I finished it. …Okay I guess I’m not really done because I haven’t gotten Sonja back in her body yet, but I’ve killed the last boss and that’s enough for me. Anyway, 66 hours. Level 42. I used the Rune Blade and some three random monsters to distract the boss while I snuck in my hits. I would have gone with the Legendary Blade, but I accidentally used up my sapphires and couldn’t be bothered to go grind for more. Moving the golem is such a chore in this game that I preferred to take my chances with the boss rather than trek to the water shrine yet again. Tides of Destiny is going to be the first Rune Factory game I’ve abandoned before getting married, but I have no regrets and no intention of playing any further.
Story
Rune Factory games aren’t particularly known for their good stories (RF3 was pretty bad as well) but this was the most disappointing experience so far.
They aren’t many, but there are RPGs out there where the protagonist would hurt the villain more by not doing anything than by continuing his adventures. Tides of Destiny is one of that rare breed, and by the time the final shrine rolls around Aden should know he’s the one putting the world in danger, but he blithely does it anyway. See, there are these 4 shrines in the world. They contain gems that seal some Legendary Golem that could destroy the world if it got out (except when it does get out it does nothing but wait for me to come up and beat it up so I dunno what they were so scared about).
The shrines have been around for centuries, but they’re locked so no one can get in. That includes bad guys, i.e. the final boss. The keys to the shrines are hidden on islands under the waves. So in essence, by raising those islands up, taking the keys and opening the shrines, Aden is the one putting the whole world in danger.
In the beginning he doesn’t really know what he’s doing, but by the end of the 3rd shrine he definitely knows. No one else in the world has an island-raising golem and there are no submarines, so if Aden just sat on his butt after the Water Shrine that would have been the end of the last boss’s ambitions. And Aden must have known that so… what gives?
I mean yeah, I’m the player and I controlled him and made him do all that, but that was the only way the game was programmed to progress: help the last boss so you can beat him later. They should at least have written a scene into the game where someone gets kidnapped and Aden is blackmailed into opening the Wind Shrine (stupid as those plot events usually are) or where Aden is conned into believing that visiting the shrines will help Sonja get her body back. Anything but “I know opening the shrine will help the bad guy and I have no actual reason to visit any of the shrines but there’s nothing else to do in this game so I might as well.”
All the stuff I had to do after that like visiting all the shrines again and sealing part of the Legendary Golem’s power was all just rubbing salt in my wounds because none of that had to happen. No wonder I couldn’t wait to ditch the game after beating the boss. Speaking of which, we never did get to find out who the ‘last boss’ really was and what he was really after. I mean yeah, he reveals he wants to become a legendary golem at the end so he can find the Elder Dragon, but why? What’s so good about being the Legendary Golem? The LG has been defeated twice and really isn’t that strong and the Elder Dragon never puts in an appearance so…huh? Maybe that’s stuff that would have been answered if I’d continued, but I’m done so never mind.
The good stuff (in no particular order)
– You can start forging/crafting immediately, no need to upgrade your house first.
– I liked making new furniture, though many of the changes were so minute you had to look hard to spot them.
– If you don’t like farming, much of it is automated. Though if you don’t like farming I don’t know why you’d pick up a Rune Factory game in the first place.
– The map shows where characters are, which was lacking in RF Frontier and the older RF games.
– I like the idea of haggling, though the practice was a bit of a chore.
– The mood of the game is quite relaxing.
– The characters were quite cute. I really like Minako Iwasaki’s character designs, especially when they aren’t attached to fiascoes like Kamiyo Gakuen and L2: Love x Loop.
– It has the most challenging dungeons out of all the RF games. If you aren’t careful you’ll be wiped out quite easily, especially by mages and dragons.
– Characters will wear the accessories you give them, so you can customize their appearance. It’s fun to give all the guys pumpkin heads so you don’t have to stare at their ugly mugs :p
– The voice-acting was good and the music was catchy. No problems with the audio aspect at all. Also bright happy colors!
– The game takes a few seconds to load at first, but after that there’s almost no loading. It’s a very smooth experience.
The not good stuff (also in no particular order)
– Waving a magic wand to get crops and getting animals to take care of them wasn’t bad in itself, but I didn’t like the randomness of what would grow. I always had a ton of strawberries when what I really wanted was pineapples, or green peppers when I wanted eggplants. I didn’t even get cabbage and carrots until I was almost done with the game, and I got turnips last instead of first. And by the time I quit I still hadn’t grown any Lamp flowers or Pom-pom grass.
– Puzzle dungeons. I hate puzzle dungeons.
– Drop rates are quite poor, especially from monsters around your level. They should have called it Tides of De-stingy instead.
– Tiny text is tiny! Though it’s probably my TV’s fault.
– Mining is a chore and a crapshoot. It’s all about what your animals feel like growing that day, which is almost never what you want. I never got Platinum from any of the Platinum-growing monsters.
– Most ores are useless once you get one or two of them. Bronze, Iron and Silver in particular, what was I supposed to do with all that? It’s not like there was a simple recipe to use them up with either, since most rings and bracelets require you to grind for Insect Skin as well.
– Trees took forever to grow. I finished without ever getting any Maple.
– Money gets useless very quickly. They should have put more buyables in place.
– None of the marriage candidates interested me enough to actually marry them, male or female. I might have gone for James if he wasn’t on the rebound but that’s about it.
– Pharmacy recipes are sadly limited. There were only about 8 items on the list when I finished.
– The Golem takes too long to move and no useful warping skill was ever introduced.
– No warning that townspeople affection can’t go above 6 before the story ends. Gimme back those fruit parfaits, Lily!
– The ocean being the ocean, there isn’t really much to explore out there. It’s boring.
– A game set on an island with so much to do with the sea really needed better fishing options. I got tired of catching the same Girellas and Pond Smelts and Cherry Salmon over and over again. By the time I got a better pole I had already quit fishing.
– There is some lag in a few dungeons when there is too much going on onscreen.
– Companion monsters keep getting stuck in the weirdest places and leaving you to fend for yourself. They’re good for taking the heat against bosses but that’s about it.
– My wrists hurt from using the wiimote. Either my hands are too weak or that thing is too heavy. I wish I could have used the classic controller instead.
– My storage area filled up pretty quickly because I had all these items and no good recipes to use them in. The flowers were particularly useless, but also stuff like monster hides and insect jaws and bird feathers were just taking up unnecessary space by the end. But I just couldn’t sell them because you never know.
Overall
Rune Factory Tides of Destiny has been added to the long list of games that are shortening my gaming career. They know themselves: those games that aren’t all that good and yet aren’t quite bad enough to quit so then I keep playing and then at the end I’m disgusted with myself for having wasted all that time on them. It wasn’t B-A-D bad and there were moments of brightness in the gloom, but I’m not particularly happy I played it. I just want to move on now.
Move on to what?
Mostly Harukanaru Toki no Naka de 3. It has monopolized my PSP so I can’t play Castlevania but I’ll get back to that later. I’ve put Princess Maker 3 on hold for long, boring reasons, but I’ll get round to that hopefully before the end of the year. Then there’s a Gamecube RPG called Lost Kingdoms that someone wants me to try, so I might do that. Apart from that… my DS is feeling lonely. I’ve still got stuff to play on that, so I might go back to it soon. When will my backlog ever shrink?! But it’s packed with good games, and that’s all that counts.
