Mad Science And Madder Gaming

Wow.

I think I found something fairly rare:  A modern JRPG that actually does very well with being played in small spurts.  Usually they suck you in and expect for you to grind through the forces of evil for a good while.  To be fair, they (usually) make it fun and worth your while; even so, the working gamer can have plenty of IRL issues that ruin a good old-fashioned dungeon crawl.

But Atelier Rorona is different.  Because of the nature of the gameplay (especially how everything is time-sensitive) it actually rewards a fair bit of pre-session planning.  Hell, it actually behooves the player to make a save, then play-and-reload so you can experiment and find particular synthesis results and work out schedules for exploration.  I can't say I've encountered a game where you had to figure out how to get to the Dungeon of Bleak Terror to hunt down the Shiny Rock of Making Awesome Stuff, while also churning out +2 Alchemical Snowmen of Chilly Doom to give to the government.  It's surprisingly addictive, and I've found a bit of satisfaction in figuring out how to beat some of the deadlines fairly early.

I'm not pulling off a perfect run; I've managed to fail some of the requests, and screw up some some relationship values by doing so.  I feel that some of them are either grossly unfair or meant for a later part of the game/new game plus; I've found requests (especially from shopkeepers) that require materials I don't have any access to.  There may or may not be a random number generator involved; I suspect there is, but I've also found things that look impossible to fulfill at first but are actually easily done if you just know where to look.

Another oddity of the game is that there are several synthesis items that come in different 'grades,' each one requiring a certain type and/or quality of the base materials.  It has a good deal of logic behind it (better and more rare materials result in higher grades), the only real problem is that the grade is listed as an effect, which can cause some confusion to new players.  It might have been corrected in later Atelier games (I broke down and tore through Atelier's wiki, which hinted at this), but for the moment it's a minor annoyance.

There are some surprising bits of humor to found as well.  You can make metal ingots from random bones gathered from dungeons, therefore making our adorable heroine a producer of death metal!  Plus you can effectively sidestep a mid-game mission's goal by using chemical warfare instead of normal combat.  That's right, we have a (fully intentional) shortcut via spraying large-scale pesticide.  In the spirit of the idea, it's expedient, but it has some side effects; you don't gain any experience for doing so, and you lose out on any drops normal combat would have yielded.  It's somewhat clever, really.

I'd still like to know why alchemy has so little regard in-game at first.  Some of it can be traced to the local alchemy master, Astrid McFrigid being a creepy woman with all the warm empathy of an internet troll, but I don't see how things devolved to where there's only one workshop, with that one workshop being run by a demented, lazy aspie, but I suppose we wouldn't have much of a plot otherwise.