Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma director Shiro Maekawa says the end goal for the long-running cozy RPG series is a game you can "keep living in forever."
Talking to Automaton, Maekawa shared his vision for the future of the Rune Factory series, although he also expressed some skepticism about whether it'll ever come to fruition.
"Mr. Yoshifumi Hashimoto, the original creator of the Rune Factory series, once said in an interview that part of the inspiration came from the idea of 'getting to live in an RPG world even after you've beat the Demon Lord'," said Maekawa.
"In other words, I believe that Rune Factory was originally supposed to be a fantasy world you could just keep on living in. I do think it's good to keep adding new features over time, but from another perspective, I imagine Rune Factory's 'final form' would precisely be a game with a world the player could keep living in forever. Though, whether we can actually pull it off is a completely different story (laughs)."
Guardians of Azuma released in June 2025 as a spinoff of the mainline Rune Factory series, with the next numbered entry having been announced in 2023 with no release date or window.
As someone who still plays Ultima Online and Diablo 2 to this day, I think Maekawa is selling Rune Factory short here. It's definitely admirable to keep pushing forward as a developer and striving to make better and better games, but I'd argue there are almost certainly people still playing the original Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon on Nintendo DS.
Essentially, it just sounds like Maekawa is pushing for a more robust, even self-sustaining endgame in future Rune Factory games, which is hard to argue against.
In the meantime, here are the best Switch 2 games you can play today.
