Mana Khemia

[dalucifer0]

All three Atelier Iris games are in English.

[Lard]

Really? I checked Wiki and it only has an entry on Eternal Mana and it says "Atelier Iris is the first of the series to be released in the US; this release and the English translation are by NIS America", which is why I asked, because I thought I'd heard of more than one.

[dalucifer0]

Yeah, and Ramza reviewed all three Atelier Iris games on the main site, too.

[Lard]

I should've just looked on the site. :/

[Adapheon]

I can't say for sure it's better than the other but I've only played Atelier Iris 2 and I thought it had a lot of problems but it was kinda fun poking around trying to find all the items you could synthesize. It's a complete breeze though, not sure I died or came close to dying once, by the end of the game I had some many healing/attack spell items it would be almost impossible for anything to have beaten me.

[Dincrest]

AI2 has a much more robust storyline than AI.  Granted, story is not the main focus of either RPG, but still...

[Robert Boyd]

Never having played Mana Khemia, I'm not sure how it fares, but at least in the Atelier Iris games, the difficult was directly related to how well you know how to use the alchemy system.  I imagine Mana Khemia is the same way which would explain why some people find the game ridiculously easy and other thought the game was difficult.

[Redempteur]

hi

i 'm late in the discution but i' don't think i found mana khémia difficult at ALL ... i finished the game 4 times and it was an very good expérience for me
the story was not the main point of this rpg ...it was the way the characters interact with each other ( otherwse why let the player choose the order to the events ?? ) the game is not THAT hard  if you update the board by making new items ...thsi difficulty of the game is related on how you make new items and on how well you explore

i bought the game and i was really happy with it .... ( i have played much harder games than this ... )

Nice music , good battle system , school setting well done and many many laughs ...

[Ramza]

Really? I checked Wiki and it only has an entry on Eternal Mana and it says "Atelier Iris is the first of the series to be released in the US; this release and the English translation are by NIS America", which is why I asked, because I thought I'd heard of more than one.

Wikipedia has it right.

"Atelier Iris" was its own trilogy within a larger series. When it says "Atelier Iris is the first of the series," they're saying the first of the ATELIER series. There were five games before Atelier Iris. They were:

1. Atelier Marie
2. Atelier Elie
3. Atelier Lilie
4. Atelier Judie
5. Atelier Viorate (Violet)

These fives games have never, and probably will never, come to North America. I specifically asked NIS America about this at E3 2005, and have followed up the question a few times in emails, and they seemed pretty honest with me in saying that it was quite unlikely. So...yeah.

If you watch your Atelier opening sequences, they're numbered "Project A#."

Atelier Iris - Project A6
Atelier Iris 2 - Project A7
Atelier Iris 3 - Project A8
Mana Khemia - Project A9

So...yeah.

Also, for what it's worth, we have ALL the soundtracks for those old Atelier games reviewed in our soundtracks section.

Ramza