Well, That Was Unexpected

It's something of a surprise, to be sure.

After a whirlwind of IRL events, I managed to get enough quiet time to tackle the final assignment of Atelier Rorona.  I didn't pull the evaluation grade I would like, but thanks to getting mostly perfect tens, I could pass and beat the game.

It's a funny thing; an important part of the game's mechanics revolves around turning in items for the big assignments, then using the rest of the in-game time as you see fit.  It's fairly simple in practice:  Do what it takes to get a passing grade (noted as "Complete" on the screen), preferably with a full ten out of ten stars, then use the remaining time to undertake jobs for the local folk and delve into dungeons (to trigger and fuel more jobs), plus do special jobs for party members and shopkeepers.  I'm not quite sure yet, but the final assignment seems to trigger much more lenient and doable collection of jobs for the NPCs.  This worked out well into my favor, since part of the ending requirements are tied to your in-game reputation, which is raised by completing the jobs at the palace counter.  It came as a pleasant shock, to be sure; going into the final assignment, I was barely at 51%, and managed to ramp it up to 94% without much trouble.

It's still funny, how this game is pretty much one big fetch quest.  It's even funnier that it can be loads of fun.  I can't think of many games where I enjoyed tearing about town, handing out goodies, and playing delivery service for the kingdom and suchlike.  Usually RPGs treat this stuff as a necessary evil, but Atelier games turn this into your bread and butter, and actually make it enjoyable in and of itself.

For anybody curious, part of the endings involves which NPC you wind up making your best friend/beau, and despite getting a perfect 100 value for Cloud Sigfried Sterk, I wound up having poor innocent Rorona paired up with Gio.  The guy is more than old enough to be her father, and happens to be the damn king to boot, but A) values were different for that sort of thing back then and B) he's awesomesauce anyway, so I really just had a good laugh and moved on.  And C) the pairing is no more than implied anyway.

Gio, AKA Ludwig Giovanni Arland XIII, is one of the better ideas I've seen in a while.  He's a JRPG character, with all the quirks and tolerance for weirdness that entails, that wants to be an Elder Scrolls protagonist really badly.  His whole shtick to to sneak out and leave Minister Bad Touch in charge so he can tear about the countryside and unleash the Harvest upon the wild and wicked.  This, plus the fact that he does all this in a swank outfit and a damn sword-cane, qualifies him for Rorona's contribution to the "awesomesauce RPG characters that reside in my hall of honor" list and a place with such luminaries as Jade Curtiss and Bacchus D-79 (AKA Space Elf Robocop).

In any case, my final verdict for Atelier Rorona vanilla (I didn't grab any DLC, and there is a remake, named Atelier Rorona Plus), is Recommended, especially for fellow RPG buffs that are looking for something a bit different.  It's far from perfect (I miss Iris' two dimensional backgrounds a lot), but what this game offers is actually pretty well put together, and the emphasis on time-management and multiple playthroughs helps play to its strengths.  You actually are encouraged to do a bit more planning than 'grind for a while, then conquer the unworthy, grind some more' that a lot RPGs expect, and it encourages a bit of mental agility.  It'll take a while, and even veteran gamers will have some missteps, but the learning curve it pretty forgiving, and once you get the rhythm of things going, this game is quite rewarding.

Stay tuned.  I have no idea what the next campaign will be yet, but rest assured that the Harvest will continue!

Surviving The Long Night

Well, that actually went much better than anticipated, really.

I managed to tear my way through Night's Domain in Atelier Rorona, and it was actually a good deal more fun than I expected.  For a game that was all about finding stuff to make the best goodies, it's good to find a bit of challenging combat encounters here and there.  There is a bounty system in place, which will spawn in mini-boss and boss level critters, but unless you're dedicated to straight monster eradication in a given playthrough, they tend to not be worth your time (both in-game and out).

I'm moving ever closer (and much faster than expected) to giving a final review on this game, and I'd like to touch a few points; I'll likely bring them up again later, but I need to get them off my chest anyway.

First, the time-management aspect.  It's both kind liberating and very restrictive.  The only real gripes involved here is that trying to get requests that involve more than minimal gathering and dungeon-crawling can get really frustrating, really fast.  Things got better as I progressed through the game, but I managed to fail several requests early on, and it probably compromised my in-game reputation enough to lock me out of the better endings.  The good news is that this is the kind of game that lets you figure out your mistakes fairly quickly, and being intended for multiple playthroughs means you can actually put a fair bit of planning into your little excursions.  All in all, you get to give your brain a good workout, and actually figure out things like efficiency and a bit of long-term strategy, and it works pretty damn well.

The combat is still the weakest overall part of the game.  It's not bad, and it's actually fairly well-balanced internally, but it's fairly bare-bones (especially in the era this game was produced).  It's a bit of disappointment after the intricate combat mechanics of the Iris series, and just really give the sense of spectacle its predecessors had.  It's still turn-based, with basic attacks, flashy skills (but fueled by HP), with a special emphasis on tossing out the fruits of your labor to rain doom upon the unworthy; it just doesn't the oomph.  It also has the classic RPG problem of letting your plow through mooks early on, then smacking you upside the head with the next tier of critters, making for annoying speed bumps.  The combat difficulty curve is always hard to gauge, even for experienced developers, so it's pretty forgivable.  The curve here has been sharpened by the time management aspects, which can make grinding counterproductive.  But hell, this is still a game that takes all those (traditionally useless) offensive items and turns them into the harbingers of the Harvest.  Have fun tossing alchemic dynamite, explosive snowmen, and giant sweetgum balls upon your foes, then up the ante with things like blasting them with cannons, unleashing elemental blasts o' doom, and summoning meteoric death from above.  Why the hell doesn't anybody respect alchemy in this game again?

In any case, the Harvest must continue, and the forces of badness shall be reaped to fuel the cause!

Wow

So.  It took a good while, but I finally got a TPK in Atelier Rorona.  I wasn't even sure it was possible, but there you go.  I waltzed into a late-game dungeon, brought along my preferred team (Sterk and Gio, in anyone cares), and managed to tear about the first few areas without much more resistance than usual.  Hell, I took having to actually use curatives as a pleasant surprise.

Naturally, pride goeth before the fall.  I found these angry shadow griffin things (pretty much the local griffins in a goth phase and all toughened up by constant incense and raged up by constant MCR), and boy howdy, did my dudes get wrecked.  It was like the game had finally realized that the critter population had little to challenge an experience RPG'er.  It felt a lot like jumping combat difficulty from "aw look at the cute critters let's keep this at Super Mario RPG (easy, but still awesomesauce by the way)" to "heh, you're in the realm of eternal night now, so welcome to turn-based Dark Souls, bitch!"

It proved an inconvenience, but hell, I've never pulled off a perfect first run in an RPG (I think), and it's good to stay a bit humble.  You gotta know the game has some teeth somewhere.

The only real problem now, is:  What the hell do I do about it?  Rorona has some the nastiest passive anti-grind mechanics I've seen this side of Romancing SaGa, so I can't just stop plot progression and blitz a few dozen freaks for XP (at least without risking a Bad Ending, and I'm in part 11 of 12), and making gear takes time, and I don't have the resources to make the top-tier stuff anyway.  I guess that all I can do is just not go in that direction, and hope I can score enough goodies to stave off the machinations of Minister Bad Touch anyway.

The game is still a good deal of fun to play.  I'd forgotten how much I'd enjoyed a good Gust game, and this one delivers.

Release The Harvest is All Your Finery

Well, I managed to cram in a bit more of doom and errand-running in Atelier Rorona.  Things are going fairly smoothly; I think that I'm a bit behind in material grades, but I'm muddling through and smacking the unpleasant nonetheless.

It took me a hilariously long time to figure out something blatantly obvious.  Astrid, the local abrasive creep-o-chick, shares a voice actress with friggin' Mad Moxxie!  It had been nagging me for weeks, knowing the voice was very familiar, even as the character left me in a bizarre state that mixed annoyance and bad vibes.  I'm not sure if they went a bit overboard, or if they went for making her rare good moments even better in contrast.  In any case, she is not to be dismissed lightly.  She is to be exiled with great ceremony and jubilation.

Anyway, the bitz keep pouring in, and the mad loot is still getting cranked out.  I'm still confused why Minister Bad Touch hates alchemy and the workshop so damn much.  He probably can't stand Astrid either, and the whole eminent domain thing is just an excuse.

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.

LootCraft

Ah!  This stuff is actually fairly relaxing.  I should have started a Atelier game sooner.

There's just something satisfying about a game that lets you tear about the countryside, gathering all sorts of improbable things, and then going back to base and turning them into all sorts of ridiculous goodies.  Plenty of RPGs have made this an integral mechanic, but sometimes it takes making crafting the core of the gameplay to scratch that sort of itch.

It's also very interesting to actually take orders from NPCs and hand out the fruits of the Harvest.  I'm still somewhat aghast that somehow steam technology (even the semi-punk kind seen here) can render this sort of thing obsolete in-universe.  Instead of pulling away, somebody should have thought about actually blending the two together, and seeing what wonders could result.  We could be talking awesomesauce stuff like Final Fantasy VI style magitek, without all the nasty downsides.  The government (hell, the closest thing we have to a villain) seems to dimly realize that this style of alchemy is not lightly thrown aside; the location of the workshop itself is somewhat inconvenient, and the original owner of the place is not exactly popular (far less about her chosen craft than the fact that she is an infuriating, lazy, know-it-all harpy.)

We can also take some solace in the time management aspect of the game.  It gives you a good sense of urgency and prioritization.  There are some rough spots, and it can be easy to screw up deadlines and scheduled events, but overall it just take a bit of practice and you're off.

The items themselves are fairly standard fare, but the variety of materials, products, and end results is pretty amazing.  The in-game artwork and sprites for them are also fairly nice; they give a good sense of mystery and that cheerful fantasy look.  They tend to pop out from the fairly drab menu windows and grab attention.

On a final note, Atelier Rorona has the distinction of being one of only a handful of games that I've actually wrote and accumulated notes for.  It's hilarious that a game full of girly gala gunk that comes across like work and research is engrossing enough to actually elicit that sort of thing.

Monster Hunter Moe Edition

Hoo boy, where to start?

So, Atelier Rorona.  How does a concept so laced, coated, and inundated with girly-gala-gunk with combat mechanics that are actually dumbed down from Atelier Iris trilogy's stuff wind up being so damn appealing?

Yes, it's got crafting; they've even managed to up the ante for it be making more complex recipe chains (with the potential for making them recursive to boot i.e. making Tonics from crappier Tonics).  A nice little feature is the Dismantle mechanic, getting materials back from equipment; I haven't really used it yet, since the early game seems to revel in making you choose between getting stuff to make equipment, and y'know, not lose the game.  It gets better later, and I must admit that some of it is my own noob mistakes.

The characters are fairly entertaining (but your mileage may vary; I can barely stand Astrid), and the story is refreshingly down-to-earth and low-scale.  Your whole mission is to crank out goodies using Atelier-style crafting and give them to the government to justify your's workshop's continued presence.  The 'villain' of the piece is a watered down mix of evil chancellor and robber-baron capitalist.  The man is not even all that evil, really; he pulls 80's cartoon hijinx and a bit of crappy intrigue to sabotage your quest, but the guy could just literally order impossible goals and make it stick.  Why doesn't he?  I dunno, I'd say he's actually kinda bored and is trying to get his sovereign's attention.  "Bleh, I'm so evil!  I sure don't hope the king will stop terrorizing the local wildlife and actually do king stuff instead of letting me run amok!  That would stop my schemes for sure, hint hint!"  Seriously, its like Animal Crossing was being slowly conquered by Blue Laser Commander, but only half-heartedly, and only so somebody would actually notice.  It's hilarious.

The game is girly as all hell, but its more like a happy take on things, allowing you to see what it would be like if the Harvest was being carried out by a pack of shoujo manga (I hope I spelled that right) cliches, backed up by some of the fanciest-dressed badasses ever.  We've got typical dude concepts like the knight with a big ass sword (wears a fancy full suit with a big knightly-esque cloak), a fairly rad short order cook that kills stuff with an iron skillet and serves Waffle House fare as a heal spell (almost another full suit, but sans the jacket, and with a nametag and a wierd fanny-pack apron thing, still dapper as hell), and similar stuff.  This game holds the distinction of actually making me want to go out and buy some formal wear, but my normal activities would shred the things, and cosplay's pointless if you're like me and don't have the resources to attend conventions.  Hell, I forgot how to tie a tie anyway.

This game's version of the Harvest is fairly fun, as well.  You have turn-based combat where you smack freaks, and then you root through the drops, looking for materials to make the best stuff.  This is augmented by harvesting points where you find even more materials, plus shops that carry several convenient (and often high-quality) things.  Once you get going, you actually get a homunculus minion to help gather all sorts of goodies, bringing the Harvest to a whole new level.

Well, anyway, the whole thing is proving to be a nice change of pace, and something of a palate cleanser to help get a break from all the world-saving, mind screws, and and in the grim dark future there is only GAR.

Oh, and a character has a skill that summons friggin' hitmen.

Stirrin' the Cauldron

Ah!

It's usually a least a few days of drudgery before I go on my next campaign.  However, some circumstances came up, and I decided to go ahead and turn the lemons into lemon-scented craters.  Plugged in Atelier Rorona (the vanilla PS3 version, might grab the Plus one, but not now) and got to crafting.

It's kinda funny.  I've been tearing my way through these dark, epic RPGs for a good while now; they've haven't been all grimdark and gritty, but they haven't been all sweetness and goofy critters either.  There was plenty of fun along the way, and discovering the Tales series was very worthwhile.

But there comes a time, a season when you need to shoo out all the angst and grit and doom.  There comes a season where you have to drop all the epic world-saving and warring against the forces of doom and suffering and stuff.  There comes a season where you just grab some sugary, girly game and just have some adventures wandering around town and terrorizing the local wildlife.  This is that kind of game.

It's like Monster Hunter for girls.  The whole game revolves around going out and harvesting stuff to make all sorts of items and gadgets and potions and things.  It's all about the crafting and taking assignments and making everybody happy.  You're not saving the world, just saving the alchemy workshop (mostly because your master is a lazy twit).  Everybody is dressed like a fashion magazine cover.  The town is all happy and bright, and the local idea of evil...well, I haven't found it yet.  Found a character I can't stand, and a random jackass official being officious, but no actual villains.  And I love it.

Why?  Hell, some of it's reasons I've gone over already.  Some is that I have a thing for screwing around with crafting systems, and Atelier is pretty much Crafting System:  The RPG Series.  Don't get me wrong, we've got enough exploration and combat to work with here, and we've also got a badass voiced by Liam O'Brien helping us tear about the countryside and mash mooks.  Bonus points for just being a nice guy and a badass, no strings attached or backstabbing to sweat.  He puts the manly in gentlemanly today.

In any case, here's to a bit of happy-go-lucky RPG nuttiness.  Hell, I should've started it earlier, it would've been a nice counter-balance to the Tales marathon.

And why the hell hasn't somebody done a ponies crossover yet?!