I like Harvest Moon. I like shovelware JRPGS featuring cutesy, kawaii looking characters. So when I discovered Rune Factory: Tides of Destiny, I expected to ejaculate my trousers. Instead, I think that one game has indefinitely put me off from anything by Natsume.

Why? Because of one single game ruining fault.

The battle system sucks ass.

Imagine you're playing Kingdom Hearts. Now imagine every time you hit an enemy, you take damage too.

Yeah. You lose health every time you attack.

Who thought it would be a good idea to have attacking deplete your health?

"Hey Bob! We're almost done designing Rune Factory: Tides of Destiny! But I think it's too easy. So I've got one more suggestion."
"What should we do? Should we tack on a bunch of random, barely-relevant-to-the-situation bosses with of health that goes into the tens of thousands?"
"Nope." (But they're probably there too)
"Should we make the character need to restart from the last save point upon every death?"
"That's a good idea, but let's not do that. Let's instead have the player lose health every time he attacks! He doesn't even need to hit anything. Once the player hits that button, his health goes down by an unnoticeable amount. That oughta boost up the difficulty."
"Wow! That's a genius idea! This game could be the next Demon's Souls!"

No. There's no sensible reason for doing that. That doesn't make the game more challenging. It just cheapens all your deaths. Heck. You may never make it past the first island because your character will get exhausted from fighting the small amount of enemies on the island. In fact, that's just what happened to me. To keep from smashing another controller, I had to ragequit before clearing the first island. But still. That's probably quite a few hours in because this game has a two hour tutorial that doesn't help at all.
Not only that, you have this huge ass Golem. I'm not exaggerating when I say everything depletes his health. If you stood still and waited, he'd eventually drop dead. And God help you if you move.
It's pathetic. It's fucking pathetic.

Okay, well. You can heal however. The developers weren't being complete retards when they made the game.
You can buy potions and heal yourself, emphasis on can.
The places where you can buy potions are almost never open, and casting spells cost Rune Points(Yeah, apparently this game was too good to have MP like the rest of the RPGs in the world), and according to the manual, if you don't have any Rune Points, spells will use your health instead. You can already see how little sense that makes when you're trying to heal yourself.

The game also has a paper thin plot, as does Harvest Moon. You're like some guy whose girlfriend's ghost got fused with you, so the only way to unfuse is by slowing down all cutscenes and tutorials with random bickering, starting a farm, and falling from exhaustion from swinging at rejected Monster Rancher monsters.

The voice actors are also fucking annoying, as are all dubbed JRPGs. That pink haired girl you fuse with feels the need to shout or cheer you on constantly too. It gets far too annoying. So turn the voices off as soon as you can.

But what only makes the game worse is that you need to find the other islands to explore (spoiler: They're underwater and you need to use the mighty dying golem to dig them up), so unless you have bought the strategy guide, you will never find anything. I mean, at least with Harvest Moon, what you saw was what you got.

There is some stuff redeemable about the game. The aesthetics and graphics are nice, and the controls are responsive. But only a complete tool would like this game for that stuff.

TL;DR: AVGN-esque rant about a game that could have been a decent Kingdom Hearts/Harvest Moon clone if the developers made smarter decisions.