Atelier Rorona Review
Atelier Rorona: Alchemist of Arland, the newest in a long running list of Atelier titles and the first of the Alchemist series created by Gust and NIS America, but if you have never heard of any of these games before don’t fret cause neither have I.
Our story begins with a history lesson of how the city or Arland was a failing city until they were taught of how to use Machines to make work easier and create better items through Alchemy, with this the town soon flourished. Now we see what were in for, you are Rorona a complete airhead who’s just as amazed as you are when the things she does actually works out (JRPG’s the only genre where a person like this can be a main character). You’re an apprentice Alchemist and through some choices from your master a.k.a not doing any work the city has ideas of getting rid of the Alchemy store and those that work in it. Not wanting to do any work (or so it seems) the master decides to give the shop, and the responsibility to you. Now it’s up to you to prove not only the king but to the residents that shop deserves to stay where it is. Sadly it seems that it takes an idiot to successfully pull this off.
The basic plot of the game is that every couple of months you are given a task to complete by the Kingdom which is graded depending on how much you are willing to invest into the tasks at hand. The biggest thing in this game is that everything requires time and health. All of the things you create through Alchemy takes up a certain amount of days depending on what your making, and cause this takes so long to make it also takes away some of your health. If you run out of health you won’t be able to create any more and will have to take a few days off, and if you run out of time for your task you fail. Traveling around the areas to gather ingredients also takes up your time. Also to increase the way you need to think about creating items, is that all materials have certain characteristics that you may or may not want to pass on to the final product. For instance this item may be valuable and have a + 2 to skill boost, but has a crappy condition, and the other is weak but had a good condition. You don’t need to care so much about this at times but there will be instances where these small differences can change quite a bit.
Through the game you will be introduced to different characters which you will be able to hire to help you go out into the wilds to fight enemies and unlock different areas, and like the castle every now and then they will ask you to create items for them, which you will be paid for but this also increases their friendship level which changes certain events and the games ending. There is much to do and think about in this game and with everything taking up precious time it may seem complicated at time but once you get into the rhythm you begin to see how easy and intricate they made this game. It’s fun and complex enough that you always want to calculate as much as possible.
Outside of creating through Alchemy you and the party you assemble to scourer the land for materials you fight monster like you would in any other turn based RPG, luckily they do a few things to keep your eye on the screen instead of just hitting the attack button. The only thing you really have to watch is your characters health bars. Because Alchemy takes up health your main character might be low, and because any special ability takes up more HP if you fail in combat you waste even more time getting back to town and lose a chance to collect more items. Also during battle your characters gauges will increase giving them certain actions after another certain character does an attack, or ability, while there mostly tied to the main characters actions others will reveal themselves by playing around.
The Atelier games have been around for over 10 years now and while less than half of the titles have made it out of Japan, and the ones that do usually only make decent to good reviews it still has quite the fan base, and for good reasons. The story simple yet wonderful, the characters and the world grow depending on how deep you want everything to be and it does a great job at blending 2 completely different systems in a memorable way.
I give it an 8.5/10
