Rune Factory: Tides of Destiny Critic Reviews

The story is not noteworthy and visually the Wii heritage shines through. But nonetheless the mix of conquering uncharted territory, collecting rare materials, finding treasure, recruiting monster comrades and taking care of your property is motivating.

Rune Factory: Tides of Destiny has some great gameplay innovations and refinements, and can be quite fun and addictive to play. Unfortunately, the step backwards in terms of localization and character development combined with some issues with production value keep the game from being great.

Tides of Destiny makes several good changes to the Rune Factory formula, making for a fun adventure in fantasy farming.

Rune Factory surely has some qualities with its long game experience and its colorful and aquatic universe that players will enjoy crossing thanks to the introduction of the Golem. However, the ones that usely play the IP to satisfy their farmer spirit, will be disappointed to see that all the hard work has been given to the mobs, the players' role consisting in checking if they have enough cookies to eat. Hopefully, fight sequences remain entertaining, yet repetitive.

While the motion and camera controls leave much to be desired, there is a huge amount of gameplay in this title for anyone looking to discover all areas and level up all their skills.

After thirty hours you're still discovering new islands in the enormous ocean surrounding Fenith Island. You're still trying to manage your plantations more efficiently or be a better cook. There are no tutorials, which means that you'll spend a lot of time wondering what you're supposed to do.

Showing its age both mechanically and visually, there's still fun to be had here if you've got the patience and the right mindset. It'll send everyone else to sleep, however.

As it stands, this one needed more time before harvesting.

Best left on the bargain bin's seabed.

It's when you get into the tedium of every activity that you realize a game that only does a few things well holds more value than a game that does a dozen things poorly. Variety is supposed to be the spice of life, but let's be honest, everything has its limits.

Rune Factory: Tides of Destiny took me over eighty hours to complete and only twenty of those hours actually felt fun and exciting. The game has way too many unpolished elements that keep it from being a fantastic successor to Rune Factory 3, and in the end falters from its problems described above.

A disappointing misstep for Harvest Moon's sister series, where neither monster fighting nor crop planting offers any real entertainment or variety.