#steamdeck

I get crazy gender envy every time I see this stupid and insanely pretty joker girl on the balatro art

Yesterday I ran this test of Vampire Survivors on Steamdeck vs Switch 2. I found the Steamdeck's screen blew the Switch 2's out of the park in colour accuracy and framerate.

However, even when both devices were running stable, the Switch 2 looked really blurry. It made me question whether the game was capped at 30fps.

The truth is, the response time of the Switch 2's screen is really, really bad. It's worse than the DSi. While the games are capable of running at 120fps, the truth is the switch 2's screen will make games look like they are running at 30fps because the image doesn't fade on time. This makes the 120fps feature completely useless.

The effect is worse in 2d games (thus the dsi comparison) but it is also noticable in 3d games. Turning the camera fast in Breath of the Wild makes the game look like it's running at 30 instead of 60. Effectively it's a built in Motion Blur effect. I can imagine it's even worse in Cyberpunk which already has its own motion blur settings.

TODAY'S THE DAY! I can't believe this game is actually launching, I'm so excited :D :D

Here's a mini trailer, and a steam link!

Hello everyone! Welcome to Ranch Story’s review for the Steam release of Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma! Here we will go through the graphical settings, how the game runs on the devices I ran the game on (including the Steam Deck), My personal thoughts about the game, and finally a list of Steam features that are included for this release!

Graphical Settings

The graphical settings to the Steam release of Guardians of Azuma are extremely customizable, and I was very surprised to see the Super Resolution and Frame Generation options. I have not seen those options on previous pc versions of previous Rune Factory or Story of Season games!

 Specifically, the bottom half of the Graphical Settings menu are the settings that are changed depending on what Graphical preset you use.

High Preset

* This was captured with a machine using a NVIDIA GPU. AMD GPU users will have FSR instead of DLSS.

Medium Preset

Low Preset

While playing on the medium preset on the Steam Deck, I noticed some detail pop-in specifically with the LOD of 3D models. When I was testing on other devices, I noticed it was specifically happening with the Medium and Low presets.

I found out that it was the Mesh Quality setting and turning that from medium to high disables the pop-in if that bothers you, but that may cause performance issues depending on your hardware, but for me the performance decline was not too noticeable! I will go into more detail in a later section but this game is very optimized!

Devices

Desktop: CPU: AMD Ryzen 7-Series 3700X

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060

Memory: 16 GB

Operating System: Windows 10 Home

I decided that I wanted to see this game in the best possible way I could. So I used my main machine. I am very glad I did because I was amazed at everything shown! Everything impressed me; from the textures, 3D models, and even how smooth and snappy the animations were. These are amazing features in general, but it even furthered the gaming experience seeing it all come together at max graphics with no visibly noticeable slowdowns! 

Steam Deck:

Model: LED 512 GB

Operating System: SteamOS

I was very happy when I tried out Guardians of Azuma on my Steam Deck. I chose to keep the settings on the default Medium and the game is just as pretty as it was on my desktop. I had no issues with Proton running this game, and there was nothing special I had to do to get the game to run. One thing I did have some issues with was during some demanding cutscenes, the game’s framerate would drop noticeably lower, but it does not happen for all cutscenes, and honestly on a handheld computer I expect these things to happen, other than the demanding cutscenes, the frame rate stays around 50~60 fps.  Personally, I would not notice if I didn't have the fps overlay on while playing! Another thing I would like to say is that the battery while playing lasts 1:30~2:00 hours with the fps uncapped and/or capped at 60 fps, using the in game settings to cap at 30 fps or setting the frame limit to 40 fps using SteamOS’s performance settings. I ended up being very happy with how Steam Deck ran the game on medium plus the convenience of laying down while playing means that for the majority of my playthrough I ended up playing mostly on the Steam Deck.

Laptop:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7-Series 3750

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650

Memory: 8 GB

Operating System: Windows 10

I went back and forth on trying Guardians of Azuma on my laptop, but ended up trying it out for a bit and was pleasantly surprised? The laptop is slightly below the minimum requirements with the “GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER” being the minimum requirement for GPU but it was such a small difference that I might as well try it out! I noticed boot up and post load would get really laggy and models would take a second to pop up, but once things loaded the game was mostly smooth at a 40-50 but sometimes when the character was still and nothing really going on at 60 FPS. The performance was almost the same when unplugged, which I couldn't really say the same for some games previously.

General Thoughts

Alright alright, enough with the technical for now!

I could go on and on about it for quite a bit of time, but there is so much more to the game than how it runs and it deserves to be spoken about too! It’s a spin-off from the mainline Rune Factory titles, and honestly as someone who grew up with only playing Frontier and Tides of Destiny before getting into the numbered titles, it feels faithful to its preceding spin-offs. I am so happy this is the case. Spin-offs are wonderful, and I really love it when they experiment with new concepts and try new things but in such a familiar way. Farming is a bit different and can even be a bit more hands off with the town management sim part of the game, but also its bare mechanics are very familiar where you do not have to learn a whole new system just to make sure your plants grow. Another thing I really love about Guardians of Azuma is the cast of characters.

To put it straight to the point, I love how human they are. (Even the non-humans) They all have things that they love and hate, things that they are scared of, and their own personal things they have to go through. And this all affects how the social interaction choices work too, you have to think “would they actually like this topic” or “is this a place they would enjoy visiting” and each interaction could be positive or negative, depending on the character.

And if I may get a little technical again to tie things off here, I really really love that no matter which device I ran this game off of, it worked. Of course there will be limits and you should probably pay attention to the minimum requirements, but the game itself runs rock solid and the settings allow you to tweak things if you would like things to be more easy to run on your hardware. I feel like it's very important that games are able to run natively on all sorts of hardware old and new, weak or powerful in the current era of very expensive hardware, and I am glad that Marvelous thought about this when developing the game.

Fun Steam Stuff

The Steam release of Rune Factory includes various classic Steam features like 

Cloud Saves

Controller Support

81 Achievements (Holy Moly 👀)

7 Badges

15 Trading Cards

Final Thoughts

🩸 Let's Join a Cult! 🩸 Unboxing my Cult of the Lamb CptnAlex Console Sling!