Getting It Out Of My System

Yeesh.  Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana is no joke, I can tell you that.  The battles are overall a great deal more difficult than Iris 2. 


A lot of it comes from a combination of having much harder monsters (especially in offensive stats and variety of special moves) combined with a party that just doesn't hit very hard, even with optimized gear.  It gets better later on, but not all that much.


It tries to charm you with having loads and loads of all sorts of consumables for you to find and make, then you realize the awful truth:  nine of each item, maximum.  You had better be crafting several different curatives, or you stand a good chance of being stuck without a lot of resources very quickly.


The crafting system is overall fairly satisfying, with shop synthesis (where the meat is, both literally and figuratively) giving you fairly complex recipes early, allowing you to make all sorts of goodies from food to potions to bombs and more.  The actual alchemy system is fairly workable as well, with the added advantage of whipping up items on the fly, including in battle.  Unfortunately, both are really handicapped by the item cap.  Smart play can feel counterproductive, resulting in having a constant glut of alchemy elements and basic materials, with even more being left on the field unused. 


The developers included a couple of interesting ideas to compensate.  The first is a gifting system, where you give items to elemental spirits to improve their energy and how they feel about you.  It has some interesting quirks, and you can't give everybody the same crap and expect the same result.  The second is an option to extract alchemy elements directly from items in your inventory, which was a very nifty idea, and actually gives an impression of the big cycle that alchemy is supposed to be a part of in the game world.  Iris 2 really should have kept that.


Don't get me wrong; Iris 1 is a pretty good game, and I plan to finish it out, but there's so many things here that make me think that developers were trying to make a Playstation 2 game but were stubbornly holding to 16-bit sensibilities, which hampers the experience.


Oh, and this game needs 100% more Flashbang Poe!