Completed: Atelier Iris 2

Completed

Atelier Iris 2

System: PS2 (Playing on PS3)
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."

Quick Fixes

Not that many this time around, just two, but I don't have quite enough to say about one or the other to make a Daily Review.

 So this kind of came out of left field, but I hit the fortune cookie option on the Backlog, and it gave me this. My wife bought it a while back from a Gamestop for about 5$, and neither of us have really touched it. Quick thoughts on it though: The art style is beautiful, the sprites on 3d backgrounds actually work really well, and the art in the battles is very well done. Not quite Valkyrie Profile 2 level, but hey. Another thought is that I'm really enjoying the alchemy system, since its mostly collect recipes, have the other character craft it, then you can make them with mana from then on. This means that healing potions almost never run out, since they need just 1 Wood mana, which you can get from anywhere. I have 99 of several items just to not let my mana go to waste. The combat system itself is rather fluid, though for some reason seems to have brief load times mid fight, as in a half second or so. Not a major deal, but it does make the otherwise fluid action kinda herk at times.

The title of the game is "God Catching Alchemy Meister" or Kamidori Alchemy Meister (kinda prefer the latter since the direct translation is silly), and yeah, its a great game. I'm always a sucker for strategy RPGs with very in-depth aspects of crafting and character building. This doesn't have so much on the character building, kinda leaning towards Fire Emblem in that they just level up, gain stats, and go from there. The main heroines get outfits you can make that radically change their stats and skills, and the main character gets far more customization through his menu, but mostly its just swapping gear. Still, the strategy aspects of crawling around the maps and fighting monsters, and collecting materials to make new items is pretty fun. The game is split up into chapters, and they do warn you when you're about to change chapters since you can miss out on quests. All the quests tell you what chapter you fail them on too, which is very conveinant. The only thing you'd have to look at a guide for is the level certain characters have to be at to get events. Of course, being a strategy RPG with set characters...some are rather useless or ungodly slow, and very hard to level to get those events (in this case, mostly the earth elemental Aht since she only moves 2 spaces). Also, yes, it is an adult eroge game. Doesn't change the fact that the game itself is damn good, dirty pictures or not.