Known in English as Atelier Iris 2: Azoth of Destiny, I was super psyched to jump right into this game as soon as I finished the first game in the Atelier Iris sub-series. This was a game I hadn't heard a ton about other than a friend who recommended it a fair bit, and with how much the first game was "almost great" in so many ways, I had fairly high hopes for this game. The thing I ultimately found with it left me feeling something similar as to when I finished the first game: wishing something "almost great" had actually made that step to being genuinely great. But either way, I did almost everything in the base game and that took around 36 hours in total to do on the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
Atelier Iris 2 is the second game in its sub-series, but it's a prequel to the first game set many hundreds of years in the past to that one. It follows the stories of Vieze and Felt, two childhood friends and budding alchemists who were raised at the same orphanage in the peaceful floating island of Eden. However, just after Vieze gets her certification to be a real alchemist and makes her first pact with a Mana (magical familiars who allow alchemy to occur), a sudden cataclysm occurs and nearly all of the holy spots of each mana group suddenly disappear. Finding the titular magical sword, the Azoth, suddenly talking to him, Felt pulls it from its legendary resting place and events push him out on an adventure to save Eden by traveling to the other world just beyond the magical gateway. Iris 2's narrative is, on the whole, a fair bit weaker than that of the first game. I'm barely scratching the surface of the plot setup in the above paragraph (I didn't even mention the appearance of the titular Iris, though she's a mysterious child and not a playable character). There is just a ton of lore and plot but not actually all that much on the level of meaningful character writing (and very little in the way of narrative-focused side content, to be perfectly honest). Even the big themes and character beats of Atelier Iris 2 are very similar to those of its predecessor, with Felt and Vieze unsurprisingly realizing they view each other as more than just friends over the course of the narrative. But where Klein and Riita were strangers who grew to trust one another before, Vieze and Felt are already close for the whole narrative, and it's a much quieter and less engaging relationship. Other characters have either virtually no character arcs to speak of or have ones that simply repeat standard tropes (secret princess not ready to rule, and child of the estranged father (who himself is a good guy on the wrong side of the war, a plot line I think is handled particularly clumsily)) in pretty uninspired ways. The game tries to frame Vieze and Felt as two equal main characters in the story, but the actual mechanics and happenings of the story fly in the face of that constantly. Vieze is stuck in Eden making recipes and support information for Felt while he's the one on the front lines meeting new characters, fighting big bosses, etc. Though she does eventually get some more important action as the story progresses, the way the two main characters are split up and the way the woman is made to stay home and simply prepare materials for the man leaves a pretty sour taste in the mouth, even for a game released in 2005. The characters themselves are likeable enough, but they go through so little actual struggle on a personal level that I found it very hard to ever care terribly much about the story. Iris 2's narrative is a very weird case where the same team (more or less) managed to make a sequel that for the most part feels like a cheap ripoff of the story of their previous game, and after how charming so much of the first game's writing was, that was a pretty big disappointment. Where Iris 2's genuine improvements shine brighter is in the mechanics and combat. Finally, after having the thing hidden for so many games, we have a visible turn order counter visible at the top of the screen. You even have "break" normal attacks you can do to send an enemy further back in the turn order, and a lot of strategy can be employed on whom to try and push back and when. This is especially true as in addition to special moves and using items, you also have "charge" normal attacks that charge your skill gauge, and those skill gauge charges give you ammo to spend on special moves. This game has no MP at all, and so most decisions in battle come down to the health you had going into it as well as the decisions you make in that battle itself. This is where Iris 2 hits another one of its main stumbling blocks. Sure, combat animations and overall time is reduced heavily from the first game, as is the amount of time spent in menus. It's a game that overall moves a LOT faster, but it's also a game that is way WAY easier than the last game. The game has a really clever combination of the alchemy systems from the first five games and from the first Iris game, where Vieze makes the "master" versions of consumables using item combinations like the first five games, and then Felt can "mass produce" copies from that master using source he obtains just like how alchemy works in Iris 1. But the fact is that this system basically doesn't matter at ALL because you can get through the large bulk of the games encounters (and boss battles) by only ever using charge moves, break moves, and maybe a special skill if you feel like it. Some later bosses dish out nasty mass debuffs that you'll need to spend a turn undoing with one of the better mass-heal items you have, but even these are super easy to craft and make a TON of, and you can't avoid getting one of the best ones due to how the story goes. Healing items in general are super duper easy to mass produce to the point where running out of health is virtually never a problem, and the game as a whole just never actually hits any sort of resource management. Not all games need to be super hard, but there was basically never a time I meaningfully thought I was going to get a game over, even against the final boss. Combat is snappy and fun, but it's so simple it ends up coming off as almost pointless due to how poorly balanced the underlying systems are. The overly simple combat combined with the overly easy story add up to an experience that feels like an earnest attempt to improve the formula of the previous game without time being taken to actually polish those systems into something that works. The presentation at least is as good as ever. The musical tracks lean a bit more towards pop-styles than prior games, and the character design is a little more sexualized than the relatively (although certainly refreshingly) modest designs of Iris 1, but those in themselves aren't bad things and are kept well in moderation. It's got a very pretty, colorful art style and loads of good tunes. Nothing out of the ordinary for a Gust game of the time, thankfully~. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This is a borderline "recommended" game, but it's just so underwhelming in so many ways that I feel your time is probably better spent playing a different RPG. This game is very rarely outright "bad" in one way or another, but it just also doesn't do anything particularly well either. Even for the Atelier series, the bar had been raised in terms of the quality of experience in an RPG in 2005, and I don't believe that Atelier Iris 2 does a fantastic job of passing that bar. You likely won't dislike your time with this game (outside of perhaps being bored), but you'll also likely enjoy most other PS2 RPGs of the time more than you will have enjoyed this.
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The latest game in my Atelier series binge of this year, this is the 6th game in the series and the start of the Atelier Iris sub-series. I considered continuing with the PS3 entries after finishing Atelier Meruru a few weeks back, but I decided to go back and fill in the PS2 gap in my knowledge of the series instead. This is a game I've tried playing through three times in the past, and my last serious attempt got forever derailed because of the sudden start of the Mega Man Mega Marathon Month (i.e. basically all of April XD). But this time I was committed to finishing it, and I did! I did most of the things in the game, but not quite all (for reasons I'll get to later), and it took me about 49-ish hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on original hardware. Atelier Iris is, very oddly, NOT the story of the titular alchemist and her atelier (though they do make a sort of appearance). Instead, much like how Erdrick/Loto were the historic heroes of legend whose actions you were following in the original Dragon Quest, so too here is Iris a long-dead alchemist whose actions nonetheless continue to define the present in ways you are intimately involved in. You, namely, are Klein, a wandering young alchemist who has come to the land seeking the legendary fallen city of Abanberry, a city once known for its alchemical prowess that is now just a massive ruin upon a mountaintop. On the way, you meet up with the mysterious girl, Rita, and her and Klein become fast friends as a much larger plot slowly unfolds with the fate of the world at stake. Atelier Iris is a MASSIVE departure for the series norms up to that point, and that isn't just because this is one of the only games in the series where a boy is the main character instead of a girl. On top of that, you also have the story being something with world-ending stakes rather than just a story encompassing the life of the titular alchemist. As you meet new party members and go to new locations, you often go back to the same locations, particularly the main town, again and again, and this is just one aspect that shows how unfamiliar and uncomfortable Gust is with telling a more linear story like this. It often feels like episodes of an anime whose events aren't all entirely necessary but fill out the characters' personalities for the audience. While that isn't a bad thing, it does make Atelier Iris have a somewhat plodding pace at times with both the main plot and the character writing. The character writing is something that hasn't changed from Gust's usual prowess though. Your main party, particularly the relationship between Klein and Rita, are a very endearing bunch who get tons of time to respectively shine. Even side characters and shop keeper NPCs have really long and involved subquests you can delve into, and they were easily some of my favorite parts of the game (particularly Viola, who runs the magic shop). I'd say Rita is the real star of the show, with Klein being a more flat character for her character growth to reflect off of, but it's a dynamic that still works well. The overall themes revolve more around the familiar theme of the use of alchemy for selfish vs. common good means, but with a bit of an environmentalist twist to it. It isn't perfect, but it's a story told through a very personal lens to the point that the world ending stuff feels fairly secondary in comparison. It's certainly far from the best written game Gust has done to that point, and certainly not the best written game on the PS2 in '04, but it's a really solid first try, and I enjoyed it a fair bit more than I thought I would. Where Atelier Iris really obviously shows its differences from its predecessors is in the game design, and that's in many more ways than simply going back to a larger adventure with no time limit to bind you. The first bit of control you have in the game is the tutorial combat fight, as the game seems to say right out the bat that this is a more combat-focused experience in a way unlike the prior five games in the series. The list of changes to that effect is pretty huge, so I'll just start at the most obvious place: alchemy and synthesis. Now there IS alchemy in this game, but it's just very unlike the alchemy in prior games, and there are two types of it. First, there is the non-alchemy synthesis simply called "Shop Synthesis", where you bring items for recipes at different shops and new items are assembled for you. This is the kind of crafting most similar to the types in the previous games, and it's most like the first few games, as items once again are not unique between one another, and one puni ball is identical to any other. It's a system that's pretty simple, but they make it more engaging by having little events around the item you've created happen after each first-time crafting of an item. The only really annoying part about this is that the event flags to get you new recipes to craft can be very fickle and sometimes just don't work at all. The reason I didn't end up 100%-ing the game (as I quite wanted to) is that several events, most importantly the one to craft clothes with 3 ingredients, never triggered for me, so there were a dozen or so items I could simply never obtain (and that actually never triggered for me in my previous playthrough either). Looking online and even in the guidebook I bought for the Japanese version, I can find no explanation as to why it didn't trigger (beyond some theories that some events may simply be impossible to trigger once you advance beyond a certain level?), so I can really only chalk it up to bugs. It's really unfortunate, because the extras such as character bios and the jukebox are locked behind crafting/acquiring/seeing certain sets of items, so there were a few I can just never get QwQ. The second type of crafting is actual alchemy that Klein can do, but this is totally unlike other game's types of crafting. The game has 14 types of elemental mana (which I will call "sources", to alleviate confusion for reasons that will become clear very shortly). As you go through the game, you come across Mana Items that use different combinations of sources to craft. Sources can be acquired through means such as bopping them with your staff on the overworld, getting the last hit with Klein on an enemy in battle (turning them into source), or even turning normal items into source. This alchemy can actually be done anywhere, even mid-battle, and that's because instead of an alchemy cauldron, you use Mana to do your alchemy. Mana in this sense isn't MP (although the game does *very* confusingly call MP "MANA" as well), but it's the name of the cute little familiars you acquire throughout your journey. Sometimes they give new actions you can perform on the overworld, such as shooting fireballs to destroy obstacles or making enemy encounters more or less frequent, but the most important thing they do is give you the ability to utilize new sources when you do crafting. If you don't have a mana who can manipulate water source, you can't make anything that needs water source, and certain mana get more efficient multipliers for using certain sources than others (such as a x1 multiplier vs. a x1.5 multiplier). Mana can even eventually be equipped on party members to give slight stat boosts and also to make certain skill abilities level up faster, and they can also be used to manufacture special boosts you can equip onto certain customizable weapons (which are usually the best weapons and accessories in the game). It's a very interesting new system that contributes a lot to how combat works now. How combat works now is much more heavily yet sloppily position-based compared to prior games. Finally scrapping the 3x3 grid that prior games used for its enemy placements, now enemies are just scattered along pre-set patterns across from you as you fight. Klein plays an extremely important role in that, while all characters can use normal items, only he can use Mana items. Mana items are much more easy to make and much more powerful (generally) than normal items, making Klein and extremely important party member, and this also mimics how in later games only alchemists would be able to use items at all. You still fight in parties of 3, but in a neat move a lot like Final Fantasy X, you can actually swap between any active party member for one in reserve once you get to their turn for no turn cost at all, and that opens up a lot of opportunity for interesting strategies to approach enemies with. Different items and skills have different attack radii, but that's where the most annoying aspect of combat comes in. The actual effective radius of attacks is never shown to you outside of enemies who will be affecting starting to blink to indicate they'll be hit by it. It makes using these area of effect moves very awkward and frustrating at times, and it also makes moves that do knock-back to the enemy difficult to use effectively either, as you can never be SURE that you're about to hit someone into an area where they'll be able to be hit. It's hardly something that breaks the game entirely, but it makes combat *far* more frustrating than it really needs to be, and it's an extra shame in a game that really brings focus away from crafting and towards combat. Even exploration has been wildly revamped. Where before you had rectangular rooms to navigate, now you have properly crafted maps to wander around in and pick up ingredients in. They even have platforming, as you jump around areas trying to get out of the way goodies and to new found areas. It's ultimately not a huge change, and none of the design is particularly innovative or inspired, but it's regardless a big change for a series that up until this point had left combat and exploration a secondary concern behind the crafting and writing aspects of the game. The whole game plays much more like a traditional JRPG than prior Atelier games, and this (admittedly largely aesthetic) change perhaps more than any other really hammers that home. The presentation is quite nice, but very lacking in certain regards. The music is once again very good, and the graphics, while taking on a new style, are very pretty. The visual-novel dialogue segments shift from the old style where you were talking to characters head on (effectively seeing people from their perspective) to characters appearing on the left and right to talk to one another (the style the series would continue to use until it abandoned 2D illustrated sprites completely). The most unfortunate thing is the abandonment of a LOT of the voice acting that made the series so distinct up to this point. While there is still voice acting, there is a TON of spoken lines that simply have no VA, and that includes a ton of unskippable story dialogue as well. This wouldn't be an issue if not for the fact that the previous five games had really pushed the boat out to have ALL of the spoken lines in the game voice acted. Perhaps it was due to this being the first game that was localized for the English-speaking market, but regardless of the reason, the voice acting budget for this game was seriously shrunk compared to previous entries, and it leaves a pretty sour first impression on the presentation front. Verdict: Recommended. While I had way too many annoyances and bugs with this game to ever be able to recommend it SUPER highly, I still really ended up enjoying it. In many mechanical ways, it just isn't an Atelier series game at all, and it's one that a lot of fans of the rest of the series will bounce off of pretty hard if they're looking for an experience more like the rest of the series offers. That said, Atelier Iris may be different, but it still manages to be a really fun JRPG in its own right while also keeping that Gust-quality dialogue and character writing the series excels at so well. It may be a black sheep among Atelier games, but it's still a very solid JRPG worth playing. This is a game I've been meaning to play for a good while, and was kinda just waiting to stumble across a physical copy until a friend told me that it's included on one of the Namco collections on Switch! it also happened to be on sale for 4 bucks, so I snatched it up right quick, and I used it as a chaser in between Atelier games about a week ago X3. It's a pretty short game, as I beat it in around 40 minutes, but it's a pretty tough one too. I was pretty proud of myself that I was able to beat it in my first set of continues without needing to resort to save states or passwords (which, for the record, I was absolutely willing to do if it came down to it XD).
Wanpaku Graffiti is a cutesy parody of Splatterhouse that sees a "super-deformed" chibi-styled cutesy Rick clobbering his way through a handful of levels to save his girlfriend. The overall Splatterhouse-ness of the story is there, but in cutesy parody form, as there is a ton of silly stuff on top of the cute stuff. Some stuff is still a little creepy, such as fighting the poltergeist boss (one of the tougher ones), but a lot of it is also very tongue-in-cheek, such as the boss of the first stage: a vampire who, instead of fighting you himself, summons a bunch of zombies to dance to a legally distinct version of Thriller to before sending them to fight you (and then he descends back down into the floor once you're done fighting and he's done dancing XD). The gameplay is a pretty bog-standard action platformer, though it is thankfully of that late-Famicom variety of "reasonably challenging platformer" rather than "lmao go die in a hole" platformer XD. You go through stages, left to right (and sometimes even climbing upwards!), fighting enemies, mini-bosses, and proper bosses. You can collect candy from killed enemies to refill your healthbar, and killing enough enemies extends your maximum amount of health. While you only have one life per continue, and you only have 5 continues, there are passwords between each stage and the checkpoints you go back to when you die are always very generous, so the game does a very nice job of feeling challenging while usually not feeling unfair. You don't punch like normal Splatterhouse, but instead you have an axe to swing at them, but you can also get a shotgun powerup sometimes as a sort of directed screen-clear superpower. The shotgun does take some care to not fall into a hole while using, as it knocks you back a fair bit when you fire it, but the biggest mechanical stinker is the axe. The platforming, enemy placement, and boss design are all pretty darn good, but the hitbox on your ax is absolute jank. Especially for flying enemies and bosses, it can be very frustrating to land a hit made at a flying enemy or landing a hit while jumping. It isn't a game-breaker, but it's a very persistent annoyance that brings the game's overall quality from "pretty darn good" to "memorable but only okay" for me. The presentation is quite good, especially in the graphical department. As with most late-Famicom platformers, they really knew how to flex the hardware to get some really nicely detailed sprites. I'm not sure how the Switch version affects the hardware slowdown at all, but at least in this version of the game, it also runs pretty well too. The music is fun and boppin' for what it is, and the Thriller part at the beginning of the game absolutely steals the show in that regard X3 Verdict: Recommended. Especially if you can pick it up on this little Switch Namco collection, this is a Famicom game well worthy of your time. It's not super unique mechanically, sure, and it's pretty short as well, but it's a cute, fun romp that will likely give a good bit of entertainment to anyone who likes action platformers~. And so ends my time with the original Arland sub-series of the Atelier series. A good few months back, this was another game I co-streamed with a friend of mine, but she did all of the playing, and I just watched most of it. While the game certainly did look pretty fun to play, I came away from it with a pretty harsh view on the quality of the writing, and so I wasn't originally intending to play this one myself at all. However, in the interest of having first-hand experience with the series (and because I was able to find it for just 300 yen), I figured I should give this game its fair dues on my own time. I ended up quite surprised both negatively and positively, but I'm certainly glad that I did end up giving this game a fair shake in the end. I got the Witch's Tea Party ending (the second highest in priority, as this game has no "true" ending like these games often do) in the Japanese version of the game in about 47.5 hours.
Atelier Meruru is a sequel to Atelier Totori. As these games so often do, it tells the story of the titular alchemist Meruru. Unlike the humble origins of most of the series' protagonists, Meruru isn't some girl from a back country town, she's the princess of a back country kingdom! Totori ended up in her kingdom of Arls and wound up teaching her alchemy, which she took to with fervor. Meruru's father, the king, is quite reluctant to let his daughter play at magician instead of doing governmental duties, but he makes her a compromise. In five years, the kingdom of Arls will unite with its sister nation the Republic of Arland (whose former royal family the Arls are a junior branch to). If she uses her alchemy to help develop the nation in preparation for their unification, then she's allowed to do it. So, with her first objective at getting to 30,000 citizens by the end of her third year (and then if that's completed, 100,000 by the end of the fifth), Meruru has a goal with which to start out her new life as an alchemist. Now while my opinion on the game's narrative has certainly softened during my own playthrough, Meruru's narrative is still remarkably weak compared to the other two games in the original Arland trilogy. Meruru herself has a quest but no real personal goals to overcome or confront, and she winds up as a remarkably flat character as a result. They try and play it up like this has all been some big task of proving her capabilities as a hard worker in the final act (or what amounts to it in a somewhat non-linear game like this), but it doesn't exactly impress when the narrative up to that point hasn't been telling that story at all. In fact, the game's larger plot feels really remarkably confused and at times outright contradicts itself (such as during Meruru's soliloquy under the moonlight after you hit the 30,000 population goal) and it overall feels like a compromised mess that was the result of several competing drafts of the game's script (which I have BIG theories about in how Meruru was probably going to have a sibling at some point, but I won't get into that here). Meruru ends the narrative the exact same person she starts it as, and it makes her feel like a side character in her own game, and that's not a good sign for a series whose main strengths are often character writing. This weakness in writing also extends to the rest of the cast too, for the most part. With some very small exceptions (such as the gate guard Lias), your party members are all also similarly flat and boring characters whose character quest lines often don't change them meaningfully if at all. The game is PACKED with flat, fluffy dialogue which is fine in and of itself (usually, when it isn't diving into some pretty vile sexual assault/harassment jokes of which this game has a significantly higher amount than either previous game in the sub-series), but given that it's with characters you have a difficult time caring about, it can often times get kinda boring. This is even more unfortunate considering just how much of the cast isn't new characters but returning characters from the other two games. Just two of the nine non-DLC party members (the DLC characters up it to four out of 13) are actually new to Meruru's story (and they're the two I played the game with, Lias and Keina), and the rest are all returning characters. Atelier Totori did a good job balancing new characters with old, and ultimately making the story both mostly about Totori and also giving returning characters (mostly) good new arcs and stories. Atelier Meruru is not only a quite unfocused story, but it also gives a TON of time to these returning characters when there are several new characters (such as Meruru's own father) who are sidelined to the point that they're barely even characters at all. And what makes that ALL worse is that these aren't so much returning characters so much as weird distortions of what you remembered those characters to be. It's particularly bad with Astrid and Sterk, but all of old characters have had their prior character development changed or warped in some way as to leave them awful perversions of themselves. It's a problem I had when I originally watched my friend play this, and it's a problem I still very much have now, as Atelier Meruru's bad writing isn't just contained to its own story, but also does a lot to harm the ultimate stories of the other two games in the trilogy too. Atelier Meruru on many levels just isn't trying to have a very meaningful story with deeper messages. While that doesn't make it particularly interesting and also makes it a very weird follow up to two quite meaningful and well-written games, that isn't in and of itself a bad thing. What IS a bad thing is all of the very distasteful humor and ruining of old characters, and that's stuff I have a much harder time forgiving this game for no matter how much I may've enjoyed other aspects of it. Speaking of things I enjoyed about the game (finally), the gameplay is actually really really solid! It takes a lot of the things that worked best about the overall formulas of both Atelier Rorona and Atelier Totori and makes it into something that works really damn well. Where Rorona was more of a very guided experience with its dozen 90 day tasks, and Totori was a quite unguided experience composed of one longer slowly unfolding journey, Meruru is a slowly unfolding journey that's quite guided along the way. Developing the kingdom is done through a constantly growing list of things you have to do, whether its killing monsters or delivering/crafting materials, and completing those gets you points very much like advancing your adventurer's license worked in Atelier Totori. However, unlike that game, these points don't just raise an overall rank (although they do do that too), as they can also be used to build buildings in your kingdom that both give population boosts as well as provide passive bonuses such as giving you more EXP from crafting and fighting, giving you a monthly free money boost, or making your popularity go down slower. It for the most part keeps the exploration along a larger map that Totori used, but it reigns it in a bit, and the checklist of developments constantly keeps you focused on current objectives rather than worrying about what COULD come from some secondary main plot. It's a really clever system and it's a great way to structure the usual alchemy stuff in a way that's both challenging and dopamine-providing~. The alchemy itself is very much like Atelier Totori handled it. Items still have unique properties to themselves such as their quality and inherent traits, and crafting things as well as traveling places, gathering materials, and fighting monsters takes time that you need to manage (although thankfully the amount of time for gathering and fighting have been reduced since Totori). Trying to perfect a recipe for getting just the right traits and qualities is as fun and addictive as ever, and they haven't tried to rock the boat much in that regard. The combat has been further refined into something better, but it's also still very recognizable. The biggest and most important change is that while you still have the turn order indicator on the side that Totori introduced, you now have much more meaningful ways to affect and manipulate that turn order. Your alchemist's attacking and support items have had their area of effect and strengths buffed, but so have the skills of your other party members. It gives you a lot more choice in what you wanna do in tackling each battle, and while their character writing may not be terribly great, each party member really does add a whole new flavor to how you're going to go about fighting. Meruru is overall a much easier game combat-wise than Totori, and that's due in no small part to just how much stronger and flexible they've made the options available to you as a player. One last thing I'll mention about the combat that I really liked is that while they haven't changed how super moves can be used by your non-main character party members, they've introduced two different animations for them! A different animation plays depending on if you're dealing a finishing blow or just dealing damage, and that was a little touch I really appreciated. The presentation for the battles is quite good, but outside of that it's a bit of mixed bag. On the more positive side, you FINALLY have the 3D models looking JUST like the 2d portraits. They were pretty close in Atelier Totori, but now we've finally made it to where they're basically never looking quite so uncanny anymore. The music is also good, but it's quite different. The more slow going orchestral ballads from the earlier two games give way to a soundtrack packed with a lot more pop-rock flair, and while a lot of it is stuff that's really good and I really liked, it's another big stylistic and thematic change from the first two games. On the less great side, you have first how the game has some pretty significant framerate issues when walking around (not that they ever meaningful affect gameplay) as well as a far heavier reliance on the 3D models for in-game cutscenes. This is the last Atelier game in the main series to use 2D portraits in visual novel-style dialogue scenes, and that manifests partly as a lot more in-game cutscenes with these nice 3D models. What it also amounts to is not only less 2D visual novel-style scenes but also less 2D portraits, full stop. There were many times when the particular portrait selected for a line of dialogue didn't really seem to fit the emotion behind the line, but no other better expressions existed, so they had to the best with what they had. It's a really weird cost-cutting measure that just adds to that whole slapped-together feeling the game's narrative has in general. It also means there are a lot less hand-drawn CGs for in-game events to boot. This is a trend I really don't care for in how these games are presented. Like a visual novel, there is a lot of imagination used in interpreting the scenes in your head for the 2D scenes, just as you would a book. When it's just relatively simple 3D animated cutscenes, it's a lot harder to look like anything less than simple/cheap in-game 3D cutscenes, and it makes the whole game just feel cheaper and less engaging than the prior games. It's a sacrifice seemingly made simply to usher in the 3D era and usher out the 2D era, and while this game is the first game in the series to start leaning towards that inefficient sacrifice, it is far from the only game in the series to suffer from its many drawbacks. Verdict: Recommended. Though the writing may be as rough as it is, a lot of the fluff is still enjoyably written fluff, and what good stuff is there (such as with Lias or the last act's emphasis) IS still good. However, the real star of the show is just how fun this game is to play. If it weren't a fun RPG to play, it'd be pretty impossible to recommend, and while I do have some pretty heavy reservations about its humor and overall writing caliber, I can't deny how much fun I had playing the game. It's definitely my least favorite of the Atelier Arland trilogy, but it's still a game I'm really glad I gave a chance, and I can still recommend people play it despite its faults. While Atelier Meruru may fall pretty flat at being the conclusion to the Arland trilogy, it still manages to be fun on its own merits. It may not seem it at first, but the subtitle (not on the spine, so I figured I wouldn't include it here :b) of "Atelier Lilie - One More Story" makes it pretty clear that this is a spin-off of the Atelier series. This is a visual novel that's a spin-off (and, at least I'd argue, an ultimately non-canon one) of the third Atelier game, Atelier Lilie. It's also one of the very very few games in the Atelier series that is both a spin-off and not a remake that's also on a home console and not a handheld console. I enjoyed Atelier Lilie quite a lot, and so the opportunity to spend a bit more time in that world in a bit of an unfamiliar genre seemed right up my alley. As luck would have it, there was actually a copy of this in my city (although I had to drive all the way across town to get it XP), so it wasn't a difficult choice to spend the 800 yen to pick this up. I had heard it was fairly short, which proved true when I completed it in just around 5 or so hours, but it was time I ultimately found very worthwhile. (I will be getting into some spoilers in this review, fair warning)
As the title heavily implies, this game is about Hermina and Culus. Hermina is one of the two young (like 10 years old) proteges of the titular alchemist in Atelier Lilie, and she's the more mischievous and slightly less straight laced of the two. Also along for the ride is a totally new character, Culus, who is a homonculus that Hermina has created in secret to help her with her alchemy. Culus is also you in the story, and it's overall the story of Hermina and Culus growing closer over the period of his rather short life. Hermina created Culus in secret, so she's unaware that homonculi only live a few weeks. Gust's usual good character writing really has a chance to not just breathe but thrive in this little novella that starts out about a simple slice of life between a child and her unconventional new best friend, and it ends up turning into a really touching story about death, loss, and acceptance of those things. Part of it may be because it just caught me off guard, but DAMN did this game hit me good. As anyone familiar with my reviews may well know, I'm no stranger to having games and media make me cry. That said, I'm not sure any piece of media has ever brought me to tears as much as this game did. It's just such a sweet, touching, human story that it really gut-punched me in the final act, but that's nothing if not a mark of just how well this game brings its world to life for the brief time you get to hang around in it. Hermina & Culus isn't a kinetic novel. That's to say for all you (like me) non-visual novel connoisseurs, that this isn't just a story you watch to its end. It has branching paths and different things that can happen, although there isn't a huuuge amount of choice. The main gameplay is choosing where to go among the handful of locations in the city and talking to the characters that are there. Very often you'll have one or more "events" you can go watch, which are actual unique happenings in the story and not just canned dialogue like the non-event encounters are. While most of these are just little quick slices of life in the city that you're observing, you'll also very often learn new words from these. Hermina isn't just your creator and friend, she's also your teacher (your relationship is very difficult to define in a single word, but it's also a very sweet one). You have a certain amount of time most nights to talk to her about words you've learned and learn their meanings from her. Now this isn't a language learning game, but Culus has only just come to life, so his language skills are still quite limited, and Hermina teaching him the basics of speaking are all a part of learning to be a good alchemist's assistant. Once you've learned words, you can "think" about them, putting two words together and asking about that concept (such as "alchemy" and "synthesis"), and this will often also earn you new words. However, walking around the city drains your energy, and thinking also drains energy. On top of that, you only have an hour of in-game time per night to ask about things, so you must use your time and energy wisely. This is all because all the talking and learning you do increases an affection meter with Hermina, and the status of that meter as well as certain events you can see or things you can "think" about will be what determines which if the game's 5 endings you get (I got ending C, myself). The presentation is very polished, but it also reuses a lot of assets from Atelier Lilie. However, this game also has a ton of new drawn CGs of Culus interacting in different events, as well as a very well animated Hermina during your sessions talking with her every night. It also has a lot of reused music, but a fair bit of new tracks as well, and these tracks are very good as Gust is always so reliable to provide. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is one of my new favorite games, full stop. I wasn't a super duper fan of Atelier Lilie (I quite liked it, but it's not my favorite in the series by any margin), and that's what generated my initial interest in this game, but by the end of it I was sure that it stands on its own very well. It's a really sweet and well written story about the pains of growing up, and it's definitely earned a treasured place on my shelf. My only difficulty in recommending it is that it's never been translated in any way shape or form, so while it's not a terribly difficult game to get a hold of (uncommon, but cheap), the barrier to entry in terms of language barrier will likely be too high for most people reading this review. However, if you do have the ability (or if this game ever does get fan translated), this is absolutely a story worth checking out, even if you have no prior interest or experience with the Atelier series. |
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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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