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.

Mad Science Skillz

Welp, that was hilarious, but I forgot to actually bring up the contrast in the last post, in the paragraph making the contrast about Atelier Iris 2 and traditional Atelier games.   Suffice to say that Iris 2 is a typical JRPG adventure with Atelier crafting mechanics tossed in, while your traditional Atelier game is all about running an alchemy shop, chilling with buddies, and maybe wandering off to a nearby dungeon for materials.  Makes you wonder what sort of insanity and hijinks are in store when I finally pop in Mana Khemia.

Anyway, things are progressing pretty well.  Exposure to Rorona gave me the impetus to fiddle with the crafting system now, and it's yielding some good results.  Potions heal better, debuffs are actually somewhat consistent and reliable, and alchemically produced bombs wreck more faces now.  Combat items are now worth it.   It was a source of minor frustration that offensive items were obviously supposed to be a big part of the combat system, but suffered from the traditional problem of not being particularly better than stabbing things the old-fashioned way.  Other games in the series didn't have the problem (hell Rorona made them borderline broken relative to normal techniques).  I guess is that without that exposure, we just have a fairly normal RPG on our hands.

But I must go for a while.  All Hail Flashbang Poe!

When Your Sword is A Jackass

But that jackass is pretty much Gandalf in stabby form.

So, having inexplicably gotten the True (AKA best of the generic) endings in Atelier Rorona, I put down the controller for a bit.  I had some IRL issues to handle, and my work schedule for the last few days could be best described as chronological schizophrenia.  That's over with for the moment, and I picked it back up.

I did a bit of thinking.  I wanted to go ahead and play the sequel, Atelier Totori, and already tracked down the next sequel, Atelier Meruru (which still sounds like a basset hound bay), but I kinda needed the break from the long chain of new games, and decided to return to an old friend.

I popped in Atelier Iris 2:  The Azoth of Destiny.  It's still a blast, and a pleasure to play.  It's very much an Atelier Series game, but there's much more of an emphasis on the RPG and storytelling aspects.  You've got the crafting, and quiet alchemy chick that hangs out in town and gives alchemical goodies to the locals, but there's also a second protagonist that does traditional RPG stuff like save the world and loot stuff and harvest the unworthy with flashy moves

His sword is also sentient, and a smug smartass.  Seriously, the local Merlin equivalent decided that the Dark Side is totally awesome and used the Philosopher's Stone to become a talking +7 Sword of Alchemic Doom (instead of y'know, straight up immortality or something), and tried being Alchemist Sword Sauron.  Then, his apprentice was all "Shut up evil, Imma Alchemist!  Bah-ZAM!" and did the exact same thing.  Stuff exploded, people died, alchemy and alchemists were locked up in a pocket dimension, but a nice one where alchemists could chill with Mana spirits and make cool stuff, and Good Guy Azoth decided to be like Excalibur and hung out in a pedestal guarding the pocket dimension.  Bad Guy Azoth lurked in a cave or was sealed away or got stuck in a pawn shop hitting on the Alicorn Amulet somewhere until Liam O'Brien showed up a thousand years down the road and decided to start wrecking shit and now all hell is breaking loose.  I'm not making this stuff up.  Gust is hilariously awesome like that.

Anyway, I can see why the hardcore Atelier fans were somewhat unhappy.  The whole down-to-earth, shopkeeper fetch quest and character scenes stuff was sidelined for classic tearing-about-the-countryside antics.  Crafting is pretty straightforward, no real chance of failure, and materials have uniform quality and properties, compared to the constantly changing variables and required experimentation and notation through trial-and-error.  The combat is quirky; only designated alchemists can whip up items on the fly in combat, but everybody can use the goodies now, and special moves use a growing and depleting meter (kinda sorta like a fighting game's super meter) instead of MP (or worse, HP like Rorona), and is much more serviceable than traditional Atelier fare.  You wind up fighting an evil empire and then Alchemist Sword Sauron triggers an apocalypse to capture the titular Iris, who happens to be the incarnation of the Mana Goddess and the game's little magical waif, so now he has the power and intent to bring the universe into Age of Sigmar and make everything terrible.  Naturally, you whip his ass.  It's a far cry from all the small-scale, run a magic items shop stuff.

But, y'know what?  I like it a lot.  It's a wonderful change of pace, and rekindled my love of crafting stuff in games.  It's simple to start but can be hard to master.  It has some of the prettiest graphics I've ever seen; between the wonderful hand-drawn backgrounds and the happy li'l mana spirits, it's pretty much the awesome Seiken Densetsu/World of Mana game everybody's been waiting for since, well, Secret of Mana itself (hell the plot pretty much kicks off with a big sacred tree vanishing and mana going to hell, add in the evil empire being manipulated by an ancient bodysnatching sorcerer for fun).

Wow, I'm really fanboying out here.  Oh, and don't forget:  This is the game that gave us Flashbang Poe, the Gun Mana.  A little wood fairly that acts like a dirty old man, and brings the dakka with an kickass magical doomcannon.  All hail Flashbang Poe!

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.