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If you want the quick and dirty, Guardians of Azuma is a good Rune Factory game with an incredibly good base-building gameplay loop held back from being awesome by several cracks in the story and Digital Deluxe DLC package.
In more detail:
Guardians of Azuma is a spin-off of the mainline Rune Factory games, akin to something like Tides of Destiny which has its own cult following within the already small cult following Rune Factory has. It takes place after Rune Factory 5, and has some lore ties to that game, but it's not completely necessary to enjoy the story. Instead of being primarily focused on farm management, it is instead a side activity that can be automated away with proper village management, which is the main gameplay loop. Skills have also been completely reworked.
What's new:

You can craft more than just furniture, including entire buildings and shops to place in the four season themed villages. These items contribute to your stat total, and while you can get by without them, the game becomes much more difficult without them. Multiple in one village do not increase stack stat bonuses, but one across different villages do.
You can request to hang out with a character, exchanging some in game time for a possible boost to bond EXP, shortening the time it take to farm bond levels. Certain actions are disliked by certain characters, and will reduce Bond EXP depending on the level of the action or if the character isn't at a high enough bond level to use that action. Certain actions also cause new cutscenes if preformed at the right level and time of day, and a skill tree is dedicated to unlocking new actions.
Generic NPC villagers can help preform tasks, such as mining, logging, fishing, maintaining shops, and farming. Each come with special skills that give them boosts or banes, or allow them to maintain certain kinds of shops. A farm can run completely fine without any player input.
Bosses have stun bars, which need to be filled up in order to deal significant damage to them. Charge attacks deal the most damage to the bar, and Ultimate attacks allow you to immediately chain into one once unlocked.
A successful dodge causes you to enter a slowdown stage, where stun gauge damage is boosted and Spirit Gauge gain is boosted, allowing you to quickly down and then burst a boss.

What has changed is:

Weapon, Sacred Weapons and Crafting life skills now use a skill tree system. You gain EXP by using each, and unlock nodes using their specific EXP points or General EXP Points.
Fishing, walking, cooking, farming, gathering, and other life skills not represented by the skill tree system now earn General EXP Points, so doing them isn't completely pointless.
Because these lifeskills were removed/changed, unlocking new recipes is tied to specific collectables and chests.
Crafting does not use RP, only Gold.
Woodcutting axes, fishing rods, and mining hammers are now a key item, and the recipes for their upgrades are locked behind village levels.
Only Sacred Weapons use RP, and their functions are similar to that of farming tools, such as the fire sword being able to cut crops to get back a potentially higher level like the Scythe.
Weapon arts don't exist, being completely replaced by Sacred Weapon special attacks.
Seasonal changes only progress the calendar, and don't change any of the villages. Seeds now have a preferred village to be planted in rather than a preferred season. It makes sense given the lore of the game, and the older RF titles had small plots within the permanent season areas in order to let you plant anything at any time regardless.

I expected to be turned off by the changes to gameplay between this and the main games like RF4 and 5, but it was actually quite pleasant. A lot of the time I would have spent farming was instead spent basically city planning, determining what buildings and decor I needed to build to both improve my stats and improve village output, grabbing the necessary Lumber and Stone needed to build them. Needing gold instead of RP was a bit irksome, but that was because my usual strat of chugging Hot Milk for RP as I blitzed through crafting to power-level life skills or farm gold from shipping endgame equipment wasn't available anymore. The new hangouts are an incredible addition to the relationships in this game and they should 100% continue doing it, just with the addition of some more dialogue that triggers when you preform them and not a brief, silent cutscene (P.S. You get character swimsuits by inviting them to the river or beach!). Whoever did the models did an incredible job as well as they are very expressive and detailed, and I wouldn't mind them replacing the hand drawn portraits (though please don't fire artists for this, I love the old RF artstyle too). The combat is also pretty good with the ability to switch between two weapons, although RF5's combat wasn't great since you could trivialize everything with Fists, picking and throwing mobs into rooms like mini-nukes while having incredible single-target DPS arts for bosses so it's good just by comparison.
Now, I want to talk about the story. It's got the potential to be good, but is significantly held back by:

Two bosses that appear out of nowhere, with little explanation as to why, and the disputes are very quickly resolved. One of them is literally the first time you meet a certain romancable character, whereupon after defeating them they join your cast then disappear from the story immediately after. It feels like they were added as bosses just to hit a quota.
The above is a more general issue with the writers seemingly just forgetting story threads in-between arcs. Something will be brought up that seems relevant but then never gets addressed ever again. A good example is Subaru/Kaguya being your MC's betrothed before they went on their separate journeys. This should be a significant factor when you choose to save them but it literally never comes up in the story and pre-bond level 7 quests make hardly any mention of it.
Romanceable characters that aren't the seasonal gods or Hina/Mauro have zero story presence. They feel like afterthoughts, which is a shame since older titles did try to make most of their characters relevant.
Town events are GONE. Really not too happy with this one since it adds a lot of characterization for the cast and helps flesh out ones that didn't get much attention within the main story. Certain pairs of characters will have special dialogue between each other when out in the field, which helps a little, but again the lion's share is taken up by the gods and Hina/Mauro.
You can permanently kill off your MC's gender opposite (Subaru/Kaguya) by refusing to sacrifice anything to revive them. In story, this is played and set up as though it were a major decision that would have negative ramifications for the story going forward if you did make the pact, but there are literally no consequences for doing so. All that happens is a few minor dialogue changes and the Mikoshi Habaki Heart fight allowing you to fight with Subaru/Kaguya and Clarice, instead of just Clarice. There is no change other than locking yourself out of a possible romance partner if you do kill them. Just a major missed opportunity overall.

The Deluxe DLC package is required to unlock Pilika and Cuilang's bond stories and marry them. If you do not have the package, they remain in-game but without the DLC content. I would understand if these were characters added in some sort of additional story add-on, but them being included in the base game for characters that already have some story involvement feels like a bad omen, especially since we know Rune Factory 6 is in the works. It's sort of like that on-disk DLC controversy back in the 2010s, if you can remember that.