Rune Factory: Tides of Destiny - Fishing Poles, Scarves and Monster Slavery

What exactly is rune factory? Well the creator basically called it, "Harvest Moon with a sword." Its basically Harvest Moon meets action RPG. Its highly praised and many people have suggested the game to me. I haven't played any of the other rune factories but everyone seems to enjoy the game a lot so I picked one on the Wii rather than the handheld. Was it a bad choice? I heard the hand held versions are superior however I didn't find the game horrifyingly bad except for some really terrible decisions.

You first start off the game with you going around beating up random monsters then suddenly a bright light appears while you're in town with your BFF. Suddenly you're sucked 200 years into the future and shes now stuck inside your body. You play as both people and she can take control of your body and talk with others. Its really bizzare but you'll get used to the weirdness, as will the rest of the people in the future town. Like all other harvest moon games you go around farming and planting stuff and selling for money. Theres one difference in this game in that farming is secondary. It felt tacked on and you don't even get to farm it yourself. You can capture monsters by scrubbing them with a brush then force them to work on your farm. You cannot grow plants by yourself, you need a monster to grow it for you. All you can do is place a marker on the ground where a monster will come and then stomp the ground and then the marker will bloom. You feed your monster slaves monster cookies everyday. Each monster eats one a day. The bad part about this? You never get to choose what you want to plant. You really want a Pom Pom Flower for that hat? Too bad. You need a strawberry for some jam or a quest? Pray your monsters plant them. If you forget to feed your monsters its fine they won't starve to death or anything they'll just become unable to work. I also want to point out that you can choose to kill your monsters. In the game quests will often tell you to "return the monster to the forest of beginnings" by killing them or NPCs will talk about sending the monsters back there by slashing it to death with a sword. By talking to your monster slaves at your farm you can pick an option to "return the monster to the forest of beginnings." If you select that option they will die and their spirit will float away.

The main focus about this game however is the combat. You can pick from a variety of weapons and poke, stab, slash, smack, and smash your way to victory. Combat for the most part is fairly responsive and fluid. However, using skills requires a huge cast time and will lock you in animation. Some weapons are also very slow that basically gets you stunlocked from 100% to 0% when surrounded. Every monster hit will stagger you no matter the damage. Even if its a 100 hits doing 5 damage a hit you will get staggered and basically just go grab a drink because you'll be stuck getting hit for the next 5 minutes until you die. This only becomes a problem near the end of the game when they start throwing in large masses of enemies with projectiles. The game itself doesn't have many dungeons. In fact there are four dungeons total in the whole game and 5 bosses. These dungeons are super spread out and you must get there by walking on your golem through the sea. You might be thinking this game must be really short. Yes it is short, but they pad it with the most stupid shit ever.

You do not buy gear in this game. Nothing in the store is useful except to buy materials to craft your own stuff. Crafting starts off alright, collect some materials, make the item, then kick some monster butt. Sounds simple. Then suddenly BAM you hit a wall. You need to raise your crafting skill to craft the new stuff. If you don't craft these you are stuck in progression because you cannot fight against the new stronger monsters. So what do you do? You grind. You sit down and you grind the fucking thing. You make millions of scarves and fishing poles. I am not fucking joking. You will sit down and waste at least two hours of your life spamming the craft button until you are bored out of your mind. Now that you got that out of your way its time to spend a few hours farming rare drops from monsters until you get it. I wouldn't mind if the crafting was optional. If it gave you stronger items or super powerful items. Like have the shops sell some decent gear when you reach the next dungeon, with crafting letting you create stronger ones than the ones in the shop. But no they force people to craft these. Also to get crafting recipes, you first have to make friends with the villagers. By completing quests and raising friendship they will give you recipes. So it takes even longer.

The worst part in all of this? Like harvest moon games, there is a stamina meter. In this game its called RP or Rune Power. Everything you do uses rune power. Crafting, fighting, planting, etc. If you run out of RP it will start draining your health until you die. If you are fighting monsters and you run out of RP then you're shit out of luck. To bypass this you need to buy a shit load of food to eat. Food will recover some RP and you're basically crafting, eating, crafting, eating, crafting, eating every day. In dungeons you will be killing, then eating, kill, eat, kill, eat, kill, eat, kill, eat. This might sound tedious, and it is. The worst part is how much money you'll be draining on food. You cannot possibly afford that at the start so you'll be spending days fighting a couple of monsters and going back to sleep. Is there a reason why RP is so intrusive? You can easily drain your entire RP pool killing one to two enemies with a weak weapon. Thats fucking bullshit. If this game wants to play like an action RPG then don't add something like this. If they want it to be a farming simulator, then let us plant our own fucking plants instead of making us create fishing poles and scarves for fucking hours.

Last and not least the villagers are the craziest people you'll ever meet. Father Gerad, a priest, is probably the worst depiction of a homosexual person I have ever seen. The villagers describe him as a character and he's over the top flamboyant. Then you have the most boring people like Seirra who never wants to man the fucking shop so you have to wait around all day for her to walk inside rather than standing at the door. You cannot buy stuff unless shes indoors. Her whole existence is to complain about work, to avoid work, and to piss off her twin brother off. The brother isn't much better either, he is super shy and can't talk to girls. Then you have people who drug you because she loves you, and people who is in love with their little sister. Basically crazy people and you're stuck with them. The game lets you play as a male or female but only at the very end after you beat the game. When you split apart from the same body you can choose to play as yourself or as your BFF. However, playing as a female is an afterthought. The entire game you are playing as Aden, the guy.

There are 9 bachelorettes and 3 bachelors. That number itself is indicative of how much effort they put into making the female counterpart of the main character. Basically the list of characters are:

Bachelorettes
Odette - The normal girl who loves to cook and works at the inn. The first person you meet.
Lily - The older sister of Odette. She is incredibly clumsy and ditzy and often falls face first on the floor.
Violet - Younger sister of Odette. She is incredibly shy and softspoken. She falls in love with you at first sight and drugs you.
Electra - Mayor's daughter who really likes housework and being a housewife *groan*
Maerwen - A dark elf. A token dark skin character. She works as a maid for Electra. She acts really cold and has a sharp tongue but is really nice underneath it all.
Sierra - The tomboy active girl who hates work and complains about it everyday and is the most boring and annoying character in the game.
Mikoto - The token asian character in every single harvest moon/rune factory game for the xenophobes that play the game. Shes a cross dressing samurai.
Pandora - The evil sorcresses out for world domination. She calls you her minion and bosses you around all day long.
Elena - A golem crazy inventor/blacksmith/childish person who sleeps until 4pm every day.

Bachelors
Bismark - Sierra's super serious and super shy girl fearing twin brother.
James - Elena's older brother who has a girlfriend already and who cannot stop talking about "his cute little sister" because "her cute face lets him get through the day." Incest alert.
Joe - A giant idiot surfer dude. So very stupid.

So as you can see, girls get the short end of the stick with three of the most depressing people you can ever find. Guys at least have more choice although most of them are terrible. However, all this only appears after you beat the main game. You cannot raise friendship of NPCs over 6 until you beat the game.

The game started off fine at the start, fun in fact, then it became one of the most tedious grinds I ever seen in a game. And I grinded a lot in Disgaea. The difference is, it was somewhat enjoyable there, and for this game its just crafting fishing poles and eating ice cream cones until you take a break from boredom. The farming element is an afterthought in the game and do not expect to spend much time farming. Except to spend in game days just traveling from one place to another and many in game days trying to clear a little bit further in the dungeon because of your limited RP. Although its much easier to just run past all the enemies because it wastes too much RP to fight them. Only fight them when you need drops after that just keep running to the end and buy a stack of food and fight the boss while downing as much food as you can to keep your RP up. Other than these giant flaws, the game itself feels like harvest moon. The combat is fun when you have enough RP to fight. Its decent but not good enough.