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Crispy™ What's the deal with these Atelier games?

eric__s

ass hater
Developer
Joined
Jun 13, 2011
Messages
2,301
What's the deal with these Atelier games? What are they? Why are there so many of them? What are they about? Why do they come up on Steam every single time I go there? Help.

Give me a basic rundown on them. Which is the best? What are they even about?
 
Joined
Oct 20, 2019
Messages
5
Location
Israel
What are they even about?
Cute girls doing cute things, such as practicing alchemy. What more do you really need to know?

v5sxkJK.jpg
 

Tigranes

Arcane
Joined
Jan 8, 2009
Messages
10,350
As far as I can tell it's a bunch of passable gameplay loops held together by cute little girls trying hard to be cute to encourage you grind a whole lot more so you can craft stuff
 

Nifft Batuff

Prophet
Joined
Nov 14, 2018
Messages
3,169
I started to play Atelier 2 for the ps2, just to see how it is. How does it compare to the other Ateliers?
 

Jigawatt

Arcane
Joined
Aug 13, 2009
Messages
3,409
Location
in a desert, walking along in the sand
I knew nothing about the games at all and got Ryza solely on the basis the main char looks like the missus. Turns out it was pretty ok, put a lot more hours in than I expected. More than half of the play time was probably crafting and doing slice-of-life sidequests for ingredients, with main quest and combat being a bit of an afterthought - especially since the more attention you pay to crafting the easier the combat gets to the point of a pushover. Still those elements were serviceable.

Overall I would describe it as cozy, if you have a couple of hours to kill before bed it's easy to slip into and chill with
 

thesecret1

Arcane
Joined
Jun 30, 2019
Messages
5,676
The meat of the game is watching cute girls be incredibly cute. Other than that, you spend a gorillion hours grinding. Do not play this series if you dislike grinding.
 

eric__s

ass hater
Developer
Joined
Jun 13, 2011
Messages
2,301
The meat of the game is watching cute girls be incredibly cute. Other than that, you spend a gorillion hours grinding. Do not play this series if you dislike grinding.
What is the grinding? What are you actually doing? What does the item creation stuff entail? Is there combat?
 

Sigourn

uooh afficionado
Joined
Feb 6, 2016
Messages
5,624
It's worth mentioning that the animation quality is somewhat shit so the cute girls being cute is vastly overrated.
 

Damned Registrations

Furry Weeaboo Nazi Nihilist
Joined
Feb 24, 2007
Messages
14,982
The meat of the game is watching cute girls be incredibly cute. Other than that, you spend a gorillion hours grinding. Do not play this series if you dislike grinding.
What is the grinding? What are you actually doing? What does the item creation stuff entail? Is there combat?
My experience with the series is Mana Khemia and seeing a friend play one of the other earlier ones. There is combat. The grinding is for materials to use in crafting. Generally the game will be broken up into chapters, and in a given chapter you'll have a couple story missions and a bunch more optional ones. Most common are the requests to bring them an item you need to craft after hunting monsters and searching for magic tree branches or whatever. Crafting has it's own mechanics where you can gain skill or better tools to have more success or options. It's all fairly easy though, both crafting and combat. Obviously you also craft equipment and consumables.

Everything is very cute with a lot of nice atmospheric areas- ancient forests, floating island ruins, that sort of thing. Very chill games. I liked the music.
 

TigerKnee

Arcane
Joined
Feb 24, 2012
Messages
1,920
The PS2 era games are very out of the norm for the series and play more like traditional JRPGs with crafting bolted on top.

Most of the other games are item crafting focused games with combat and exploration tailored to serve crafting instead of the other way round as per standard RPGs. The item crafting tends to be more complex than usual and usually undergo huge changes between games so it's usually the freshest part - common attributes include juggling elemental values and traits derived from component parts (which can be created from more component parts forming a long chain to reach the end product) so as to produce top tier items which will generally be your main offense in a lot of the games.
 

HoboForEternity

sunset tequila
Patron
Joined
Mar 27, 2016
Messages
9,175
Location
Disco Elysium
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Atelier series prove the importance of know your audience's taste, find a winning combination, and NEVER DEVIATE.

Deviation from the wins is the common illness among western devs. Not for Japanese.
more like AAA gamedev problem. look at square enix and how much they butcher final fantasy. or capcom last gen.
 

Norfleet

Moderator
Joined
Jun 3, 2005
Messages
12,250
pedo shit.
Isn't that every Japanese cartoon, basically, ever? I mean, it's always some sort of schoolgirl vs. some sort of squid. Them Japs also like the long game, so they can drag out that particular plot for a very long time before the action actually happens, I hear.
 

Silentstorm

Learned
Joined
Apr 29, 2019
Messages
885
Atelier has been around for a while, since 1997 in fact, and there are quite a few games, it's just only recently they really started coming to the West and getting any kind of ads here, but basically, it's a bunch of cozy RPG's based on crafting, and grinding to get items to do said crafting, and then more crafting on top of that.

Like it has been said, they got their fans with that formula and haven't strayed from it, the biggest change being mainly different characters and settings, also, there are sub-series but it mostly translates into some games sharing the same settings and some characters.
 
Repressed Homosexual
Joined
Mar 29, 2010
Messages
17,867
Location
Ottawa, Can.
Games whose only purpose is to show cute girls to make the players attach themselves emotionally to, so they then buy the much, much more profitable resin figurines.
 

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