My adventure through the Atelier series continues with what was the very first game in the series released wayyyy back in 1997. I had thought going through Atelier Judie would be a really big change from Atelier Rorona, given how old one was compared to the other, but I'd been quite surprised at just how much of the fundamentals were the same. Here in Atelier Marie, however, is where the real archaisms of the series lied. It was quite a learning curve just getting to grips with how the series worked back then, but I actually ended up enjoying my time with this much more than I thought I would. I played through the PS1 original version (via my PS3, as my PS2 is having some annoying audio issues), and while this is yet another game in the series that doesn't keep track of your play time, I reckon it took me some 40-odd hours to get the canon ending that leads into the sequel (although really I could've gotten any of them, as I effectively 100%'d the game save for one final item I couldn't be bothered to save scum enough to get).
Atelier Marie, as with virtually (but not quite) all Atelier games is the story of Marlone, or Marie, as her best friend Schia calls her. She is a student at the alchemy academy in Salburg, and she holds the proud distinction of having the worst grades in the history of the academy. In order to actually graduate, her teacher Ingrid gives her a special final task: In the course of five years of running her own atelier shop, she must create an item of good enough quality that Ingrid decides to let her graduate. While Ingrid DOES call it a "shop" that you're running, it's really just the "filling item requests at the town bar" system that basically every Atelier game after this would use, and the whole "do X task before Y time limit expires" is solidified and executed on surprisingly well in this initial entry. There's not THAT much text or characterization, certainly compared to later games in the series, but what's there is funny and charming in the way that this series does best. My personal favorite part of Marie's personality being how aggressively little she cares about all of the city's festivals and events that Schia drags her to XD. The game takes a little while to get going, and ultimately the time limit you're given seems pretty generous (even with all of the usual save scumming for efficiency that I anxiously do in every one of these games that I play), as I had nearly 100%'d the game's content before the halfway mark of the 4th year. That said, it's a really solid first step for the series, and while mechanics of the game have certainly not aged fantastically and the messaging in the writing leaves something to be desired for 1997, I can definitely see why people fell in love with this series and why it got to keep getting sequels as long as it has. Speaking of those mechanics, holy heckin' jeebus is this one oddball of a game when compared to even an entry as soon as Atelier Judie. There is SO much different about this game compared to later ones (and this is outside of stuff like UI refinements) I don't know where to begin, but I'll try to be as succinct as I can here. For starters, not only do you effectively have no cap on your item container (99 of any item is the max, but not total beyond that), and not only do items never expire, but items simply aren't unique. Item qualities and traits simply don't exist yet, and items of the same type are always completely identical to one another. This also means, by extension, that recipes never use generics or categories of ingredients, and items by and large take a bit longer to make than they do in other games. Viewing your inventory/container is kind of a pain with the UI as clunky and menu-heavy as it is, but overall it's a fairly familiar crafting system once you get beyond the aesthetics. You still make stuff to fill requests, you still get more recipes by buying them from shops or finding them via story events, and you still have to buy tools to help make stuff like you do in later PS1 and PS2 games. Though, weirdly enough, you don't have an alchemy level. You have a "knowledge" level that increases as you acquire more items, recipes, and even in-game information by talking to NPCs, and you have your character level that goes up by killing monsters and crafting items. Both of these things seem to increase your odds of successful alchemy, but it's not ultimately THAT different from how later games split your alchemy and adventurer levels. You also don't have LP, but you also don't REALLY have MP or spells either. Non-basic attacking special moves are limited to one per character and are determined by the weapon they're using, and using these special moves can be done infinitely (I got a huge AOE one for Marie and she was heckin' MELTING fools by the end of the game XD) as they don't use MP. What DOES use MP is items, which anyone in the party can use as long as you equip them with them. Now the alchemist herself DOES have a ton of MP compared to most of the fighters that'll tag along with her, but the whole "only the alchemists can use items" thing that later games do is totally absent here. Combat itself isn't thaaat difficult, or rather, it isn't terribly technical. Certainly not to the point where the lack of an ability to create your own weapons really matters to any significant extent. This has the whole grid-based rows and distance mechanics that later PS1 and PS2 entries would use a lot, but I really either felt that I was stomping enemies or getting my face stomped in myself, and a lot of that seemed to come down to "have I upgraded my weapons as much as I can yet?", "Am I using weak party members?", and "what level am I REALLY?". Combat is a really secondary thing in this game, and as long as you bring a big pile of healing items, you'll usually be able to at least limp away from fights even if you can't win them outright. There's also some weird pacing in regards to when you unlock certain areas to gather items in (like you're gonna wanna go to the mountain asap, as even though you can't really survive there, the bar tender will tell you a rumor about a much closer, lower-level cave where you can get nearly all the same ingredients only AFTER you go to the mountain once), and the areas themselves are really odd. They really aren't areas, per se. They're more like screens you go to after several days travel, and then you pick to either gather another day, heal the party, or go home. There is absolutely no exploring of any kind in the wild areas outside Salburg. Even the way you recruit your party members is odd, as they just have their own lives outside of you, and you actually need to get lucky enough to bump into them at the bar, alchemy shop, palace, or wherever. They still often cost money to get to come with you, and stronger ones generally cost more per-outing. While they don't have THAT much character to them, what IS there is generally fun and charming as the series is known for. My personal favorite (though I never really used him much) is the former bandit king who is only no longer a bandit king because you beat his gang up so bad that no one respects him enough to follow him any more XD The game's art style is like the later PS2 games I've played in the series but even more chibi-looking (at least in the walking-around parts). The 2D illustrated stuff is quite 90's but much more appealing than I found Judie's art style to be, and I really liked the character designs in this (although the alchemists themselves are definitely a bit eccentrically dressed to really fit in with their surrounding NPCs much ^^;). In a challenge to my assumptions about the early games' music that I'd gotten from Atelier Judie, the music in this game is by and large really good, and it's of the quality I expect from the series. There are some odd choices, like just how jaunty and happy your workshop's theme is, but I still really liked it and the workshop theme is something I've heard so often that I think it will never leave my head XD Verdict: Recommended. I really didn't expect myself to enjoy this game as much as I did. It's definitely in that PS1 JRPG space of "actually fairly simple but the UI is clunky enough that it has a bit of a learning curve regardless" going on, for sure, but it holds up surprisingly well given how long it's been since it came out. This and its sequel have a fan translation available online via the PS2 port of both games together, so this is one that can even be played in English (though I can't speak to the quality of the translation, as I haven't seen anything of it). If you're curious on the origins of the Atelier series, while this game certainly has its foibles and lacking in quality of life features, it's remains a pretty solid game in its own right, and if you're anything like me, it'll probably be something you get some fun out of despite all that stuff X3
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This is a game I owned as a kid on Wii Virtual Console, and I never got too far in it. I gave a good ol' try to get through it last year, but I got stuck on the final boss. I beat the 4th SFC Ganbare Goemon game on the actual hardware years ago and loved it, and this is one I've always wanted to see to completion before venturing on to the other two mainline 16-bit titles. After playing through one of the N64 games a week before, I decided to give this one another shot but this time on my SFC Mini instead of on the Wii VC, so I had the power of save states on my side this time XD. I actually managed to fare pretty well, and I even managed to beat the final boss in just two attempts (and I beat the second attempt taking only one hit the whole time, much to my own surprise).It took around three hours to beat the Japanese version of the game with some limited save state uses to save time re-grinding through certain objectives.
Mystical Ninja is the localization of the third mainline game in the Ganbare Goemon series, and the first 16-bit incarnation of the series as well. Goemon and his very effeminate friend Ebisumaru (localized as Kid Ying and Dr. Yang) are a pair of ninja based on the great thief Goemon of Japanese myth, but here he's just a wacky character effectively out of a gag anime. As is the case with the rest of the series, you travel around Japan to save the country (in this case, Princess Yuki and her father, the emperor) in an adventure full of anachronisms, risque humor, and a tone with the aesthetic trappings of feudal Japan but the tone of a gag anime. There isn't a ton of dialogue in this one, as this is much more of an action game than an adventure game (unlike later games in the series), but what is there is silly in an overall inoffensive way (which is more than I can say for later games in the series ^^;). The gameplay is largely a refinement of the Famicom games, and they're for the most part sorely needed refinements. Both Goemon and Ebisimaru can go on these adventures (continuing a co-op tradition started in the Famicom games), and there are two different kinds of gameplay: town sections and platforming segments. The town sections are a sort of top-down view where you go around usually just looking for the entrance to the platforming segment where the boss awaits you, but sometimes you'll need to get money for a gate pass or some other key item. Only the last stage really has much of a puzzle element to its town segment, and it's mostly there to give you an opportunity to not only earn but spend money on things like armor, health, and extra lives. There is overall a lot less grinding in these sections than the Famicom games, and the villagers within them have responses ranging from just silly to helpful information on where to go next (although in most cases, just wandering around will get you where you need to go eventually). The hit detection on enemies and yourself in these areas is a bit awkward, some stages lack armor/health shops simply for the sake of being mean to you, and they definitely get a bit too punishing later in the game as far as enemy range goes, but they're a net neutral for the game, in my book. The platforming sections are where the game shines a lot stronger for me. Each of the game's nine stages has one of these with a boss at the end, and it's Konami's 16-bit days at their finest. Jumping and hit detection feel way better than they do in the town sections, and the level design never has any nonsense with leaps of faith. You can use your money as projectiles or use your melee weapon to fight stuff, and you can power up your melee weapon Castlevania-style by finding lucky cats from defeated enemies. Though sadly, unlike most Castlevania games, your weapon power goes down when you get hit (continuing a tradition from the Famicom games). This isn't the hardest 16-bit Konami game, for sure, but it ain't no slouch. Unless you can find the hidden golden lucky cats to increase your health bar (and those health bonuses go away when you beat a stage), you're generally only 4 or 5 hits away from death. You can mitigate this during the town segments by buying food to revive you upon death or armor to take more hits for you, but those are only gonna be useful for one life. The game has a pretty fair and reasonable difficulty curve until about stage 6 or 7, where it throws the kid-gloves off and starts barely even giving you shops to go to. That said, the bosses are all well designed with most of them having reasonable tells for when they're gonna do their attacks (the kabuki boss is awful and I hate him though XP). I suppose sticking to Goemon's origins as a legendary bandit, it's sometimes better to run by enemies than actually fight them, especially if you wanna conserve your money/ammo (which is often one of the best weapons to use at any point), and I largely chalk up me beating the game this time compared to failing before to my willingness to use money as a weapon (where before I saw it as too wasteful). The presentation is really what you expect from 16-bit Konami: heckin' awesome. The game has a bright, cartoony art style that all sorts of colorful and charming. That's all peppered in with fun character designs and an absolute banger of a soundtrack. Goemon games are just about always good in these departments, and this game is no exception. As far as regional differences go between the SNES and SFC releases of the game go, there are very few. It's largely down to a couple partial-nudity based jokes being removed as well as the revival food being changed from rice balls in the SFC version to pizzas in the SNES version (which still fit the irreverent tone of the game pretty well). Verdict: Highly Recommended. As is the case with just about everything Konami did on the SNES, this is an excellent action/adventure game. It's got some issues with difficulty curve and signposting here and there in the later game, and it's definitely pushing the bounds of reasonable co-op game design during the platforming segments, but it has nonetheless stood the test of time very well regardless. It's definitely outshined by its Japan-exclusive sequels, but the first game should not be forgotten as a powerful debut into the 16-bit era for the series. This is a game I owned as a kid but never ended up beating. There are a bunch of missions to complete to get the real ending, and I could never figure out all of them to be able to actually beat it. I sat down with a wiki open on my computer and finally beat this game after so many years. I have Bone to thank for me finally getting off of my butt and completing this after I read his review of Dream Land 2 a week or so ago ^^;. It's not my favorite Kirby game on the SNES, but it does have a lot of nostalgia for me, so I'm really happy that I was finally able to conquer this mountain of my childhood (even if it ultimately wasn't that difficult ^^;). It took me around 4 hours to beat the game on my Switch's Super Famicom Online service.
The story is another fairly light Kirby affair as is so standard for their games. Kirby is chilling on Pop Star (or as it's called in Japanese: "Pupupu Land") when those weird, shadowy eyeball fellas land on it and start wreaking havoc again. Kirby needs to go to all five sections of Pop Star and complete the six levels in each and then fight a boss at the end. And, if they complete the special mission in each of the six levels in a world and then beats the boss there, they'll purify that area of the shadows. Purify all five worlds and you unlock a true final boss to fight to kick those shadowy jerks back into space. It's a simple, cute story that sets up the gameplay nicely, as is so often the case with Kirby. The gameplay is very much Kirby and an evolution on what Dream Land 2 brought to the table. Like in Dream Land 2, there are a scaled back number of powers compared to just how many there are in Kirby's Adventure or Kirby Super Star Deluxe, but they're modified by the inclusion of Kirby's animal friends. Pair up with an animal friend and the power you have gets turned into something totally new that also happens to have that power. It's a neat gimmick that is also pretty clearly what led to the power combining mechanic that we'd see a couple years later in Kirby 64. The main issue I found is that a lot of the animals just aren't that fun/quick to go around as, and a lot of their power combos suck. A fair few of the animals feel like power-downs as compared to how you usually get around (let alone compared to other animals), and several missions require the use of certain animals. Kirby themself controls alright, despite a bit of a heavier walk than I'm used to in Super Star, but a few of the animals are paiiiinfully slow and it feels like you're trudging through levels for no real benefit other than the novelty of the animal companion. Gooey, your co-op partner, is also a really cool idea, but Gooey (as far as I can tell) can't ride animals, which is a bit of a stinker (and Gooey is nowhere near as cool as the partner system in Super Star). It's certainly a change from the normal just-Kirby stuff, but it's got a flawed enough execution that it's not surprising to me that they were dropped from future Kirby games (though my personal favorites are Rick and Kine <3 ). The level design and overall difficulty are quite good, and lend to a game that's not dead-easy but also isn't brutally hard. I actually did die at a few points, and the game hits a nice sweet spot between not really hard enough to make you feel like you're on edge, but also not easy enough that you just stop caring. There are a few parts that require the animals' respective unique platforming abilities to complete the mission in that stage, and those are usually really good fun (if above-average in their challenge), but there are only a few of them. The mission design on the whole varies a lot in quality from a good challenge to nearly unknowable nonsense (like the one in level 2 that had me stumped for literal decades), and while their overall construction is a big improvement on how they're done in Dream Land 2 (you can always find everything you'll need to complete a mission in that level, so you don't gotta go get animals/powers and bring them to a different level to complete that mission), but they're still a fairly flawed idea. The presentation is very strong, as is normal for a Kirby game, but has some ups and downs. The music is overall very good, and I'll leave it at that. Kirby music is something HAL has always excelled at, and this game is no exception to that. The bigger sticking point for me is the graphics. Now, for a very late SFC game, the picture-book style of the game looks really cool. The way things look drawn with crayon or pencil gives the game a really unique style that I adore. The main thing I don't like about it is the fact that Kirby doesn't change depending on the power he has like with the hats they'd get in Super Star and such. I realize this is no doubt a compromise for needing to ride on all the animals, but it's still an aesthetic of those games that I love that I missed having here. Verdict: Recommended. It's got some issues as far as Kirby games go, but it's still a really solid game. It's gotten to be quite the rare physical release, so it's pretty darn hard to recommend it that way, but if you already have Switch Online, I'd say there's no reason not to give this a go if you're in the mood to kill an afternoon with a fun platformer. There's certainly better Kirby to be found on the SNES, but this is definitely not a choice either. After being thoroughly underwhelmed by Atelier Judie a couple weeks back, I was eager to see just what they went to from that entry. Given the very experimental nature of Atelier Judie's abandonment of the time limit Atelier as a series was so defined by, how would the next game in the sub series handle what Judie had brought to the table? What I was greeted with was an incredible turnaround I never would've expected. This game, like its predecessor, also does not record your actual playtime, so I reckon it took me around 40-ish hours to complete it with Brigitt's ending.
Viorate is a 15 year old girl living in the small village of Karotte. It's famous for its carrots, and she can't get enough of them. She loves her town, but her parents think it's too small and want to move to a big city very far away to get more opportunities. Inspired to take up alchemy by an itinerant alchemist (another student from Salzburg, the location of the first Atelier trilogy), she commits to trying to use alchemy to improve her town to the point that her parents have no choice but to remain there (or at least let her stay). This starts as simply filling requests for people, but ends up working towards efforts to both run a shop and to be the biggest seller at the annual charity auctions. Though the chronology is later specified to a degree, Atelier Viorate's connection to Atelier Judie is at first very murky, but ultimately not very important (especially given how Atelier Judie ends). Viorate's story and how it's told are head and shoulders above Atelier Judie's. The side characters (and main character) are better defined and characterized with a lot more scenes together, the main character's motivations as well as the stakes of her quest are much better established, and there are a myriad of endings you can aim for depending on just how hard you're willing to go towards trying to fulfill Viorate's wish to remain in her hometown. I thoroughly enjoyed the story and the characters, and although it certainly lacks the depth and polish of later games I've played like Atelier Rorona (many party members still join your party basically just because, and with very little personal reason to), the seeds of what would become the even more detailed character writing that are so strong a hallmark of the series are definitely here and definitely flexing their narrative muscles. A lot of these narrative improvements don't exist in a vacuum, however. A lot of them are allowed to exist because the the structural changes in the game's design since the last game. You still travel around to different towns, but Karotte Village is your home base of operations. No more moving house from inn to inn like in Judie. This means you have a place to expand and grow your alchemy/shop skills in as well as a place to have important plot events to occur. And let's not forget the most important change: You have a time limit again! You have three years (or five, if you manage to get the two year extension from doing well enough at the end of the first three) to turn Karotte Village into a boom town. If you're paying attention to your shop stuff, this is a pretty trivial task and is ultimately not that hard. However, putting the game's story back on a time limit gives it a sense of pacing that really helps the story stay consistently engaging, as the multiple endings allow you to try as hard as you're willing to go to see the story to its completion. The establishing of Karotte Village as your home base as well as giving you a time limit to do your quest within allow the most verisimilar elements of Atelier Judie's narrative progression to now shine as genuinely clever storytelling elements rather than interesting quirks that do little but befuddle you with awkward signposting. The UI and quality of life features have been improved a fair bit as well. Most importantly, you can now select multiple items at once when moving them between containers. That may seem trivial and obvious a thing to implement into a game that has tons of item management, but it's SO nice to have it now after not having it for the entirety of Atelier Judie XD. Overall, the item management has been streamlined a bit, as you can even auto-sort your inventory now with a press of the triangle button. There are still some annoying things like the lack of more detailed sorting features, the lack of sub-categories in your crafting menu (so the ever expanding singular list gets a bit annoying to traverse after a while), and your container still not preventing things from spoiling, but it's overall a very significant step up. The one weird step backwards is that they no longer give crafting time for items in their actual fraction of a day anymore, and you need to figure it out yourself through trial and error. The gameplay loop itself has both changed a fair bit but also stayed very much the same. The Atelier crafting system; with its item qualities, item effects, time spent, and resource gathering; is still here in all its glory. The function of tools that you buy or craft to aid in crafting has also returned from Atelier Judie. You have more items to craft than ever, and most importantly you can even craft your own weapons and armor now! You also very familiarly to any Atelier game have the ability to pick up requests for both found and crafted items from the town bar. However, you also now have shop management, which involves keeping your store stocked, deciding what items to mark up or down (with a simple "sale" or "luxury" toggle), and trying to keep track of what's popular so you can sell as much as you can! Those requests you do for bars? They spread the word of your products and will attract people from those towns to your village's shop. You can hire someone to stand behind the counter for you, or you can do it yourself if you fancy getting some of the oodles of character interactions hiding behind it~. You can even unlock different upgrades for your atelier, but you can only have so much built at a time (granted the upgraded forge is basically the only correct choice to have once you have the opportunity to build it). Running your shop adds a big opportunity for self-directed play in the game, but along a guided route. I found the gameplay loop really satisfying, and although running a shop isn't exactly a totally unique thing in the series (it's the main focus of the first game in the series, after all), it's definitely within the realm of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Of course there's also the combat in the game, which is really one of the things that's changed least from Atelier Judie. You still have the same "everything is HP" system of that previous game, where running out of HP, MP, or LP will result in a KO. Additionally, a LOT of enemy sprites have been reused. That said, having different player characters as well as differently balanced monsters makes the way you need to approach combat much different, especially given how many fewer good non-item AoE attacks are in this game compared to the last one. The only really significant change in the combat is the addition of special moves that require several party members in your group. Both members of the pair can add skill points into their own version of it, meaning that whoever launches the attack has a big impact on its effectiveness. These also tie into the story to some degree, as they're basically always done between characters who have some narrative relation to each other. This system is ultimately a double-edged sword. On one hand, it nudges the player towards pairings that will result in more durable fighting teams, but it also gives you hints on whom among your possible party compositions will result in side-story events together while you're out and about. But on the other hand, these pair moves are often quite powerful and have some of the best AoE spells in the game, so it ends up discouraging experimental party compositions. This game, unlike Atelier Judie, has no combat checks for most of its good endings (as there are many good endings, and it just depends on which one you're trying to aim for, although the best endings do involve a fair bit of combat and defeating the all or several of the game's quite tough optional bosses), so combat is another aspect that you really only need to engage with as much as you're willing to do so (as most of the base good endings are related more to crafting, the town's population, and your shop level than anything else). The combat is another element that is very much "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", and honestly the ability to craft your own weapons and armor does more to fix the combat than any actual technical changes in the mechanics of combat ever could XD The last thing to mention is the game's presentation, but it's definitely something worth mentioning. Though an art style change in the middle of a sub-series isn't something this series often does, it's something that happens between the two Gramnad games, and it's absolutely one for the better as far as I'm concerned. Characters look far more appealing in this style more reminiscent of the early-/mid-2000's anime rather than the more decidedly 90's' look and feel of Atelier Judie's art style. The other aspect that's really been given a shot in the arm is the music. I'd been told before I went into this game that it had a banging soundtrack, and boy does it ever. Atelier is a series that I generally associate with quite good music, and Judie really let me down on that front. Viorate really picks up the slack though, and has a soundtrack of the quality that I have come to expect from these games. The last few bits of presentation I'll quickly mention are that, just like in Atelier Judie, you unlock a bunch of goodies after you beat the game like character portraits, a jukebox (complete with composer's comments about each track) of songs you heard, the ability to view art stills and anime videos (of which there are a surprisingly large number) from the game that you saw, as well as listening to interviews with the voice cast about their time with the game. I really love gallery stuff like this in games, and it always makes me smile to see that, even back in the early 2000's, Gust was putting these in as bonuses for people who saw their game to the end. Verdict: Highly Recommended. I figured I'd like this game, but I ended up loving this game. There aren't many Japan-exclusive games that I play and really bemoan that they were never localized, but this is absolutely one of them. Atelier Viorate is an excellent entry in the series that really flexes the strengths of what Gust's team was capable of. If you can read Japanese, it's absolutely something worth checking out, as it's quite the foundational game for what would come after (at least for what I've seen of the later games) while still managing to be fun and compelling in its own right. This is a game I rented as a kid and enjoyed up until I hit a huge difficulty roadblock and had to stop. I wasn't super into reading game dialogue when I was a kid, so I probably wouldn't've been able to finish it even if I had been able to progress, but it's a game I've always wanted to get back to at some point. It's also got the odd position of being a 3D action/adventure game on the N64 that came out 15 whole months before Ocarina of Time did, making it a very interesting historical curiosity. It turns out it's a pretty cheap game here in Japan, so I picked it up a while back with the intention to stream it. The only problem was that, while the game DOES work, it needs a Memory Pak to save, and even worse is that for whatever reason it simply cannot use the Memory Pak that I have (I guess my one is too new or something? I have other Japanese Konami games that use it fine, so my Pak certainly ain't broken), so if I wanted to beat it, I'd need to do it in one sitting. 11 hours later, I finished it! I certainly didn't expect (or particularly want) it to take that long, but I did it!
Goemon and Ebisumaru are escaping from the angry crowd at an inn when suddenly a giant peach-shaped spaceship comes out of the sky and transforms Oedo Castle into this weird, Western toy-looking thing. They then embark out first to save the lord of the castle and his daughter, and then on a quest to save Japan from the Neo Momoyama Shoguns who want to turn all of Japan into their own personal theater stage. This game was originally titled as Ganbare Goemon 5, but the '5' was dropped in order to try and show that it was a break from the older games in the series. Nonetheless, the markers of its continuation of the story of the previous games (however unimportant or trivial that may be) are there in how wacky this story is (and a reference here and there to the ending of Ganbare Goemon 4). What's also unfortunate (but certainly unsurprising) are the continuation of all of the more rotten parts of Ganbare Goemon's humor, like the not infrequent homophobia and transphobia. It wasn't a deal-breaker for me, but it very well may be for some people, and the English script does tone it down a bit (though not THAT much). It does have some genuinely funny comedy in it as well as an aggressively silly tone packed with loads of 4th wall breaking, irreverent remarks, and even a laugh track. That combined with the several voiced musical numbers give the game an energy like something right out of a gag anime. When it works, it works pretty well and gave me a good few chuckles, but when it doesn't work, it's downright painful. The game design is overall pretty strong. You have four playable characters, as many of the Super Famicom games do (although no co-op mode), going through a 3D adventure around Japan. Each character has 3 weapons (at least one of which uses money as ammo, in grand Goemon fashion) and a special power they can activate, and while they each play mostly the same, there are enough differences between the four of them that you'll likely develop a favorite among them. The game has five dungeons to go through with a handful of bosses and mini-games to tackle to progress through the game. The overworld is not super awesome, and can feel a bit needlessly empty at times, but there are many secrets to find, so it pays to keep your eyes open for the many heart containers (or rather, lucky cats) scattered throughout the world. The bosses are overall tackled fairly well, and although some of the dungeons can certainly run a bit long (the ability to save in the middle of them would've been very nice), they're well put together even if they tend to fall into the camps of "overly simple" or "overly maze-like" in their constructions. The game's biggest problems are in a few deliberate design choices and then with technical problems. There are several fairly baffling design decisions, number one of which is that the game has absolutely no manual camera controls. This game is an early N64 game, sure, but 3D environments were not a new thing in 1997, especially given that Mario 64 came out the previous year. It isn't the worst auto-camera in the world, but damn if I wish it didn't have some way of controlling it to at LEAST recenter it behind you. Outside of some rough signposting here and there (despite a hint shop), there are some other strange decisions like not being able to pause during the Goemon Impact boss fights, or how despite how often well tutorialized the rest of the game is, you're never told how to actually fight in those boss fights. Several boss fights in the game (the second and then two final ones) have you piloting Goemon's giant robot friend Impact. First, you have a really fun transformation sequence as Impact is summoned in (complete with vocal song behind it) followed by a brief sort of running section to bash baddies and buildings in order to build up ammo and health before you get to the boss. Then when you get to the boss, you enter a mode that's something between Star Fox 64 and Punch Out, and they're often brutal battles of attrition unless you know what you're doing already. I was stuck on the final boss for an HOUR (he has some attacks that go on for AGES) before a friend looked up a speedrun and told me of a Scorpion-style "GET OVER HERE!" grappling hook move I had no idea was present (which I then proceeded to use a lot to beat the everloving hell out of the boss). The R-button, which is otherwise totally unused in the game, launches that grappling hook, while Z fires money as projectiles, A does long punches, and B does quick jabs. There are even special moves you can do by doing certain combos, but the game never tells you ANY of this in the game. While I'm sure the manual for the game did tell you that stuff, it's very odd that the game itself never tells you any of this given how many other things are explained to you in it. Some of the mini-games are overly obtuse and frustrating in their own ways, but the Impact fights take the cake as far as inadequately explained mechanics go. The fights are fun once you know what you're doing, but if you don't then expect to have a really frustrating time (especially since the cursor in the first-person sections don't use inverted vertical aiming, and that takes a LONG time to get used to XP). The last of the issues with the game are largely technical. Konami has a pretty bad track record on the N64 as far as releasing games that feel unfinished (like Castlevania 64, which genuinely IS unfinished), and this game is part of that legacy. Even for an early N64 game, the frame rate is HORRIBLE and very inconsistent. There were many parts where it was chugging so badly that it began to affect the latency of my button inputs, and while it isn't exactly game breaking, it is impossible to ignore in a game where platforming is so important yet pressing A sometimes results in a very late or a totally absent jump. Then finally there are some significant collision problems. Enemy and character hitboxes are very oddly defined, with hits often hitting but sometimes bafflingly missing, and there even being one type of platform (the fans in the last stage) that I routinely clipped through for no apparent reason. The game's difficulty is overall quite forgiving (your health bar is pretty big and only gets bigger while health items are quite cheap), so these problems never made me feel like the game was unplayable, but it was quite frustrating and they do a lot to drag down a game that could otherwise be one of the best experiences of its type on the system. What isn't a slack at all, however, is the presentation. It's a 1997 N64 game, so it's VERY polygonal, but the art style on the characters at least holds up pretty darn well. Environments look pretty flat and unimpressive in the overworld, but dungeons are often whimsically put together in a way that makes them memorable. The MVP of the game is easily the music, though. The soundtrack is an absolute banger even outside of the vocal tracks. The dungeons even have a really cool mechanic where the songs start out simple but then slowly get more complex as you delve deeper into them. The excellent music is one facet carried over from old Goemon that still runs as strong as ever, and even if you don't check out the game, the music should still be looked at X3 As far as regional differences go, there are a few but they're usually not very important. The biggest and most noticeable one is that the opening and ending movies have voice acting in the Japanese version of the game, which adds a fair bit more character to the game in a way I really enjoyed. Aside from that it's largely small aesthetic things (like replacing the manji on grappling blocks with a star) and translation decisions. A lot of Ebisumaru's lines in particular are wordplay that simply can't be translated, and from what I understand the English version of the game has a translation that walks the line of "poorly translated, or deliberately wacky?". Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This is a weird one to recommend because it has so many problems, but if you can get past those and play the game as it is, then there's a lot to be enjoyed here. Especially for mid '97, this is a really incredible feat for the N64's library, and is one of the best 3rd party Japanese developed games on the platform in my experience (if we aren't counting Rare as 3rd party, anyhow :b). The technical issues and writing problems are the biggest obstacles to my recommendation, and I can't give it a higher one because those are a lot more difficult to tolerate, generally, in 2021 than they were in 1997, but if you're ready to take the plunge then there is a lot of enjoyment to be had here among the jank. Special thanks to WASDBee, Nive5, Fawkes, and everyone else who helped keep me sane as they watched me stream this thing for 11 hours. And an extra special thanks to Blanka_Ball, who saved my life by telling me about Impact's grappling hook attack X3 This is the last Japan-exclusive (non-Eye Toy) Ape Escape game I'd yet to play, so I was pretty excited to get to it. Being a game that came out on the PS2 in 2001, I probably shouldn't've been quite so surprised that one of those pretty blue discs that indicated it was shipped on a CD instead of a DVD. Given that it also came out a scant year before Ape Escape 2, I maybe also shouldn't've been quite so surprised that the game reuses a LOT of assets from the first Ape Escape game. I ended up being quite surprised by a lot this game had to offer, but they were mostly not good surprises ^^;. It took me about 5 hours to 100% normal mode.
The story is fairly unimportant and awkwardly presented, so I had a pretty hard time following it or caring about it enough to try harder to follow it XD. After the events of the first game, Kakeru and the gang are renewing the Monkey Park and in the meanwhile have sent all the monkeys into a virtual play park while the physical one is being repaired. Unfortunately, part of the renewal is cleaning all the monkeys' pants, which they forgot to do, and Specter has the monkeys running amok in the virtual park! Now Kakeru (aka Spike) needs to get in there with his special vacuum cleaner to suck all of the pants off of the monkeys so they can be washed. It's a very light and forgettable story (even for one of these games) that's really just a delivery device for the gameplay. A lot of how forgettable it is comes down to just how thread bare the presentation is compared to the other games, as this game has virtually no cutscenes (only intro and outro with no subtitles) or voice acting (and the font is very annoyingly hard to read). The gameplay is sorta part Ape Escape and part Luigi's Mansion (which came out a little later that same year). You run around levels with your vacuum cleaner sucking the pants off of all the monkeys before time runs out. You also get some weapons to use against them, but largely it's just you and your vacuum against the world. You get a letter grade ranking for how fast you complete the mission, and you also get marks for delivering all the pants to the goal (washing machine) at once as well as another for completing the mission within the allotted time limit. You get an extra life for both of the latter marks, but the actual target time you're aiming for for an S-rank letter grade (which are recorded and unlock silly extras) is never specified so far as I could tell. The games mechanics and general premise are sorta solid, but ultimately it's all super rough. Not just assets, but mechanically, this game plays a LOT like Ape Escape 1 (but thankfully with a better framerate). Kakeru feels fairly slow (and you don't have any dash ring to go faster) and his double jump feels a bit stiff, but that's only the start of the issues. With how fast the monkeys move (and they move FAST), it can be really hard to get them with the vacuum, which makes it a real pain that the vacuum's range and limited auto aim are so ambiguous in how they operate. You can suck at the monkeys until you can fire them in front of you like a rocket, but those are really hard to aim and therefore aren't much use in a game about time trials. There are also monkeys and boss battles that require fighting with the extra weapons you get, but those weapons are just a bomb, an attraction device, and some mind control thing (with the last one's operation being confusing and largely useless in my experience). You aim these by flicking the right stick back and then letting go in the direction you wanna throw it, and if that sounds like an awful way to aim and fight to you, then you have excellently guessed one of the biggest problems present in the later half of the game (and the entirety of the Expert Mode levels you unlock after beating the normal ones). That also means that this game suffers from the same problem the normal Ape Escape games suffer from: camera control is bound only to focusing it behind you, as the right stick has a different use. This is extra weird when you consider that the face buttons aren't used for switching weapons and area actually used for jumping and activating your vacuum. Aiming these weapons is terribly awkward and is rarely accurate as a result. The camera is usually fine, but one or two stages in particular (particularly the penultimate stage's boss fight) are DREADFUL because of how the camera works. In boss fights especially, Specter moves around so fast that they change how the camera focusing works to focus on him (sorta) instead of refocusing it behind where you're standing. The boss battles are by and large pretty bad both because of how repetitive they are (it's the same boss just in different stages for all but the final boss) and due to these camera woes. The presentation is acceptable, but nothing special. It very much looks like a last-gen game with basically every character model being recycled from Ape Escape 1 (so at the time it didn't look that bad, but Ape Escape 2, which came out the following year, blows this out of the water). The environments look quite nice and pretty, though, as they were all developed especially for this, and that makes an even harsher visual clash as you have higher polygon count environments contrasted with far lower polygon count models. The music is also really nothing special and I already can't remember any of it. The only fun thing about the presentation is that after beating each world you unlock a monkey sauna to peer into (creepy) depending on how many S-ranks you got, and you can look at the monkeys doing silly antics and read their thoughts for some silly jokes. Verdict: Not Recommended. I was really disappointed with this game. Given the series its part of and how much I enjoyed the last spinoff of the series I played, I certain expected better, but this game is a really rough time. In the grand scheme of PS2 platformers it isn't THAT bad, but it's a frustrating enough time that I can't possibly recommend it over anything else (especially with how cheap the proper Ape Escapes are in Japan). This game feels like something the B-team made while Ape Escape 2 was entering its last stages of development, and they had to do SOMETHING with Ape Escape 1's engine to have something ready for the launch window of the PS2. They did indeed get something, sure, but I'm not sure it was worth it given the quality of the final product. After completing Atelier Rorona, I got quite the itch to try out more games in the series, particularly older ones to see how things had changed since then. I was able to find a good few of the older, Japan-exclusive ones for cheap, and picked them up about a week ago. I decided to go with Judie, the 4th game in the series, hoping to get something "retro yet more polished", though I ended up only being partially right in directing my hopes towards Atelier Judie for that ^^;. Some 35~40 hours later (the game doesn't keep track of your play time, weirdly enough for a game this old on a console), I reached its conclusion. I didn't exactly get what I was looking for, but I did ultimately enjoy my time with it despite many bumps along the road.
Atelier Judie is, as is so often the case, the story of an alchemist named Judie (pronounced "yudee", as they're very about German names & pronunciations here). The game opens with her mixing a potion into her cauldron only to accidentally have on of her own hairs fall in. This messes up the delicate mixture and causes an explosion of light that flings her, her house, and her parrot 200 years into the future. She awakens after the explosion in her now ramshackle house in the middle of the wilderness, and a travelling money lender named Wist helps her realize just how far she's accidentally traveled and helps her get to the starting town (after plunging her far into debt, of course). She then embarks on a quest to get back to her own time period. For 2002, the story is pretty underwhelming. Judie is never given any real stakes to traveling back to her own time. There's no ticking clock, we know nothing other than aesthetic particulars of her connection to the time period she's originally from, and she seems to be getting on just fine in her new time period despite the occasional bout of homesickness. Beyond that, almost all the characters are very flat and unchanging, and their character events end up feeling very incidental and unmemorable. That's not to say that games need to be serious all the time or incidental scenes can't help build character, but character needs some kind of foundation to be built upon, and this game provides next to nothing for any of them to do that. I didn't hate the story or the characters, but with just how surface level everything was, it made it very difficult to really connect with any of them, and the experience was largely unmemorable. One of the biggest culprit for that lousy story, I believe, is that lack of any ticking clock. As mechanically this is a very bold step forward for the series: this is the first game in the Atelier series to have no ultimate time limit you need to complete your quest within. There are days of the week and the requests you fulfill do have deadlines, the festival in the big town is time sensitive for how often it's held, and perishable ingredients in your inventory will expire after a certain amount of time, but there is otherwise nothing really affected by the time mechanic. Combined with some pretty darn rough signposting at times (I had to use a guide for most of the narrative after about the halfway point), this makes the pacing of the narrative very ponderous by nature, and doesn't help the already weak building blocks that are there to begin with. The combat is something I found simultaneously very cool yet very disappointing. Like in most Atelier games, you have 3 bars dictating your abilities: HP (health), MP (used for casting spells), and LP (used for physical, non-magic abilities). The thing is, however, is that unlike most games in the series, ALL three of those are vitality. Run out of HP? You're dead. Run out of MP? You're dead. Run out of LP? You're dead. Though still limited to 3-person parties (which is seemingly the one constant of this entire series), this ability to focus down a monster's weakest point total adds some really cool elements to the tactics you can bring to combat. This is even cooler by the fact that there are some enemies that simply don't have one of those point totals at all, so they're simply immune to damage from it. Ghosts, for example, have only MP, so only MP-damaging attacks can kill them. This is made even COOLER by how you can get a ghost in your party who ALSO has that same lack of HP or LP (and she's easily one of the most powerful characters in the game in most circumstances). However, that cool combat system is hampered by a weirdly hamstrung crafting system. Now, this is a bit more simple than later games in many ways by nature of how new it is in the series. For example, there are so few actual items you can even craft that there are no tabs for different kinds of items. It's just one big list when you open up the alchemy menu. But this has to be one of (if not the only) Atelier game where you can craft ingots but NOT your own weapons and armor (unless that feature is just super super well hidden). Ingots and such can have stats effects on them, which implies armor crafting, but nowhere could I find the ability to do that (even after looking online a bit). This means you're entirely at the mercy of the weapons merchants and the very very rare enemy weapon drops (which can be sped up a bit if you steal from them a lot, but that requires one of your party members ALWAYS being a rogue). There are some other elements to the crafting that are kinda neat, like needing to buy tools to help certain recipes that need them have higher chances of success, but that one major gap in your ability to augment your arsenal really makes the few boss battles the game has very frustrating. I mean, sure, you DO have infinite time to grind up levels, but that's not exactly what I expect in an RPG whose main draw is the crafting system. The game even has a second ending locked behind a very long, difficult post-game dungeon, but I had no interest in even trying it when my ability to augment my party's power level was limited almost entirely to just more grinding. There are honestly a lot of elements in the game that feel awkward and meaningless in that way. It gives the game a quality of feeling unfinished (which it likely is, given that this series has has annual releases almost every time since its inception with very few exceptions). Items not only expire in your inventory, but in your container too. I'm willing to give the series the benefit of the doubt for now (as in later games your container freezes the quality of items so they don't degrade), but in a game with no time limit dictating your playtime, this only serves to annoy the player and waste their time. The game takes place in the kingdom of Gramnad, and you constantly go from town to town to do requests and events, but you can only have your atelier in one place. Why do you have to keep uprooting your atelier (which involves selling most of your container's goods) instead of just buying out every upstairs room in every inn in the kingdom? No reason. Just another way the game seems to like to use a neat idea to waste your time for no reason. And that's outside of weird things like not even being able to craft your own equipment, alchemy levels being annoyingly grindy to raise, and the constant difficulty in making quality (always perishable) healing items and bombs yourself instead of buying them from merchants. The Atelier series is always an experimental one, but this game clearly needed more time to figure out what its underlying mechanics were actually there to do rather than just being there to be there. The presentation is largely good but with some odd blind spots here and there. For a game from 2002, I was surprised at just how well this plays nice with the PS2's 480i option via component hookups. It makes everything look SO much crisper, and the hand-drawn character portraits and pixel art for the in-game models look really nice. While I do like the monster designs (and the fairy NPCs are ADORABLE), I'm overall not a huge fan of the art style. So far as I can tell, this is the last game in the series to use a much more 90's-style for its anime character designs, but I just didn't really care for the art in the game. That said, the character expressions and art are done very well, regardless of my personal preference. The music is on the whole fine. Nothing was particularly ear catching despite some of the boss themes, but it was cool to hear musical motifs that reminded me of the PS3 games present in so early an entry in the series. As a fun bonus, even so back as this game (and I assume even earlier), beating the game unlocks a jukebox, art gallery (of event stills you've viewed already), and even little commentaries from the voice actors (as this game is all very well voice acted. There's actually virtually no unvoiced character dialogue in the game, even from minor NPCs, which was cool). It was really fun to see even stuff like that present in such an early entry in the series. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Despite how much I rag on the game and call it unfinished and unfocused, I DID still enjoy my time with it and found it compelling enough to blaze through the thing in five days. With how easily this game was a time vampire for me, it's clearly still doing something right despite all its foibles. As far as Japan-exclusive RPGs go, I'm not sure the West was really missing anything by not getting this one, but while I do find this game hard to recommend, I wouldn't actively dissuade anyone from trying it out if they were looking at it as a historical curiosity for the Atelier series like I was. Portal 2 was a favorite of one my best friends in high school, and it's something her and I played a lot together. My brother and I played through the co-op campaign (his first time, but a replay for me) a few years back, but it's been at least five years since I've played through the single player story. This month's "2011 Retro" theme gave a great excuse to go back down memory lane to being in high school again XD. It took me about 5.5 hours to play through the English version of the game in one sitting.
Portal 2 starts sorrrta where the original leaves off, but much later. Chell's failed escape from Aperture Labs put her back into deep cryo sleep in the hibernation facilities, and it's been a LONG time since then. She's awoken by a strange AI robot called Wheatly who needs her help to try and escape the facility which is now totally falling apart ever since Chell decommissioned Glados who knows how long ago. Unfortunately for them, they end up accidentally waking Glados back up, causing a whole new wave of testing and life-threatening turmoil. The story holds up a lot better than I thought it might. To a certain point I'm not sure if the humor is just that 2011 or if I just associate it so much with high school that this just IS humor from that era for me, but I still liked it XD. The back and forth between Glados and Wheatly (who is still charmingly as ever voiced by Stephen Merchant) and Cave Johnson's antics are still wonderfully entertaining. I'd also never really thought before about any kind of messaging in the story of Portal 2 before, and this gave me a really good chance to reassess that. Portal 2 is mostly a sort of silly comedy on top of a character study, and it doesn't shove any messaging in your face particularly hard, but it's a nice story about how monstrous people don't make themselves: monstrous systems push them into being that way. The gameplay is still that Portal excellence with some new toys added in for more puzzle fun. A first person puzzle game in the Source Engine (and my god was it a nostalgia trip playing a Source Engine game again after so long XD) where left click shoots one end of a portal, and right click fires the other end. You still have blocks to weigh down buttons and turrets to try and kill you like in the first game, but this game also adds in things like pressure plates that fling you across the map, light-bridges that can also be redirected through portals, tube-like gravity fields to push you (and objects) around via portals, and also weird goo that can be used to make floors bouncy or make you run faster on them. Every new mechanic feels like it's used in a way that never outstays its welcome, and the puzzle design is top notch as ever. I can definitely see the argument that Portal 2's puzzles are ultimately a bit more lackluster than the original's (given how excellently the original nails the "short but sweet" aspect of its level/puzzle designs), but I'd also put forward that Portal 2's single-player puzzles are ultimately just a training ground for the co-op mode's puzzles. The co-op mode's puzzles are also excellent but much harder given how much more you have to work with when operating with two sets of portals rather than just one. The presentation is as wonderful as ever as well. The white and greys of the fixed, modern Aperture Labs look cold and forboding as ever, and are foiled nicely by the decaying and aging facilities both in the newer and older parts of the lab. The music, while often subdued, is also excellent (and given how much my best friend in high school loved those tracks, they were also a hell of a nostalgia trip for me). Verdict: Highly Recommended. Portal 2 is still an excellent time all these years later. The humor and puzzles have held up very well, and if you somehow haven't played it yet, it's still very much something worth checking out. Though we've had a few more first-person puzzle games come and go since Portal and its sequel, nothing is really quite like Portal 2 (particularly the co-op mode), and Portal 2's level of quality gives a good indication as to why that might be. For almost a year now, I've been co-streaming with a friend every weekend and commentating while I watch her play the games. We started with Idea Factory games, but after dropping out of Fairy Fencer F when we realized it was hot garbage even for an IF game, we hopped into another game she was in the middle of playing: Atelier Rorona + (the remake of this game). I've since gone through Atelier Totori (Rorona's sequel) with her and now we're into Atelier Meruru (Totori's sequel) as well, and it's gotten me really interested in trying out the series. I was able to find a copy of the original version of Rorona for very cheap, so I figured it was a good a time as any to try it out, and I ended up absolutely loving it~. It took me around 34 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game with Cordelia's ending.
Atelier Rorona is a bit of an odd RPG as far as the story is concerned. There is no world-saving fight, or even a fight at all. The game honestly barely has an antagonist at all. Rorona is working as the apprentice at Arland's atelier when one day a knock comes at the door. It's a knight from the castle with an important message: the atelier is going to be shut down! Rorona panics and tries to help, but before she knows it, Astrid, the dismissive and selfish master of the atelier, gives the atelier to her to manage and save instead. What follows is three years of fulfilling tasks for the people of Arland as well as new requests from the castle every 3 months to prove that the atelier is worth keeping around. As I said before, it's a bit of an unconventional setup for a major console JRPG. The only real thing standing between you and a good ending is completing those quests for the castle. As long as you hit a minimum requirement, you won't get a game over or anything. The other things you have to keep engaged are quests for the town to up your popularity et large, and quests for characters around the town. The town popularity as well as doing extra good on the castle quests determines how good an ending you'll get, and doing requests and quest lines for your friends around town will influence you getting certain extra events and character-specific endings. I really adored the writing in Rorona. It's a lot of smaller slice of life stuff between Rorona, her friends, and other people around town, but I found it very charming. The character quest lines especially were something I really enjoyed, and I did as many as I could. It's a very grounded game that doesn't really stretch the suspension of disbelief very far. The stakes are pretty low, in the grand scheme of things, but this is a game with a very small scope. For Rorona, having the atelier shut down and being forced to leave the city and everyone she cares about would be the end of the world for her, so the stakes couldn't be much higher on a personal level. Atelier Rorona really nails interpersonal relationship writing and that is definitely one of the main highlights of the game. It's also a game that tells stories about relationships that lets people be friends without any of the constant romantic tension, fan service, or queerbaiting that SO much other anime and anime-styled games (not to mention later Atelier games) use, which is another thing I really appreciated. So just what IS an "atelier" anyway? Well in these games, they're functionally a sort of alchemist's shop. Rorona herself is an alchemist, and you go around the kingdom of Arland fighting monsters and gathering ingredients (and fighting monsters TO get ingredients) to fulfill the quests of the castle and the citizens. The game has a few castle requests that are kinds of combat checks, but the game otherwise has more of a focus on crafting and time management than combat. It doesn't even have a final boss and hardest fights in the game are all optional unless you're going for specific extra endings. The gameplay of the Atelier games almost always revolves around a larger time limit you must complete your quest within/around, and that time limit then informs a lot of the rest of the gameplay. However, Rorona is definitely one of the more forgiving Atelier games in that regard, and that extends to more than just how easy it is to stay focused on the task at hand via the 3-month requests from the castle (which function sorta as 12 chapters to the game). Where in other Atelier games EVERYTHING takes up time (fighting, gathering, traveling, crafting), in Rorona only traveling and crafting take time. Once at a location, you're free to fight and gather to your heart's content without fear of wasting time, as the time you'll spend there has already been decided. The fairly relaxed requirements of the castle requests combined with this forgiving time management system make Rorona an ideal game to start out with for anyone interested in the series. The combat and crafting of Rorona are both fairly involved but also ultimately quite simple. For starters, unlike many of its sister Atelier games, Rorona has no MP mechanic for casting spells and no LP mechanic for mitigating how much you can travel in one outing before needing to rest. There is no mechanic at all mitigating how much you can travel, really, and spells are cast by deducting MP rather than HP. This makes for a fairly interesting dynamic, especially with characters who can heal via spells, of just how you're going to balance the actions of your 3-person party to both do enough damage to win but also not die. As a rule, you're quite survivable, but the boss-like enemies in the game know this, and so they will really push your ability to win a battle of attrition unless you're really REALLY prepared (especially the two hardest fights). In this game as well as most other Atelier games, only the alchemist themself can use items, and so crafting items to attack and heal is all well and good, but your party members can't use them. The alchemist also tends to be weaker defensively, so as your party members gain points in an assist gauge so they can take a hit for Rorona or join in with one of her melee attacks to give her a helping hand. The game also has an interesting elemental magic system that, while not bad, isn't super well thought out either. Every party member has two spells, and more than can be unlocked to cast depending on the elemental status of the battlefield. Cast more spells of that element which your party member uses most, and more powerful spells will be available to you for that fight. If you get to level 5 elemental status, you can then cast a super move, but that super move will reset your elemental gauge back to 0, so you need to decide if it's worth one big attack at the price of being able to do better magics for a little while. The thing is, that enemies can also influence that elemental status, so if you use and your enemy have opposite elemental spell affinities, you're gonna have a very hard time building up any elemental levels and that character's spells are gonna be pretty weak during that fight. In later games they simplify this system to be locked to the respective character instead of something everyone influences, which is a big improvement. In Rorona, that system is cool but quite flawed. However, the crafting adds a lot of potential spice to your battles. All the items you have have both qualities and traits which will affect the effect of the end product. In terms of healing items and attacking items (bombs), it'll influence the strength of the item to how many charges the item has or even if the item will be an AOE or not. For equipment, it will affect not just the stats of the item, but also passives it will grant you as well as extra spells that your elemental level will unlock in battle. Quite often I found it wasn't actually advantageous to use a new weapon I could craft because despite being a higher gear tier, it gave me spells I liked less or the extra traits on it weren't good enough. You often need to choose between lower tier gear with better traits or higher tier gear with less numerous/less ideal traits, and it gives a lot of nuance to how you'll approach making your gear. All that said, Atelier Rorona definitely shows its age in its mechanics but especially its UI. The information given to the player at one time is very annoyingly clunky quite often, and going through menus to check if you can craft something at all is only one thing you'll butt against. The most prominent annoyance I had was in regards to making weapons and armor, as I'm not sure there's actually any way to check the stats of what you're currently wearing, let alone is there any way to know the stats of what you're about to craft to then easily compare to what you currently have. It's honestly quite tough to even compare one armor to another, given how the passives and stat boosts outside of the stats related to that specific weapon work. The remake of Rorona spruces up a lot of things aesthetically, but the one mechanical godsend it offers above all others is importing the crafting system from Atelier Meruru, and that one addition would be the main reason (even more than the remake's new playable character) I'd say it's worth shelling out extra for the remake rather than this version. Presentation-wise, Rorona also shows its age a bit as the first 3D game in the Atelier series (which shockingly enough didn't have a single 3D game on the PS2 despite having like six games on the system). The art style for the character models has them all as these baby-ish chibis, which isn't a problem in and of itself, but it can look quite uncanny given that the dialogue (which is all very well voice acted) uses 2D portraits with many reaction versions as well. This makes a weird demarcation between the characters in your mind's eye and how they look in front of you as you do battle, and making the 3D models look like the 2D portraits is another welcome addition that the Rorona remake adds. What holds up best of all, however, is just how good the music is. Atelier Rorona has an excellent and bubbly musical score with tons of music that just won't get out of my head. It fits the scenes perfectly, and the character and location themes especially fit their purposes splendidly. Verdict: Recommended. If this were the remake, I'd probably put this as a "highly recommended", but even at this level I still adore this game. Had I finished this before the end of last year, it would've been my #3 favorite game I played that year. If you're someone who prefers your RPGs to offer technical puzzles to solve in regards to its combat and interlocking systems, then you will likely be very bored by Atelier Rorona. However, if you're someone like me who prefers good storytelling and character writing over complex systems, then there is a lot of joy to be found with Atelier Rorona, and if you've ever considered giving the series a try, then Rorona (and moreso its remake) is an excellent place to start ^w^ |
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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