Let's wrap this review up with the juicy stuff....the dating and social aspects.
This is where this game shines brightest. You can talk to the many villagers in the town, and build relationships with all of them. yes, ALL of them. Want to be best friends with the pervy priest. You can. Want to be BFFs with the old fisherman? You can do that too! Talking with people and giving them he right gifts allow for a friendship meter to go up, and everytime you reach a new level of friendship, you learn more about that person and develop a greater relationship with them. This can also be used to get exclusive items and quests, as every time you reach a new level with them, a new quest appears on the quest board and gives you a chance to get some quick FP (friendship points) for the new level, and get some new items. This encourages befriending a lot of the villagers, as you never know what items they'll give you next.
But friends, in the end, are just friends. What you want, is a *lover*. Aw yeah kids, it's time to tgalk about the dating aspects. At a certain point in the game, you need to get all girls up to Friendship level 6 (the max for the time being) in order to progress the story. After this and a couple errands, you can face the final boss. After which, your FP turn into LP (love points) for the girls, and now getting a new level means another cutscene, but another step closer to marriage. Cutscenes will reveal the feelings of the girls towards you, can once you get to a certain point, if you choose not to ignore certain girls, every single girl on the island will want to be with you. yeah, you're quite popular around the town now. Finally, once you get to LP level 10 with a girl, you have a cutscene with them, and in it you can choose whether to accept them as your girlfriend, or reject them and choose someone else. this is nice because if you accidently get a girl to 10 LP, you can just reject her, and say yes when the girl you want gets to 10 LP. Once you say yes, you go on a couple dates, forge a wedding ring, and purpose on the second or third date you have. A wedding ensues, the town supports your marriage, and then your wife moves into your house. And guess what, WERE NOT EVEN DONE YET. After THAT, you can talk to your wife in your house, and after a while she mentions a baby. you can actually choose the gender, or have it be a surprise, and after a month, she says she's pregnant. Wait a month or two, and then you have your kid. Every kid is special based on your partner and the gender of it, so it really feels like a kid born from the two spouses. You name it, then after about another month, a little cutscene shows the kid grown up into an adolescent, and at that point, the game is finished. You can still live out your days to your heart's content, but your child has grown up, going to inherit your farm and such after you've gone, you've lived a full life, had you adventures, at this point, the game is finally over.
Wow. All i can say is wow. The game puts a staggering amount of effort into post-game decisions and love aspects, and this is why this game is amazing. you're not just some random avatar, you're a real person, with real decisions. Deciding who to marry, having to reject other lovers, having a child and slowly watch them overtake what was yours and is now their's. This is an experience that is nearly impossible to find in any other videogame, and my hat goes off to Yoshifumi Hashimoto for doing a brilliant job of bringing the real world to the videogame world, in such an elegant and well done fashion. All the people and girls are nice, but relatable. They don't beckon to your every wish, a lot of times they get upset with you and sometimes just plain don't like you. But that's okay, and once you get to know them, i could honestly have chosen any one of the girls and been happy. I chose Lily, the innkeeper who loves to clean and cook, but sucks at both. She has a complex about having to do everything for her younger sisters, but being unable to do those chores at the same time, you see her grow as a person, and once you finally ask her out, she has doubts o even being able to do it because she feels she needs to look after her sisters. You tell her that all her sisters wanted was to see Lily happy (which is true) and don't care about chores and such. It all ends remarkably and screw all logic and pre-determined mentalities of our society, I felt as if Lily was real at some points. I'm aware she wasn't and this is probably sounding extremely pathetic (which it is), but goddammit if i can't commend this game for emotionally pulling me in and not letting me go...ever. even now writing this review has given me some chills as i remember my experience with this awe-inspiring game.
You can even play as a girl once you finish the final boss, so I don't even know how the game would change even more to commendate the player. throw in some great voice acting, Viewable jewelry on the characters you can customize, and a fantastic soundtrack, and you got a game you can remember, and a game that's criminally underrated. Any fan of Harvest Moon or games with depth and social interaction, is doing themselves a huge disservice by not buying this game. Rune Factory tides of Destiny gets a well earned 9/10, and a recommendation of Buy It!
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