Atelier Totori (PS3): Alchemically Average

People keep telling me to play Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. But since nothing on the 360 lately has appealed to me, I instead spent 4 days on the opposite end of the RPG spectrum in....

ATELIER TOTORI: (PS3)
(A First Impressions Review)

I happened to notice this game on the shelf in our used section at the store I work at. I had never heard about it before but it from the price tag it appeared to be reasonably new. I picked it up off the shelf with a degree of hesitation because I tend to panic when I see the word Atelier. The reason behind this is a number of years ago, NIS America produced a game called Atelier Iris. There was nothing really revolutionary about it. It seemed like a JRPG that could have easily fit on the SNES if they cut all the voice acting. It wasn't a bad game, just uninteresting and not memorable. But then they released like 4 more of these games, not making any major improvements to the series. But when I noticed this game, and recalled the previous one I saw that NIS made the jump to 3D character models instead of the sprites they are known for. So I figured with these changes, why not see if they've improved the game at all.

The game starts off with our protagonist, a young alchemist by the name of  Totori, messing up a mixture and blowing up her room. After a brief argument with her sister Cesi, she takes off running to avoid the fight and look for more alchemy supplies. As she walks into town she give a small monologue introducing herself and how she became an alchemist. As she walks you run into a childhood friend of hers who joins up with her to search. He has aspirations to become a professional adventurer, something Totori also wishes so she can be able to seek out her mother. Her mother was a world famous adventurer who went missing and is presumed to be dead. Despite this Totori begins her quest and training to be become a premier adventurer/alchemist to pick up the trail and find her answers. 

A large portion of the game will be spent in your Atelier. So get familiar with it.

This is about all of the story I know from this point, and I am surprised I know even this much. Something common of NIS America games (and I stress AMERICA, not just NIS) is that they like to hammer you with still animation cutscenes. This is the exact type of story delivery that you get in the Disgaea franchise or other such titles, but they are like night and day in their execution. While Disgaea's dialogue is clever, punchy, and entertaining, Atelier Totori's dialogue is droning, excessive, and 90% of the time completely unimportant. By the time I got from Totori's house to the first enemy to fight, I was so horrendously bogged down by story that I was ready to stop playing the game. With the voice acting on some characters, and I would say the carriage driver specifically, it makes the game borderline unplayable. They did do a satisfactory job casting the main roles and Nippon Ichi usually does well in voicing in general. Being a fan of the Star Ocean series I have heard some really bad voice acting, so Atelier Totori gets a minor pass here. 

William Shakespeare used less fluff text than this game.

Its hard to describe the exact point of the game, since I have been playing for a good 15 or so hours and I still have no idea what the point is, what the stakes are, or why I should even care. The general play of it is you go to a tavern or adventure's guild to receive quests. They could be to explore a new area, create certain items via alchemy, or hunt a certain number of monsters. God this already sounds boring. Luckily you have the ability to travel in towns with a quick jump menu instead of actually walking and its a pretty big time saver, but walking on the world map does not. The map is linear, and each move does eat up time on the calender, so you need to make sure you have adequate time for travel there and back for mission completion. Each point on the map gives you a smallish area to investigate and they are small. All of the points on the map are typically one screen at best and not at all complex for investigation, although there are a handful of maps that a fairly large in size. None of them will be daunting. In these places you can hunt monsters or scavenge for supplies. When you kill or find something, each point on the map will show you what you found in each area so if you take on another hunt or fall short of a specified material you can back track to it. Which is helpful when trying to complete your alchemy lists. Typically you may want to visit each map again the moment you leave it, this way you can get a nice little cache of supplies for each spot you visit.

Battle is fairly traditional JRPG fanfare. You get Totori and two other characters per team and fighting is done in the traditional menu based fashion. They move pretty quickly and the menus are small and easy to navigate. Only alchemists can use items so unless you dive head first into making things, Totori' abilites as an attack or a healer is virtually useless. One of the more interesting features is that the support characters have a gauge that when charged up by attacking or being attacked a support character can jump in an take a hit for Totori, or assist her in an attack. If you charge it long enough they might also have a super move they can use, but I have rarely had a battle last long enough to really see the fruits of these attacks, because battles never seem to last that long.

As far as I have played, the game is essentially fetch quests sprinkled in by what little story there is. You meet other adventurers who can join your party including the previous games protagonist Rarona, each with their own motivations and stories. While some of them are somewhat interesting, it seems like a constant derailment of the main story and a bit of a headache to find all of them. And as stated above, the rambling that some of these go on are a bit excessive. A primary example of this is another NIS America offshoot in Cross Edge or Mana Khemia, every little break in the action you are treated to stills of the characters with different facial reactions as they babble incessantly back and forth at each other. I could perhaps justify it if the intention was the build character for the players in the story, but so little of it is of any interest I often find myself skipping this garbage.

This game also has a problem with random difficulty spikes as well. You can level your characters but I've never really found them to have any useful stat increases as the gear you wear seems to be more helpful than any grinding you do. There are a number of maps where you will find a boss monster, if you can call them that. Sometimes they are obviously a boss as its the only monster in an area or usually much bigger than the standard baddie. But if I am destroying everything in the surrounding area, naturally you'd think I'm ready for the boss, right? Not really. There have been a number of times that I've marched up to a boss and get wiped out in a turn or two. This isn't a huge issue since the only penalty is you lose about 20 days of time.

I think my anger came to a head as I was mixing materials and a deadline came up. The game immediately shot me to a cutscene where Totori is reprimanded by another character and I get a text screen telling me she was too lazy to find her mother, and the game gave me a bad ending. I actually had to put the controller down and walk away I was so pissed off. It offered to let me restart the game with my equipment so I did out of sheer spite of the game. I skipped every cutscene I've seen and shredded through back to where I was in a single day, with plenty of deadline to spare. I now have found that there is much more game to play after that point but I ran out of time and had to bring it back.

Over the course of the few days I had with this game, I've come to realize I really have no idea why this franchise has so many installments. I have no idea why they keep making more of them, or even why the franchise exists. I'm alright with a game that doesn't bring something new to the table as long as they execute what they did bring properly. And if I returned this game after I got my bad ending, I would not have given it a second thought at all. But when I went through a 2nd time I did find myself enjoying it more since I understood the aspects better. It has to have something about it if it made me play through all the progress I had already done in 3 days just to find out what I did wrong. Is the game great? No. Is it good? Ehhh, It will find a niche audience somewhere. Definitely not worth the 45 used price tag I found it for. I am curious to see how it ends, but I'll probably never know unless the price of this game drops to 20 bucks. Tops. As far as JRPGs go, you can do a lot better than Atelier Totori.