Rune Factory: Tides of Destiny is exactly the reason why I barely talk about gaming with my friends.
How would I begin to explain an anime-styled "life simulator" that sees two people inhabiting the same body, living on an island with dragons, trying to make a living treasure hunting (you know, on the ocean) while riding – you guessed it! – a giant, sentient stone golem, all while farming (!) and trying to woo the many girls of the island that you've mysteriously washed up onto.
Despite how embarrassing the setup is to me personally, a twenty-five-year-old high school English teacher, there's a lot of stuff to do in Rune Factory: Tides of Destiny, and most of it is interesting enough to hold the attention – but that's about it.
Rune Factory, as a spinoff of the Harvest Moon series, is all about giving players a sandbox with fairly mundane things to do and asking them to go wild within it. With the exception of wanton violence against the townspeople (which, as a well-adjusted individual, you had no intention of doing, right?), you can go about living within this world as you please. Do you want to make your scratch by being a farmer, collecting seeds, maintaining crops and animals? Do you want to hunt for treasures on the high seas? Do you, uh, want to start a blacksmithing shop? Well, you can, but be prepared to be slightly underwhelmed.
See, it's cool that the game offers so many options – but not too many of them are particularly great all on their own. In fact, for the most part they're irritating rather than all that interesting. The Rune Factory series in particular is known for its dungeon-crawling aspects, and for being known for that, it's strange that the battling so staid, basically being a "press X to win" situation. Sure, you have to manage your hit points and action points, but otherwise it's something like the Tales series without any of the tactical considerations.
And yet, there's something ineffable about the game. Maybe it's the confidence with which the game throws its myriad gameplay scenarios together, or maybe it's the abject, endearing awkwardness of the whole thing. I don't know. But what I do know is that the game's lackadaisical pace and nonsense story somehow comes together to be oddly compelling, bringing the player back into its world over and over again. It's not as successful or whimsical as, say, Animal Crossing, but it has its rhythms all the same.
Perhaps this is a strange compliment, but what Rune Factory: Tides of Destiny feels like is a Gamecube game. I sincerely don't mean that in a derogatory way – it reminds me of the games I bought for my Gamecube when I didn't know any better. Rune Factory seems like the kind of game that would never set the world on fire, but would garner a dedicated fanbase on an undervalued console. The Wii finds itself in that situation right now, and Rune Factory seems to fill that gap just fine.
If you've played Rune Factory Frontier, though, you'll find Tides of Destiny to mostly be an evolutionary improvement rather than anything major (it is, after all, a Harvest Moon spinoff). This isn't a game that's going to change your world, and if you're over the age of fifteen, I hope for your sake that the game's story and characters embarrass you. But it's good to be embarrassed, because then Rune Factory: Tides of Destiny can be your private obsession, something that it seems destined to do anyways.