I simply get to live a quiet life. Fantasy Life's closest equivalent is Rune Factory, as it mixes some light hack and slash combat in between more peaceful town management. The hook is that players can learn 14 different jobs, each of which has its own skill tree, progression system, and function. I start by getting a cook's license and am taught how to turn any food items I get into meals by way of a quick minigame. I level up, get access to more meals, and start filling out my skill tree to improve my cooking efficiency. I repeat those steps when I get my licenses to become a miner, woodcutter, angler, and more. I immediately get the appeal as I start obsessing over leveling up each job, completing set tasks to increase my license level. What's so neat here is that Fantasy Life essentially allows players to become a town's entire supply chain. I cut the wood that I use to make swords that I then equip for my paladin job. I can plant my own vegetables by day, cook them by night, and then sell them around town. Lots of life sims allows players to do all of this, but Fantasy Life is clever to break them all out into specific job paths that each have their own RPG progression system. I feel more like a tradesman than a player pressing buttons. That's only one layer of it, too. There's also a town building component where I can terraform a patch of land, build houses for villagers, and decorate my house. Then there's some dungeon crawling, as I can hop into an open-world desert at any time to hunt for materials and level up my classes. Drop a central story on top of that, filled with boss fights and time travel shenanigans, and you've got a fairly robust life sim that you could sink well over 100 hours into. I just have one word of advice if you do decide to jump in: take it slow. When I started, I figured I'd simply mainline its narrative and start doing the life sim part afterwards. That's doable, but not exactly an ideal experience. Fantasy Life expects players to naturally level up their skills between story missions. I quickly found that late game enemies were kicking my butt because I hadn't been leveling up each of my combat classes. The more I did, the more skill nodes I could unlock that would boost my attack and defense. And leveling up my blacksmithing skills meant I could make stronger gear for myself. After misunderstanding that, I was left trying to grind everything up quickly, which meant doing a lot of repetitive minigames all at once rather than spreading them out. It's more difficult to embrace what's ultimately a series of grinds if you're doing them all at once. I have a few gripes with Fantasy Life i that hold it back from being a game I plan to turn into a routine, namely its very limited multiplayer integration that makes it so players can't work through the story together. Even with that complaint, though, it's hard not to be charmed by it all. Fantasy Life i is a sweet little game for those who love doing little digital chores and feeling rewarded for every single one. Considering how dark the real world is, it's the exact kind of escape a lot of us probably need right now. Maybe that's why it's so popular. Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time is out now on PC and Nintendo Switch.
Yahoo
18-03-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Free Agency Panic Meter: CJ Stroud, DK Metcalf, Drake Maye, JSN and more
One of our favorite segments from the regular season makes it's return to put a stamp on our free agency coverage. The 'People's Panic Meter' is back and boy people are nervous about some moves made in free agency. Fantasy Life's Dwain McFarland joins Matt Harmon to react to people's panic submissions and determine if it's time for no panic, some panic or TOTAL panic for certain players and situations. (3:00) - Reaction Bengals locking up Ja'Marr Chase and Tee Higgins (11:10) - Panic Meter submissions: Chiefs, CJ Stroud, JSN, Steelers (36:10) - Panic Meter submissions: Josh Downs, Dolphins, Drake Maye, Garrett Wilson (1:01:15) - Situations Dwain and Matt are nervous about [Join or create a Yahoo Fantasy Baseball league for the 2025 MLB season] Want to compete against all of the Yahoo Sports experts in this year's NCAA tournaments? Enter the contests to claim the ultimate bragging rights. Men's tournament: Women's tournament: 🖥️
Yahoo
18-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Justin Baldoni Insists 'Pietistic' New York Times Stay In Blake Lively Clash; Gray Lady Wants Dismissal
Going into full anti-MSM mode, Justin Baldoni is determined the New York Times will not get itself dismissed from the It Ends With Us star and director's sprawling $400 million and counting legal brawl with Blake Lively. 'This dispute should be resolved by a jury at trial,' a very wide-ranging March 14 memorandum of law in opposition from Baldoni, his Wayfarer Studios, CEO Jamey Health, financier Steve Saraowitz and publicists Jennifer Abel and Melissa Nathan retorts of the Gray Lady's February 28th instigated attempt to be dropped from the matter long before the March 29, 2026 starting trial kicks off. More from Deadline Matthew Shear's 'Fantasy Life', 'The Accountant 2' Among SXSW Audience Award Winners Which Colleen Hoover Books Are Becoming Movies? 'Verity,' 'Reminders Of Him' & 'Regretting You' Will Join 'It Ends With Us' Blake Lively Vs Justin Baldoni 'He Said, She Said' Doc Heading To Investigation Discovery & Channel 5 'A pietistic bastion of the media establishment, the NYT has long presumed itself beyond accountability,' sounding very MAGA the 36-page memo filed in federal court in NYC also states. 'Not here. The NYT went past merely reporting on Plaintiff Blake Lively's ('Lively') California Civil Rights Department Complaint ('CRD Complaint') and actively vouched for the veracity of its false narrative.' 'The fair report privilege the NYT seeks to hide behind does not protect it from liability for maliciously colluding with Lively and her cohort to publish a false and defamatory hit piece about the Wayfarer Parties, wrongly casting them as villains and making them scapegoats for Lively's well-publicized media missteps.' Poll vaulting off the December 21 posted NYT expose 'We Can Bury Anyone: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine' about Lively's December 20 complaint filed with the California Civil Rights department alleging sexual harassment and retaliation with 'astroturfing' and online 'social manipulation,' Baldoni and his inner circle originally sued the paper with their own claims of libel, fraud and more on New Year's Eve for $250 million in state court in California. Among other things, coming on the same day Lively officially sued Baldoni in federal court, the NYE suit alleged the paper was in cahoots with Lively to set Baldoni up with her CRD complaint. The filing added that the NYT journalists, one of whom was among the trio that in 2027 revealed the sordid depths of Harvey Weinstein's long history of sexual assaults, gave him and his team only a couple of hours to respond to their story before it was published online. The NYT waved those claims off at the time and just over a month later Baldoni waved off the suit too, kind of. The Bryan Freedman-led Baldoni attorneys shut the California case down in early February. Just beforehand, Baldoni's side on January 31 folded the NYT into their suit against Lively, Ryan Reynold and their PR chief Leslie Sloane for defamation and extortion with an impermissible group pleading amended complaint. It is that lumping together of all the defendants and not specifying how they are going after for what by Baldoni and team that could provide an out for the NYT along with the First Amendment of the Constitution. On February 18, Lively filed her own much more damning amended complaint against Team Baldoni – – adding self-described 'hired gun' Jed Wallace, who allegedly worked with Nathan and Abel against Lively. Amidst all that, Vision PR founder Sloane is spotlighting the so-called deficiencies in the other side's filings to try to get out of the case herself. Somewhat overlooked in the accusations of Lively leaking the CRD complaint to the Times and crafting the story with them is that TMZ actually had the story first. Getting their hands on the documents within hours of them being filed, TMZ's self-announced exclusive of 'Blake Lively Sues Justin Baldoni For Sexual Harassment …Claims Of Wild Behavior On Set' went up at 4:54 a.m. PT on December 21. While Baldoni's side say the the Times had its hands on Lively's CRD complaint long before it was filed with the Golden State government, the paper's 'We Can Bury Anyone' (a quote from correspondence between Baldoni's Crisis PR team) was published on the paper's site at 10:11 a.m ET/7:11 a.m PT. To that, timestamps may proved a sticky wicket for a part of Baldoni's argument against the Times. Certainly the paper snared a win on March 4 when Judge Lewis J. Liman hit pause on any further discovery by Team Baldoni. The stay on a deep dive into the files of America's unofficial national publication will be in place as the paper's dismissal motion works its way through the courts. Still, in a case that seems to grow every week, no actual date for a hearing on the Times' dismissal desire had been set yet by the court. For the A. G. Sulzberger run NYT, the attacks on the paper's December 21 text message illustrated reporting on what went down between Baldoni and Lively on IEWU and afterwards in a distraction, on all levels. 'The flaws in the Baldoni/Wayfarer case were made clear last week in their own legal filing when they asked the court for yet another opportunity to amend their complaint to try to make it legally sufficient,' Times Communications SVP Danielle Rhoades Ha told Deadline today. 'We are looking forward to addressing the various problems in their latest brief when we file our reply later this week.' Speaking of this week, Lively continued her reemergence into the red carpet and into the public eye that started with her and Deadpool hubby Reynolds at the February 16 SNL50: The Anniversary Special and the Another Simple Favor debut at SXSW on March 7. On March 16, the Gossip Girl alum took to Instagram to detail the cookies she and Reynolds were cooking up for their quartet of children. Among the pics was a selfie of the A-lister couple that looked like they didn't have a care in the world – which was exactly the point. Best of Deadline Epic Universe: The Latest Images Of The New Universal Orlando Theme Park Which Colleen Hoover Books Are Becoming Movies? 'Verity,' 'Reminders Of Him' & 'Regretting You' Will Join 'It Ends With Us' The 25 Highest-Grossing Animated Films Of All Time At The Box Office
