Japanese publisher Marvelous has made a surprising announcement regarding their next upcoming title, Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma.
They made this statement on their official FAQ:
“The Nintendo Switch 2 Edition is a red 64GB game card that includes, in full, the Nintendo Switch game and the Upgrade Pack.
There’s no need to download the full game: simply insert the card into either a Nintendo Switch or Nintendo Switch 2 console, and the correct version will launch automatically.
Like most modern titles, there may be small updates or patches available at launch to provide minor fixes and improvements, but rest assured: the complete game is on the game card, ready to play from day one.”
The FAQ also explains that Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma’s limited edition physical version won’t be coming with the Switch 2 version, simply because they did not have time to manufacture cartridges in time.
For those who don’t know, Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma was revealed seven months ago, and is currently slated to arrive to the Switch, Switch 2, and Steam only. The Rune Factory franchise is a hybrid action RPG/ social simulation game, which usually has the protagonist deal with both meeting goals related to building crop farms and crawling dungeons.
Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma, in particular, is a spinoff for the franchise that has you playing characters known as Earth Dancers. We don’t quite know what deviations it takes from the main series, but it seems slated to be Marvelous’ biggest game of this year.
Some gamers and game press seem to have taken this new messaging as an indication that Switch 2 Edition games could be Switch games that only have the Switch 2 upgrade installed in them. It’s certainly a little early to make presumptions in this regard, especially since the public hasn’t had the opportunity to play these games, or for that matter, examine these carts.
If it’s true that the Switch 2 has to use a translation layer to run Switch games, it may not be so easy to make Switch 2 cartridges that also work on the Switch. We may be looking at a situation similar to Game Boy Color’s Dual Mode or black cartridge games.
The question also arises if this could be possible for games that run poorly on the Switch as it is. For example, if Darksiders III gets a Switch 2 version, will it possibly be an upgraded version of the Switch version? We assume that Gunfire Games would rather build a new port from scratch to make better use of the Switch 2’s capabilities, and because it would be simply easier.
So there’s sufficient reason to believe that this isn’t something that will be true for every game, but it’s possible that a lot of Switch 2 Edition games that are already good on the Switch could get cartridges with this backward hardware compatibility. So we’ll see how developers work that out in the future.
In the meantime, you can watch Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma‘s announcement trailer below.
