Although not very deep, this game gives you a ton of things to do and you'll enjoy yourself too much to notice.
Now for mine. Personally, I have always wanted to, but never had the chance to get into the various Harvest Moon games. For one, after owning a Game Boy (which I loved btw) I never really felt like wasting money on a "mere" handheld, and Nintendo is nearly synonymous for handheld gaming. The Harvest Moon games were almost nearly all for Nintendo systems, with a few straying elsewhere - there was one for the PS2 iirc, which I managed to watch.
I really wanted to like it: I enjoy Visual Novels immensely (which tells you I can stand reading a lot of text, and repeating large portions of a game just to cover a different character's story arcs), and i enjoy RPGs. But I just couldn't get into the "busywork" that characterizes the Harvest Moon games; growing crops and all that, it just looked tedious, not my cup of tea. Even though missing out on one of the few rare games that actually let you woo a girl and marry her was extremely annoying, to put it lightly.
Enter Rune Factory: Tides of Destiny. For reasons too long to go into I consider PS3 games generally aren't worth the bang for your buck compared to PC games, consequently I rarely buy console games without reading a ton of reviews and checking out what people are complaining about in forums. This game was a pleasant exception: I only had to watch my friend playing it for a bit, and it was quickly apparent there were a lot of things to do even though they streamlined and simplified a ton of other things.
I hear many fans didn't quite like how simplified growing crops was - man, even with the simplicity here I can just about barely find it fun. Perhaps you could actually decide what grew where in the Harvest Moon games? I admit, things tend to grow haphazardly here so if you want a particular crop, don't plan on getting it immediately unless you have room to spare. For my first game I got flooded with cucumbers, even though it was merely one out of like 6 different crops the monsters I captured could grow.
The combat wasn't as bad as the official review made it out to be. Button mashing? Maybe, if you grind, but combos actually need timing to perform and if you just jam on the attack button monsters will interrupt you; you actually need to move around. I'll even go so far and compare this with another PS3 game I recently played: Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm Generations. Bring on the flames, but THAT game is a FIGHTING game, and yet has about the same "depth" as the combat here. What? There's only one attack button in the Naruto game, and fighting is all about mashing the attack button repeatedly and using a substitute log to get out of danger, in fact if you don't have any substitution logs left you're helpless if you get caught in an attack.
For a fighting game, it's as shallow as a puddle and that's damn pathetic - and I speak as someone who generally enjoys fighting games, and I actually like Naruto (I read the manga btw, catching the anime episodes is too much of a hassle). That this game (Rune Factory) can boast a deeper combat system (hello, different weapons to equip, leveling up?) goes to show that even as shallow as the combat in this game is, it's actually not as bad as the review made it out to be. After all you could end up hoarding substitution logs and jamming on the attack button just like in that Naruto game. Please, don't talk about dashing and crap, you can "run around the combat area" in Rune Factory too.
Everything else is somewhat standard jRPG fare as you've come to be familiar with. Not really a bad thing, because it makes the elements that Rune Factory / Harvest Moon develop stand out even more, i.e. the social aspect. Sure, I wish the characters had an even larger repertoire of lines, but they already have a large amount of text each. My biggest gripe would be the voice acting but that's not really the game's fault, more like shelling out to cover the Japanese VAs' contracts to extend to sales beyond Japan is typically too high for companies (this explains why many games are dubbed: it's not that the publishers here don't want to bring the Japanese voices, it's that they need to pay more). The English VAs aren't too bad, meh, I guess I got used to them after playing tons of other dubbed games even if I'd rather have the original voices.
All in all though the pros and variety outweight the cons, which are mostly annoyances rather than glaring mistakes. This game is definitely worth your money. Coming from a tight-fisted cheapskate like Yours Truly, that is one endorsement you can put money behind. Heh.