Mixin' It Up

The Atelier Iris 2 campaign is going quite well.  I'd forgotten that it could be an absolute joy to play through.
Regarding the last post, I had meant to make a contrast between Iris 2 and the "traditional" Atelier series formulae, and why some fans understandably abhor the Iris series.  Traditional Atelier tends to have low-fantasy, small-scale stories, where the protagonist maintains a workshop, fulfills NPC requests and rarely ventures more than a week or two from home base.  Iris 2 has a focus on a pair of protagonists, one venturing forth to a whole different world, triggering a grand quest to save everything with a band of colorful RPG characters; the second does the usual workshop schtick, but eventually does the same thing.  Traditional Atelier might have no real villains (the closest Rorona had was just a watered-down more-pragmatic-than-evil chancellor, and he was mostly letting off steam from dealing with the king's murderhobo antics), at worst having big nasty demon to be put down.  Iris 2 has an evil empire, the local branch run by a foolish yet dangerous fop, with access to some nasty magitek gizmos.  This empire is being manipulated by a powerful swordsman seeking the power of alchemy, who is being in turn manipulated by Talking Sword Sauron out to take over the world.

But it's still Atelier, and a lot of the fun comes from going out there and hunting down recipes and materials to make cool stuff.  There's some crazy stuff like a potion that turns wimpier monsters into stuff like Rubik's cubes and CDs, a cookie that lets you talk to certain critters, tiny hammers that immediately turn ore veins into usable stones, and three grades of potion that at like Miracle-Gro on crack to give you all sorts of flowers and fruits and things (some plants even become elemental crystals, how does that even work?).  This game has 12 different elements, each with a elemental embodiment known as a Mana (with a 13th Mana representing the ultimate force of creation).  The game's combat system only acknowledges four damage types (plus physical and non-elemental magic), but that's ok; we'd wind up with the kookiest type system outside of Pokemon otherwise.

Fun fact:  While you don't wind up with a lead-into-gold formula that most people think of when the word alchemy comes up, you do wind up with a semi-secret, indirect method to make infinite cash:  the Holy Evergreen.  It goes as follows:  Once you get the Wonder Grow and Huffin Water recipes, synthesize a Wonder Grow substituting in Huffin Water instead of the Ailhie Fungo.  This results in unlocking the Holy Evergreen, a salable Alchemy item. You can do the same thing with Huffins, but they have to be harvested, using the water instead means you can use Mana Synthesis to make the ingredients.  Use Mana Synthesis to crank out lots of Heal Herbs and Huffin Water, and make tons of Holy Evergreens for 70 cole a pop!  In game terms, one Wood element (to make the Heal Herb) plus one Water and one Aroma element (the Huffin Water) equals 70 cole.  These are all ridiculously easy to find and farm (Marmel Forest, I'm looking at you), so producing and selling this in bulk is the easiest way to crank out tons of cash.  It's practically required if you want the recipes in Riesevelt before you get kicked out and have to wait until much later in the game to get.  I know I covered this in a Wreckonomics post, but it bears repeating and amplifying.