I was supposed to finish Lydie and Suelle but GW in GBF got in the way so I finished this first. This is just gonna be a small overview and some minor thoughts on the story.
Overall the story was quite enjoyable using a merge of pseudoscience in combination with actual science to keep the readers entertained. The music and animation are quite nice also, although there isn't a really large variety for the amount of music there is in the game. My main gripe is how certain routes feel like they just fell to the wayside. Yotsuko's technically is a bad end route showing what happens in this world if things aren't fixed. Lavi's route is a part of the common route since you have finish it to even have access to the rest as part of the story. The final 3 routes are fine and have enough depth. Even though some of the side routes are a bit lacking in general it's still much better than G-senjou where all the side routes were pretty lackluster. Still a fun short read in the end but nothing super amazing that would blow away the reader.
Friday, August 31, 2018
Saturday, August 11, 2018
Atelier Firis: The Alchemist and the Mysterious Journey Review
If Sophie was the game that is considered one of the most standard game in the series, then Firis does a 180 and changes as much things up as possible. The time limit is back to the dismay of some but it is relevant to the plot and the amount of time given is pretty generous for what you need to do. The game tries a completely different formula in the game in allowing you a ton of freedom into what you can and cannot do. After the prologue you basically can explore all areas in the game other than 5 or 6 which requires items or quest from post game to access them. Aside from a main quest around the middle that you are forced to do you can basically choose where and how you want to go about your objective at your own pace.
After the first task you set out on a journey with the final goal is to get at least three letter of recommendations before reaching the final town to take the alchemy exam. There are five total which you are able to get two before the middle check point, one in the middle and two after. You are still free to go around back and forth after it but it takes quite a bit of time. The game is basically an open world game and there are tons of quests here and there from various npc where you assist with certain tasks. However you won't be able to do all the quest as soon as you reach them, sometimes you haven't learned the recipe, sometimes the monster is just too strong for you to beat at the moment. This allows for some fun things like being able to sneak into some higher level areas for materials before you normally should have access to them. The progression and pacing of the game and areas are really nice and it becomes really easy to lose yourself in the world.
The alchemy portion of the game was tweaked a bit also. The first big thing is that all recipes have their own experience, so as you fuse more of an item it become easier to fuse that said item or even items that are related the item. Overall this is great at first but later on for items where it's hard to obtain the materials for, the grind becomes somewhat of a pain since you have to level the recipe before you can make your ideal item. Catalysts in the game do help with that, that are items that allow for easier synthesis at the cost of using another ingredient. The other big change is unlocking recipes. Unlocking them are a bit more flexible now for most of the earlier recipes but even if you aren't able to unlock them normally, you can unlock them using idea points immediately instead of doing the required objective to unlock the recipes. Idea points are gathered through out the game from quests, so in the case where you want a recipe now instead of figuring out how to unlock it you can do so.
Not much to say about the battle system other than that it feels much slower, the lack a speed up option like there was in the previous game is pretty much what causes it. The game isn't overly difficult unless you are trying to fight and beat certain things before you have the ample items or gears to do so. A lot of the big fights feels a bit lacking, but a large amount of the fights can be accessed on the maps themselves regardless of if you are ready for them or not, so deciding to fight or avoid is something to think about. The variety of locations in the game is pretty nice, with starting out in mostly grassland and forests, then later on having snow and desert locations which allows for new scenery to be found as you advance through the game.
The main portion of the game takes the course over a year and that's more than ample enough time to do what you need through the world while completing the primary objectives. In my case I finished everything and arrived with nearly 100 days remaining. After reaching the final goal you get to take an alchemy exam. The exam comes in 3 parts, a multiple choice part that is actually pretty hard unless you are good at remember a lot of random stuff while fusing. A synthesis part which is pretty easy and you can prep before hand, just fuse anything of high quality and just this section is enough to pass. Lastly a damage test, in which you try to do as much damage as possible using 1 action, whether it's an item or a skill or even just attacking. Then after wards you get to fight your fellow alchemist which is technically not part of the test but has a trophy involved for winning. Once all this is done it goes into post game.
Post game is somewhat the downfall of this game for me, as good as game was before it the post game mostly felt tedious which in part was caused by the endings which I'll talk about later. The main thing to notice is the time limit is gone now so you are free to do whatever you want. Later on after some quest having access to faster travel such as a flying broom and airship is nice. You get access to new areas such as under water areas and a few that are only accessible by airship, but none of the areas feels really unique or amazing. There are a few fun bosses here and there but some of the bosses will literally still kill you before you can get a turn until you have grinded enough to match them.
Now the main reason why post game got somewhat stale is all the side character stories. There are 8 character (well 9 but Sophie and Plachta count as 1 ending) which all have their own ending and a 9th one once you unlocked all 8. The side stories vary heavily in how interesting they are, some tell you about relationships and unanswered question about their past and having them move on from it. While other feels like they were there just because they were party member and nothing really interesting came out of it. The endings didn't really help as all of them were basically 30 seconds mini epilogues with no real substance to them.
Overall I would still call it a very good game for the meat of it was very enjoyable. The open world style is one that we haven't seen much in the series and the execution of it was enough for it to be a fun experience.
Time played ~55 hours
Rating 9/10
After the first task you set out on a journey with the final goal is to get at least three letter of recommendations before reaching the final town to take the alchemy exam. There are five total which you are able to get two before the middle check point, one in the middle and two after. You are still free to go around back and forth after it but it takes quite a bit of time. The game is basically an open world game and there are tons of quests here and there from various npc where you assist with certain tasks. However you won't be able to do all the quest as soon as you reach them, sometimes you haven't learned the recipe, sometimes the monster is just too strong for you to beat at the moment. This allows for some fun things like being able to sneak into some higher level areas for materials before you normally should have access to them. The progression and pacing of the game and areas are really nice and it becomes really easy to lose yourself in the world.
The alchemy portion of the game was tweaked a bit also. The first big thing is that all recipes have their own experience, so as you fuse more of an item it become easier to fuse that said item or even items that are related the item. Overall this is great at first but later on for items where it's hard to obtain the materials for, the grind becomes somewhat of a pain since you have to level the recipe before you can make your ideal item. Catalysts in the game do help with that, that are items that allow for easier synthesis at the cost of using another ingredient. The other big change is unlocking recipes. Unlocking them are a bit more flexible now for most of the earlier recipes but even if you aren't able to unlock them normally, you can unlock them using idea points immediately instead of doing the required objective to unlock the recipes. Idea points are gathered through out the game from quests, so in the case where you want a recipe now instead of figuring out how to unlock it you can do so.
Not much to say about the battle system other than that it feels much slower, the lack a speed up option like there was in the previous game is pretty much what causes it. The game isn't overly difficult unless you are trying to fight and beat certain things before you have the ample items or gears to do so. A lot of the big fights feels a bit lacking, but a large amount of the fights can be accessed on the maps themselves regardless of if you are ready for them or not, so deciding to fight or avoid is something to think about. The variety of locations in the game is pretty nice, with starting out in mostly grassland and forests, then later on having snow and desert locations which allows for new scenery to be found as you advance through the game.
The main portion of the game takes the course over a year and that's more than ample enough time to do what you need through the world while completing the primary objectives. In my case I finished everything and arrived with nearly 100 days remaining. After reaching the final goal you get to take an alchemy exam. The exam comes in 3 parts, a multiple choice part that is actually pretty hard unless you are good at remember a lot of random stuff while fusing. A synthesis part which is pretty easy and you can prep before hand, just fuse anything of high quality and just this section is enough to pass. Lastly a damage test, in which you try to do as much damage as possible using 1 action, whether it's an item or a skill or even just attacking. Then after wards you get to fight your fellow alchemist which is technically not part of the test but has a trophy involved for winning. Once all this is done it goes into post game.
Post game is somewhat the downfall of this game for me, as good as game was before it the post game mostly felt tedious which in part was caused by the endings which I'll talk about later. The main thing to notice is the time limit is gone now so you are free to do whatever you want. Later on after some quest having access to faster travel such as a flying broom and airship is nice. You get access to new areas such as under water areas and a few that are only accessible by airship, but none of the areas feels really unique or amazing. There are a few fun bosses here and there but some of the bosses will literally still kill you before you can get a turn until you have grinded enough to match them.
Now the main reason why post game got somewhat stale is all the side character stories. There are 8 character (well 9 but Sophie and Plachta count as 1 ending) which all have their own ending and a 9th one once you unlocked all 8. The side stories vary heavily in how interesting they are, some tell you about relationships and unanswered question about their past and having them move on from it. While other feels like they were there just because they were party member and nothing really interesting came out of it. The endings didn't really help as all of them were basically 30 seconds mini epilogues with no real substance to them.
Overall I would still call it a very good game for the meat of it was very enjoyable. The open world style is one that we haven't seen much in the series and the execution of it was enough for it to be a fun experience.
Time played ~55 hours
Rating 9/10
Thursday, August 9, 2018
Atelier Sophie: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Book Review
Finally bought a PS4 earlier this year after owning nearly 20 games before I got it. This is the 3rd game I finished after Utawarerumono 2 and 3. I started writing this after I played quite a bit of Firis so there might be a little bias because of it.
Overall I would say the game feels like a really safe and standard Atelier game. They didn't do anything really drastically different than their previous games other than removing the time limit in the game. The remove of the time limit basically allows you to go at your own pace without much worries or rush though the game still basically streamlines you using other methods.
Actually there is one other thing that was changed from previous games and it is how recipes are acquired. Now you get new recipes unlocked by doing specific tasks such as fusing an item, sometimes with specific traits, visiting and investigating certain areas, gathering certain items or even just through story events. The game basically uses this to limit what you can and cannot access while pushing you through the story through these recipes. It's a interesting way to do recipes compared to just buying recipe books like in previous games, but the downside is that the recipes, especially some of the later ones are really specific ways to unlock them that would be hard to figure out by yourself.
Synthesizing is not much different then before other than being much more restrictive earlier in the game. It's basically playing Tetris on a square grid and as you get farther and upgrade your cauldrons you get more options and it becomes easier. Stuff like larger grid size and being able to rotate your materials. Nothing really ground breaking but it gets the job done.
The combat system hasn't really changed too much, the start of the game actually feels slower though than most other Atelier game but as you progress it's basically the same as past games. One quirk about the system that is in previous games too is that the level limit is only level 20 and after that all you get are skill points which can be used to increased stats, skills and other abilities. If you have played any of the previous games you'll get used to the system quickly. One thing that bugged me though it doesn't come till later in the game is that skill points will sometimes overflow and causes you to have negative skill points later in the game, not actually sure what causes it but it has happened to me a few times.
Unlocking new areas and quests are all railroaded by the story, so you never really reach any really tough areas or enemies you can't really beat. Most of the tougher bosses are only encountered through taking rumors in the tavern. The game is pretty easy because of such as well as 100% crit trait also being able to instant kill most normal enemies. Some of the rare materials later on are also limited by using these rumors. Difficulty wise this is probably one of the easiest game in the series minus maybe 2 of the bosses which are kinda tough.
Music and graphics are both pretty much what you would expect from a game from this series. Nothing too spectacular but they get the job done and by no means bad at all, just that nothing quite stands out too much. Character design are all done pretty nicely and all of the cast in the game and some returning character are all pretty likable.
In my opinion this is one of the better games for someone new to the series because it feel like an introduction for people to it with how lax the game actually is. The issue is if you plan on playing this game you probably want to plan in playing the whole trilogy since the ending is open ended and kind of leave more to be desired (At this point I haven't completely finished Firis yet so I'm not sure how the endings are). I would still recommend the game for anyone that wants to try the series just to see how it is like. It is a good game but nothing super amazing or ground breaking for the series.
Total play time ~40 hours
Rating: 8.5/10
Overall I would say the game feels like a really safe and standard Atelier game. They didn't do anything really drastically different than their previous games other than removing the time limit in the game. The remove of the time limit basically allows you to go at your own pace without much worries or rush though the game still basically streamlines you using other methods.
Actually there is one other thing that was changed from previous games and it is how recipes are acquired. Now you get new recipes unlocked by doing specific tasks such as fusing an item, sometimes with specific traits, visiting and investigating certain areas, gathering certain items or even just through story events. The game basically uses this to limit what you can and cannot access while pushing you through the story through these recipes. It's a interesting way to do recipes compared to just buying recipe books like in previous games, but the downside is that the recipes, especially some of the later ones are really specific ways to unlock them that would be hard to figure out by yourself.
Synthesizing is not much different then before other than being much more restrictive earlier in the game. It's basically playing Tetris on a square grid and as you get farther and upgrade your cauldrons you get more options and it becomes easier. Stuff like larger grid size and being able to rotate your materials. Nothing really ground breaking but it gets the job done.
The combat system hasn't really changed too much, the start of the game actually feels slower though than most other Atelier game but as you progress it's basically the same as past games. One quirk about the system that is in previous games too is that the level limit is only level 20 and after that all you get are skill points which can be used to increased stats, skills and other abilities. If you have played any of the previous games you'll get used to the system quickly. One thing that bugged me though it doesn't come till later in the game is that skill points will sometimes overflow and causes you to have negative skill points later in the game, not actually sure what causes it but it has happened to me a few times.
Unlocking new areas and quests are all railroaded by the story, so you never really reach any really tough areas or enemies you can't really beat. Most of the tougher bosses are only encountered through taking rumors in the tavern. The game is pretty easy because of such as well as 100% crit trait also being able to instant kill most normal enemies. Some of the rare materials later on are also limited by using these rumors. Difficulty wise this is probably one of the easiest game in the series minus maybe 2 of the bosses which are kinda tough.
Music and graphics are both pretty much what you would expect from a game from this series. Nothing too spectacular but they get the job done and by no means bad at all, just that nothing quite stands out too much. Character design are all done pretty nicely and all of the cast in the game and some returning character are all pretty likable.
In my opinion this is one of the better games for someone new to the series because it feel like an introduction for people to it with how lax the game actually is. The issue is if you plan on playing this game you probably want to plan in playing the whole trilogy since the ending is open ended and kind of leave more to be desired (At this point I haven't completely finished Firis yet so I'm not sure how the endings are). I would still recommend the game for anyone that wants to try the series just to see how it is like. It is a good game but nothing super amazing or ground breaking for the series.
Total play time ~40 hours
Rating: 8.5/10
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