Half a million people have already lost themselves in the fields and festivals of Azuma, and now PlayStation and Xbox players finally get their chance. Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma is making the jump to PS5 and Xbox Series X|S on February 13, 2026, and if you’ve been waiting for a game where you can spend hours perfecting your village layout, wooing a literal god, and purifying corrupted lands with sacred dance powers, this might be exactly what you’ve been looking for.

While the game launched on Switch and PC back in June 2025, the PlayStation and Xbox versions aren’t just straight ports. You’re getting all the free post-launch content baked right into the base game from day one. Marvelous Europe is also throwing in the Rune Factory 4 Hero Outfit Bundle as a bonus for all digital versions.

The game drops you into Azuma, a sprawling Japanese-inspired world where you play as an Earth Dancer, essentially a mystical farmer with combat skills and the power to literally dance corruption away. But you’re not just tending your own plot of land, you’re rebuilding entire villages from the ground up, strategically placing buildings to bring people back and restore the land. You can recruit the villagers you’ve befriended to fight alongside you or help manage your growing empire.

What caught my attention is the sheer variety packed in here. You’ve got monster collecting, village construction, exploration across seasonal-themed areas, dynamic combat with new weapons like bows and talismans, and the classic Rune Factory romance options where you can court gods and mortals alike. The anime-style graphics look gorgeous, with each village drawing from different aspects of Japanese culture and festivals.

The digital editions start at €59.99 for standard, €69.99 for Digital Deluxe with the Seasons of Love and Festive Attire bundles, and €79.99 for Super Digital Deluxe that adds a soundtrack and art book. Physical editions for PS5 will be up for pre-order soon. If you’re planning to dive deep, you could easily sink a hundred hours into perfecting your villages, maxing out relationships, and hunting down every secret tucked away in those seasonal landscapes.

Walking through any major Japanese city, you’ll pass them every so often, owl cafes, kitten cafes, hedgehog cafes, snake cafes. Neon signs promise encounters with capybaras, meerkats, foxes, and otters. It’s sensory overload for any animal lover, and on my recent trip to Japan, I couldn’t resist diving in. What I found was a mix of tenderness, cute appeal and some questions.

The first animal cafe wasn’t actually Japanese, it was a cat cafe that opened in Taiwan in 1998. But a Japanese tourist visited, recognised the potential, and brought the concept back to Osaka in 2004. From there, it exploded. By 2016, Japan had over 430 animal cafe facilities, and that number has only grown since.

In Japan most apartment buildings forbid pets, which means millions of animal lovers have no way to keep companions at home. Add to that Japan’s well-documented issues with loneliness and social isolation (particularly among young professionals working punishing hours) and suddenly these cafes make perfect sense. They offer iyashi (healing) to customers through animal interaction, a brief escape from urban stress without the long-term commitment of pet ownership. There is also an element of the sensory moment, giving you a much need ‘brain break’, it’s placing you somewhere where you are focused on the activity at hand, in that moment.

There’s also the kawaii factor, Japan’s cultural obsession with cuteness. From Hello Kitty to viral pet videos, adorable animals are woven into the national aesthetic. Pet cafes tap directly into this affection, offering Instagram-ready experiences with creatures specifically chosen for their charm.

My Micro Pig Experience

Of all the animal cafes I visited, the pig cafe was the most memorable, and the most surprisingly intimate. Mipig, Japan’s first micro pig cafe chain, opened in 2019 after a successful crowdfunding campaign that raised double its target.

When you arrive, you’re shown to your own private room with a small group of pigs. The staff hand you a blanket to drape over your lap and special shoe covers, the pigs, I quickly learned, have a habit of nipping at feet. Nothing can quite prepare you for what happens next.

The pigs are curious. Intensely curious. They want to sniff every inch of you, rooting around with their snouts. At first, it’s a bit overwhelming, these aren’t the docile lap pets you might expect. And if you try to gently move one away from nibbling at your toes? The squeal. I genuinely wasn’t prepared for how loud a small pig can be when mildly inconvenienced.

Once they’ve determined you have no more carrots to offer (you’re given a small supply to distribute), they settle. And when a micro pig decides it wants to curl up on your lap for a nap, there’s a surprising tenderness to it. They snuggle in, warm and heavy, and you find yourself sitting very still, not wanting to disturb them. It’s genuinely sweet and an experience unlike anything I’ve had with animals before (apart from my cat.. he loves to snuggle too).

The Dog Cafe

Dog cafes are a different beast entirely, literally a free-for-all. You enter a room full of various breeds, many of them small and dressed in frilly outfits (a very Japanese touch), and chaos ensues. Dogs run everywhere, customers compete for attention, and you quickly realise the transactional nature of the whole thing: these dogs are primarily interested in you if you have treats. No treats? They’re off to find someone more useful.

You also need to watch where you step. Unlike the relatively contained pig experience, dog cafes have accidents happening throughout the space. Staff do their best to clean up, but it’s part of the deal.

One cafe I visited also had foxes, actual foxes, dressed in the same frilly outfits as the dogs. They were beautiful animals, but something about seeing a wild creature in a bow felt uncomfortable. Foxes aren’t domestic animals; they haven’t been selectively bred for generations to live alongside humans the way dogs have.

And then there was what I glimpsed out the back: cages, stacked high. It was just a flash as a door opened, but it lodged in my mind. Where do these dogs go at night? Do they sleep in those cages? Do they ever get walked outside? I genuinely hope so, though I have no way of knowing. At one point during my trip, I did see a man walking about thirty dogs simultaneously through Tokyo, so someone is taking them out. Whether that’s adequate exercise for animals used as entertainment all day is another question.

We passed a kitten cafe and an owl cafe, but both were closed when we tried to visit. Part of me was disappointed; part of me was relieved. Owl cafes in particular have drawn significant criticism, owls are nocturnal predators being forced into brightly lit rooms to be handled by strangers for hours. It’s a far cry from their natural behaviour.

We’d also heard rumours of otter cafes in both Kyoto and Osaka where you can interact with otters. There are also otter experiences at various animal cafes in Tokyo, including the Harry chain in Asakusa. But otter cafes come with their own serious concerns. Research has found that many otters in Japanese cafes were not captive-bred but taken from the wild, their families often killed so poachers could snatch the babies. Some arrive with missing teeth, deliberately removed to make them safer to handle.

On one hand, the pig experience was genuinely lovely, the animals seemed healthy and well-cared for, the staff attentive, the pigs themselves choosing who to interact with rather than being forced into laps. Mipig claims to regulate how long each pig spends with visitors and rotates them to prevent stress.

Animal welfare advocates point out that cafes tend to be tiny and don’t provide enough of a natural environment, that animals kept in such settings experience stress from constant human contact, that the whole industry can fuel demand for exotic pets taken from the wild. The Japanese government has passed stricter animal protection laws in response to these concerns, but enforcement varies. Some cafes clearly prioritise animal welfare; others seem to view their animals primarily as money-makers. As a visitor, it’s genuinely hard to tell the difference from the outside.

If you’re planning to visit animal cafes in Japan, here’s my honest advice, do your research beforehand. Look for places that work with rescue animals or facilitate adoptions. Check reviews, and specifically look at the one-star reviews, not just the glowing ones. Pay attention to how the animals behave: are they choosing to interact, or being forced into contact? Do they have space to retreat if they want to?

Cat and dog cafes that partner with shelters and support adoption offer a model where animals can genuinely benefit from the attention. Some pig cafes, including Mipig, seem to take welfare seriously.

I’m glad I went. I’m glad I had that moment with the pig. But I’m also glad I’m asking these questions, because the animals can’t ask them for themselves.

I didn’t plan to come home from Tokyo with a suitcase full of tiny plastic figures. Nobody does. But that’s the thing about gachapon, Japan’s iconic capsule toy machines, they pull you in before you even realise what’s happening.

It starts innocently enough. You spot a row of colourful machines outside a convenience store, each one promising some bizarre miniature treasure for a few hundred yen. You think, “I’ll just try one.” Three hours later, you’re on the fifth floor of a dedicated capsule store, surrounded by hundreds of machines, desperately hunting for a tiny cat dressed as a shark to complete your collection.

The range is absolutely mental. Creepy Winnie the Pooh figures (some of which I must admit were looking rather unsettlingly). Furbys. Godzilla in every possible pose. Pokémon, obviously. But it goes far beyond the expected. There are capsules containing miniature VHS players, vintage cameras, and old tech that millennials will weep over. Food replicas spanning everything from detailed sushi rolls to random squid and oysters. Hello Kitty in approximately seven thousand variations. Superheroes, anime characters, and things you genuinely cannot identify but absolutely need to own.

And then there’s the totally weird stuff. Hot dogs with faces. Ketchup bottles with little expressions. Mayo with emotions. Condiments with personality, basically. It’s the kind of thing that makes you question everything, who designed this? Who asked for this? Why do I now desperately need a sad-looking mustard bottle for my desk? Japan doesn’t answer these questions. It just keeps making them.

You can find a capsule toy of basically anything that has ever existed, and probably a few things that shouldn’t.

The dedicated stores are something else entirely, multi-storey buildings packed floor to ceiling with nothing but these machines, hundreds lined up in neat rows like some sort of gambling den for people who peaked during their Kinder Egg phase. Families crowd around them, kids trade duplicates with strangers, and grown adults stand there genuinely stressed about whether they’ll pull the rare variant.

There’s even a solution for when you inevitably end up with duplicates you don’t want: recycling machines where you can trade in your unwanted capsules for another spin, another chance at glory.

So if you’re heading to Japan, keep your eyes peeled for the gachapon machines. Actually, scratch that, you won’t miss them. They’re everywhere, lurking on street corners and in train stations, waiting to separate you from your spare change and your luggage space.

Consider yourself warned.