I finished watching Ryza's anime and re-reading your comment, you basically just described my issue with atelier in general. I'd really like to see the games for what they are, but it's so hard to only do that when they craft these really interesting worlds but do nothing with them. So I just keep thinking about how good they'd be if they did this or that instead with the plots. It's worse when they're so long, because I sure don't feel like spending 150 hours playing 3 games knowing it's gonna be incredibly bland. It pisses me off even more when I read the fanbase talk about the games saying they're just slow paced and it's all about the characters and that's the appeal when most characters really have 0 development.

The dusk trilogy is probably the worst offender, the first game is actually really good but the other 2 games do absolutely nothing with the setting and actually make the characters from 1 dumber and simpler. It's the weirdest thing because Escha&Logy has to be one of the most popular titles, but it's so bad I just don't get it. You could argue that it's because they're a nice couple, but ironically the true ending of that game isn't canon so it's not like they're a thing either...

That's probably why I liked mysterious so much, the plot isn't anything to write home about but the characters are really good so I had that to enjoy. I guess I'll just give ryza another chance when I get really bored. I've also read that every entry has a different writer so that seems like a trainwreck. Like the first game was written by the author of shakugan no shana, the second game was sophie's writer, and the third has like both of them + ar tonelico's writer so that game is probably really inconsistent lol

So far it's been good! I really was surprised by how animated everything is. Here's a clip of alchemy for instance: [Link]

I really wasn't sure how alchemy could be implemented in a gacha, but it makes sense. You gather ingredients doing quests, and then you can do alchemy with them. Their main traits/stats are fixed, but then you get some slight bonuses depending on who's doing the alchemy, and these are pure RNG. Stuff like 2~10% more HP recovery or so. Nothing game breaking, but something to do once you hit endgame I guess since you still want to synthesize everyday. Items have a number of uses, but are replenished at the start of every battle (unless you're in a dungeon), so that's also pretty nice.

I still haven't read all the story, but so far it's been... good? Honestly it hasn't left a strong impression on me yet, but while it's got the usual slow tempo of atelier at least the story isn't passive. You can clearly see the internal struggles of the characters very soon and it does affect them and they try to solve them little by little. There's also a group of characters that are clearly the bad guys, which feels kind of fresh for an atelier game because even in games where there are evil alchemists it's almost like they don't really have anything to do with you lol If it ever gets super interesting I'll probably scream a lot on the now playing list haha.

By the way, what did you mean about not having hopes for the story? Was Ryza's story THAT bad? I still haven't played it because I tried but the start of Ryza 1 was a borefest and I'm still trying to muster some will to get past it.

I wonder what I'd think about L&S as my first atelier game. I think I enjoyed it so much precisely because I could compare it with previous games, and it was so clear to me the amount of effort they put into the quality of the game. Sure, I think the gameplay actually sucks a lot because it has some horrible pacing in terms of alchemy/equipment, but otherwise it really has everything; the soundtrack changing depending on the character, the voice acting, how it solves every unsolved plot point from previous entries, and in general I just really liked the more mundane protagonists this time. I still think that Sophie is the better entry in the mysterious series: if L&S was the result of careful polishing (as much as time allowed), Sophie is the result of A LOT of love poured into the characters. It's something I really appreciate because 3D atelier games love to have incredibly bland characters, usually just flanderized to hell and back.

Atelier games are really hit or miss to me. It's doubly annoying because I started with the PS2 ateliers, which were more standard RPGs, while the 3D entries try to go back to the roots of being kinda like a raising sim. I don't mind this at all, but it means that usually the story suffers a lot, and I always keep thinking what a shame that is because the worlds are great, and the concepts have so much potential but they just... don't do anything with it. It also doesn't help that mana khemia 2 was probably the best turn based battle system I've ever played, and then Rorona went to the most boring system possible, and the saga just hasn't recovered at all because they don't know how to balance the powercreep of items with skills.

I haven't actually looked into Resleriana that much, so I have no expectations. I'll probably keep playing if the story or characters are interesting, if the gameplay loop is really annoying at least I played it and I know the characters exist in case they appear in some future game(?)

I've also heard that gust isn't the developer of this game, which means 1.- it could be different and therefore good 2.- gust is probably working in another main atelier and putting more effort into it, and they'll just use resleriana for damage control: if it's good then good, if it isn't they'll just say "we didn't develop this so it's just a spin off" like bamco does with tales of games lol

wait, they're gonna release resleriana like in 2 days??? I sure didn't know about that lol

nice grey banner