The Atelier Series

[Cyril]

Of course the day I'm working ungodly hours is the day the new Atelier is shown.

I, too, am going to miss the Dusk world and Hidari and his amazing use of colors, but Sophie's design (and name!) is pretty darn cute.

[Farron]

After months playing it I finally finished Mana Khemia on the Vita and I just wrote a review for it on my blog.

I have to say I liked it very much. There were some characters like Muppy which felt thrown in for whatever reason, it just felt like he didn't belong in the game but at least I could use him to make some alchemy items using the board.
Playing on the Vita was a plus comparing to the PSP as the long load times were gone so that was a plus.
Also there are some weeks in the game that not much of anything interesting happened and it was a shame because near the end the story starts to get very intriguing.

Now I'm thinking of playing either Ar Tonelico 2 or Mana Khemia 2. Although for At Tonelico I didn't play the first one so I hope I will be okay.

[Der Jermeister]

I played the PSVita version of Atelier Rorona Plus, and I definitely enjoyed it more than the original PS3 version, and actually was able to beat it instead of getting stuck with a Game Over if I failed to complete an objective in time.

[Arvis]

I played the PSVita version of Atelier Rorona Plus, and I definitely enjoyed it more than the original PS3 version, and actually was able to beat it instead of getting stuck with a Game Over if I failed to complete an objective in time.

They announced the Plus version about 10 days after I bought the original.

[Dice]

I played the PSVita version of Atelier Rorona Plus, and I definitely enjoyed it more than the original PS3 version, and actually was able to beat it instead of getting stuck with a Game Over if I failed to complete an objective in time.

They announced the Plus version about 10 days after I bought the original.

Oof. :(

[Arvis]

Yeah, it really makes me not want to play the original.  But I am going to anyways.  At least the music is still really good.

[Farron]

I never got my hands on the Plus version of Rorona but I'm planning to when there's a discount.
The only thing I didn't like much in Rorona were some characters. I found Lionela to be kind of boring and also that music guy.

Other then the graphics and the battle music I think the original still holds up.

[Annubis]

Next Atelier game announced.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFD6IQJDCCo



Coming to PS4, PSVita and Steam

[Arvis]

Is the journey itself mysterious, or is it a journey for mysterious reasons or mysterious goals?

[Klutz64]

Disappointed it's not called "Fatelier Firis: Feternal Fana"

[Dice]

Disappointed it's not called "Fatelier Firis: Feternal Fana"

This got me. xD

Seeing Steam makes me super happy. 

[kofvscapcom]

Is this franchise dead here? Just picked up Atelier Sophie from steam sale and it's quite good. The lack of a deadline to do stuff is very freeing. The combat is....serviceable, but combat has never been the strong point of the series. If they could polish that up or add some new mechanics to the combat they could create something great. There's also a weird elemental tetris minigame to the crafting and it intrigues me.

Heard some not great things about Firis though.

[Andrew]

It's just gotten kind of stale for me. Often seems to happen with series that do annual (or thereabouts) releases.

I honestly miss the time-constraints. No time limit combined with meh stories don't really incentivise me to get much out of Atelier-style gameplay.

[Nel_Annette]

I have the PS3 trilogies on backlog, the Dusk series still seems so fresh that I forget Sophie's even a game that exists, and I'm afraid that I'm going to completely forget that Firis exists and never even purchase it.

It's hard to keep up when it's yearly like this and I'm so far behind to begin with. XD

[Kevadu]

I honestly kind of feel like Gust cranked out too many of these games too fast and a lot of people kind of got sick of them.  At least I did.  It's not like they're bad games, but they are very similar.  I think I would be more interested in the series if Gust would release new entries a little less often (and maybe gave them a little more polish in the process...), because it's become too much to keep up with...