Completed
Atelier Iris 2
Status: Completed
Currently: Finished everything.
So yeah, going to be a complete 180 on this from last time I posted, but I basically spent the last few weeks playing this solid (and Diablo 3), and at first, my hopes were rather high. The alchemy system in the game was very promising, the combat system was solid, they did a lot of things right in the game. The story wasn't the greatest, but it was passable.
Then the game just...died. The story went from passable to so full of glaring plot holes that I was yelling at the screen...to basically flipping the player off. The ending was a wonderful montage of 3 second clips that explained nothing whatsoever as to what happened, just showed the characters smiling then, roll credits. The game never followed through on any plot threads, and near the end of it, started doing things that just made me think 'Wow, my team is either stupid, or outright heinous'. It really does not make your team seem endearing when you destroy one character's wedding ring (albeit to save the world, but still), and then say he's being a baby because his wife will be mad at him. Two priceless objects (to the characters who they belonged to) are destroyed near the end, and its given about as much weight as stepping on someones toe. "Sorry for destroying this." "It does not matter, it was only a symbol to the entire kingdom." Practically quoted. The games story is so laughably paper thin you see where everything is going from the start, and any attempt at charecterization falls so flat it makes actually playing the game painful, because you know you'll have to listen to these idiots talk some more. Note to the creators, we do not need flashbacks for everything. This was a 20 hour game, there were upwards of ten flashbacks in the game, sometimes to events that happened literally five minutes before.
The combat system started out promising with all sorts of little options. Then as the game winded on, you realized rather quickly...that the designers didn't have any idea on how to make the game challenging, or to do a little difficulty curve to it. You are either curbstomping -everything- without grinding at all, or are up against something with insane amounts of HP. The post-game challenges seemed to be the most promising, but the enemies there (and the final boss) would basically one shot every character, so you learned to just keep tossing revives and not bother with healing. Most of the 'challenge' came from the fact that the bosses would heal themselves every turn naturally...which just made the fights even longer. I enjoy a good challenge, but the fights basically ended up being a challenge to see whether I would run out of revives first or win.
The item and alchemy system was by far the most promising part of it. Turning items you find into others with recipes you buy or find along the way. Certain items you could create more of with just mana, allowing you to make healing items as you go instead of buying them. The first thing you notice after a while though, is it is very trivial to just make 99 of all your healing items, and thus never run out. The second thing you notice is that everything pretty much uses the three or four most common mana types. The last thing you notice is there are about 15 types of mana, and some of them are used for one or two items. It felt like the designers just petered out on this part halfway through, and though you have tons of mana, you always need the most common ones, and almost never need everything else. The crafting system itself allows you to substitute different items to get different effects, but since most of the effects don't work on that item type, or are rather ill defined, you never really bother with this or even need to. The only time you do substitute is when the game points it out to you, and you realize you can make a truly different item...for the three or four items that actually works for.
The other aspects of the game are passable. The isometric view is interesting at first, but after a while you realize every dungeon is going to be square cubes going at angles, and it starts to look very fugly. The sprites themselves are well done, but battles are always zoomed out so far you can't see any details but for the brief moments it zooms in for an attack. The game is rather short, and that would have been fine personally, but near the end there's a very noticeable series of painful attempts to lengthen it out (fetch quests, dungeons with constant unending random encounters in a game that made a large point that after a while random encounters stop in an area, having to retread old areas constantly).
Most games leave me with a "Damn, I want to play more of that" feeling, even ones I'm somewhat ambiguous about. About six hours before I finished this game, I had the thought cross "I can't wait to finish this so I can play something else." While watching the ending, my thoughts were "Well, that is the game flipping me off." When I was finally finishing the post game, my last thought was "Thank god I never have to play this again."
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