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When Rune Factory: Tides of Destiny was announced I was ecstatic at the prospect of another  Rune Factory console game on the Wii. I had a blast playing Rune Factory: Frontier when it came out for the Nintendo Wii and I figured that Tides of Destiny would be just as enjoyable. So after another 100 hours or so invested, getting every in game achievement, and marrying anime waifus what is the verdict? Well let's find out in this weeks edition of bargain bin buys. This week I present to you Rune Factory: Tides of Destiny. A game I bought for only $15

   The story begins with Aden and Sonja, two friends who are caught in the middle of a mystical event that brings them a hundred years into the future, where they end up being forced to share the same body. Upon their arrival on future Fenith Island, Aden and Sonja discover that the islands surrounding the area have fallen under a mysterious curse. The two take it upon themselves to investigate this unexplained occurrence while also attempting to find out why Sonja's body has gone missing.

   The plot of Tides of Destiny falls short in a few areas, which isn't enough to make up for the interesting bits. I had a similar feeling with Frontier when I played it. Similarly with both games the introduction to the game is slow and takes far too long to hit its stride. And in both games it's not entirely clear what players are supposed to be doing at first.  Tides of Destiny gives little indication of what to do early on, especially in regards to the plot. A large story issue results from the fact that only Golden Turnip requests on the bulletin board provide story progression. You may waste plenty of time before figuring out how to move the story along or you'll give up and look up a guide online. One such instnace early on that I can give an example of is the progression to get to the very first shrine dungeon. Not only do you have to dig up an island to get a key, dig up another island and plant a sprout on it, but you also have to get a certain NPC to 1 friendship point and trigger a cutscene so that the quest becomes available on the bulletin board. None of which the game informs you of.

   The game's cast of characters provides tremendous appeal. As Aden and Sonja make friends, you'll get involved in the lives of the many residents of Fenith Island. As character requests are completed, the people who made them become quite endearing. While Rune Factory Frontier's cast came across as more energetic than this game's (Aside from the lazy store owner Danny), the residents of Fenith Island are a far more relaxed bunch, with interesting quirks that make them fun. It may take some time like them right away, but they grow to be far more interesting than their first impressions let on.

There are many residents within the game who must be addressed. I don't have time to cover them all, but I'll cover a few.  You have Odette, the Fenith Island Cook. Lily the busty Bard, Violet the nice Nurse, Elena the blacksmith, Sierra the sunny, yet lazy Shopkeep, etc. There are a total of 10 women who you can marry towards the end game and also in the end game there are 4 men if you should choose Sonja at the end. I won't spoil as to how Aden and Sonja  seperate, you'll have to figure that out yourself.

   While the plot placing issues are minor in Tides of Destiny, the same cannot be said for the game's combat system. Rune Factory has never had a deep combat system as it's always felt like a slow Harvest Moon style combat mechanic, but Tides of Destiny overhauls this with a completely new combat engine. Aden is able to choose from a wide variety of weapons that include one and two handed blades, axes, hammers, spears, and staves, but all of the weapons are kind of the same. Aside from the wands which provide you range to hit enemies from afar, all the weapons operate identically. Even if the hammer or spear may be slower than the sword, they all allow you to bust out insane combos. The engine isn't perfect however. It doesn't help that when five or more enemies surround Aden the games framerate slows down considerably. This slowdown makes for a frustrating experience. Another unfortunate aspect is that the combat revolves entirely around mindless button mashing, there's nothing wrong with the experience, but it's been done better in better games like say Bayonetta or some other mindless button masher beat em up. The aggravation doesn't stop there, as there is abolutely no way to block. This isn't so bad if enemies didn't gang up on you and trap you in a stun lock animation. You'll die a lot both in dungeons and during boss fights. You're only saving grace is a jump button and the fact that you can teleport away from trouble at any time with the 2 button. Animal companions make their return as well, but spend far more time in combat serving as shields instead of beating up on other monsters. This causes dungeon-crawling portions to be both mind numbing and extremely time consuming, forcing you to resort to the tried and true method of level grinding.

   Tides of Destiny features the return of Rune Points (RP). They deplete fairly quickly at the beginning so it's important that players have plenty of RP replenishing items available for dungeon crawls. Since every action in the game requires RP, be it combat or social activities like fishing or sprouting plants, it can be very hard to make sure you have enough to complete dungeon runs in one fell swoop. Luckily each dungeon grants you checkpoints to each floor  The healing system in Tides is bad. Instead of items healing Aden automatically, they must first be equipped and then used with the directional pad. This is a carryover from previous Rune Factory games and is unfortunate as they could have improved that aspect. It's problematic, because every time Aden is hit in combat it causes the item to fall to the floor. This makes cheap deaths a very common occurrence.

A Giant enemy crab... attack it's weak point for massive damage.

   The dungeons in Tides of Destiny are mostly uninspired or uninteresting to traverse through. The pacing throughout the dungeons is unbalanced. Some floors require little to no effort, while other sections are littered with traps, levers, and large clusters of enemies.  The boss fights are fun, but also are all over the place in terms of difficultly. Most of the bosses require you to learn a pattern, however whenever they go red and into fury mode, the regular strategy vanishes and is replaced by your durability to survive a barrage of unpredictable attacks.

 

There are a ton of activities in Tides of Destiny, One such return to the series is farming. Farming is a very simplified process this time around. For those that hated the runey system of Frontier, this is about as simple as it gets. First, you'll tame and recruit monsters, each has specific crops, minerals or trees it can create. Since there are four islands specifically geared towards each season, different items can be grown depending on which monsters inhabit an area. Spring Island produces spring crops, Winter Island you can harvest various ores such as silver and gold. By using the Sprouting Spirit Wand and feeding the monsters cookies, many items can be grown within a few days, eliminating the tedium to constantly tend to crops. So not only is the system simplified, it's also easier too. Just stock up on cookies, plant your sprouts, arrive a few days later, pick your crops, repeat. The result: Easy profit. This simplified process is welcomed as it keepsfarming  more manageable, but if you're a fan of harvest moon style farming of watering your crops every day, well it's kind of barebones. Also the runey system is completely overhauled as well. In Rune Factory Frontier if you had so many of one rune over the other it would overtake the other. For instance Grass runeys gelled with water runeys, but not Earth spirit runeys. It was a bit of a sour point to an otherwise fantastic game. In this you can release 50 grass runeys on one island even winter and be at 50% growth ability. It never goes down despite the season being unfit. And runeys don't eat other runeys eaither.

   The crafting system returns in Tides, which is presented as a minigame. When Aden crafts an item, he must time it while the gauge is moving. If you hit red, you fail, blue and you'll succeed. Failure to create an item results in a loss of RP, but at least failure still results in skill level increasing. It makes crafting more simple than simply selecting an item and hoping for the best. However, you still have to constantly grind for skill levels, and it takes a lot of time to craft the best items possible to make it through to the next area. Nearly every activity outside of farming is structured exactly the same way, which definitely reduces the game's variety. Still, it pays the bills, and it allows you to exploit  the game's many activities to obtain profits.For instance in cooking the easiest, yet most time consuming way to get profit is turning cold milk into hot milk. Cold milk is 100 gold, Hot milk is 300 gold... you do the math.

   Tides of Destiny sports an ocean theme, so it would be difficult to not discuss Ymir, the gigantic golem who allows Aden to travel through the vast ocean. Ymir has his own health and Rune Points, so it's important to watch those bars while travelling around the sea. Ymir's job is to help Aden discover the various islands within the deep ocean and salvage them so that Aden can explore. The ocean is massive in this game, meaning there are many places and things to discover. Travelling via Ymir does have its downfall in the slow speed of the golem, and his need to take a very long time to cover some of the distances in the game. However you can somewhat alleviate this by just using the fast travel option. In this it will give you an in game time amount of how much time will pass, but takes less time to discover islands than exploring the vast ocean yourself on foot.

 

Ymir is also equipped to battle large sea creatures when he encounters them. Ymir's fights are unfortunately not as cool as Godzilla battles against Mothra though if that's what you may be wanting to do. It's also not that different from the rest of the game's battles, using only two buttons for blocking and attacking. You can perform a finishing move, but it does not always appear for each battle. The battles are slow and sluggish, but are a relatively infrequent.

   Tides of Destiny is fairly good in terms of its audio and visual quality. First off, the soundtrack is quite lovely and loops well enough to be decent. Even the songs in English sport nice lyrics, and their simplicity is quite charming. Visually, Tides is okay. The graphics are pretty vibrant and colorful with each season change, but the lack of  true HD graphics really does hinder what could have been a gorgeous looking title. This was released as a PS3 title as well, and even that is just upscaled from the Wii, a severly missed oppurtunity

   Rune Factory: Tides of Destiny took me over eighty hours to complete. The game kept me busy, but it's far from being a fantastic successor to Rune Factory Frontier. While I adored this game, it's hard for me to recommend it to newcomers of the series, even though it's one of the most casual friendly titles to come in the series to date. Tides of Destiny has a ton of great ideas, but due to poor execution on some fronts the game it's unable to capture its full potential.

Personal Opinion: 8/10- Anything that has me invest over 80 hours into anything gets my approval!

Critical Opinion: 5.5/10- Uneven in every aspect. It's takes away elements that Rune Factory fans would enjoy, and it's to grind inducing for newcomers to the series. It's a fairly mixed bag of great ideas that were implemented with the best intentions, but have a severe lack of execution.

Overall Determination: 6.75/10- What a Bargain!