Whoa I'm done with Dusk games. They were noticeably shorter than Mysterious games and way shorter than Ryzas, for two reasons. One of them, at least the latter two entries are ostensibly replayable, with you choosing one of two characters and only able to reach True Ending once beaten the game twice. Second, they're way tighter, and don't overstay their welcome. A testament to time limits, I'm sure.
Atelier Ayesha IS the big boy of this trilogy. It has the tightest mechanics, the perfect amount of risk vs. reward, plenty of challenges both mandatory and optional, and the wonderfully grounded, slightly depressing mood.
Hobo Elf claims Ayesha is what Ryza failed to reproduce, and I'm able to agree with him. The whole Dusk trilogy is about alchemy having fucked the planet up ages ago, and the current generation of men struggling to cope with a world that is, quite literally, dying - like a setting sun, y'know, in the middle of dusk.. Ayesha builds up on this and delivers a wonderfully personal story, and manages to do so nearly fully bereft of typical anime stylization. Really, character designs in particular are absurdly realistic. But enough talk about storyfag crap - Ayesha is a tough game, it demands of you to manage your time, and to manage it well. If you're fine with that, bravo champ. If you're not, grow some balls. Once you do, you'll be mercilessly zooming all around Ayesha's tiny ass map doing the bare minimum required to proceed, CONSTANTLY in the middle of the balancing act of how much bullshit you're able to get away with. You have three in-game years to reach your goal, and I did reach it in 1,5 years, horribly under-levelled and under-equipped, beating the final boss in a highly testosteronic battle. Ayesha is turn-based, pretty much no-frills, though it relies heavily on positioning around the enemies - you will find yourself jumping back and forth to avoid attacks and capitalize of continuous effect items. The items are depletable, and the progression is very much alright, unlike in, say, Sophie. Itemization is funny - you find equipment in the field, then identify it and improve it, rather than construe shit yourself. Ayesha is a survival horror more often than not, with you being constantly starved for means to advance, but also starved for any clues on how to advance - really, there's no quest log telling you where to go, and the way to reach the final goal is amazingly vague. I guarantee that you will be like a rat in a maze, but in a good way.
Atelier Escha & Logy (Eschatology hehe) builds upon Ayesha in a rather confusing manner, and it's a highly confusing game. Rather, it's a series of "chapters" in which you need to tackle a number of tasks, usually rather straightforward, upon which completion you're free to dick around and to Atelier stuff. Due to the storyline being split between the two characters, you'll find that there are much fewer events than usual, as they're distributed between the two. Your guys are two public servant alchemists assigned to a miraculously alive town of Colseit in the middle of an otherwise depressingly dead wasteland. As expected of public servants, they engage in mundane bullshit on the clock, and eat through tax money. No, really - money is the biggest change in E&L. In Ayesha, you were rather starved for money, but in E&L you swim in it, except - you also pay large amounts of money to unlock passive upgrades, which were relegated to 'memory points' in the previous game. Because of this, the economy is very deceptive, and you'll find yourself replicating items a lot. You craft your own equipment this time, though I must say that the progression in E&L is very unbalanced, and you effectively skip through entire tiers of items at a time. The game being on the easier side doesn't punish you for doing it, until you hit endgame and all the bosses are pain. The griffon beast before the main boss took me way more time than the main boss proper though lol. Unlike in Ayesha, and very much like some future entries, your party has a 'back row' of benched characters, who jump back and forth to deal extra damage, and to swap between skillsets. To make this valid, fights in E&L are also much too tedious for the level of challenge they present, with most enemies being annoying hp sponges, most bosses having multiple attacks per turn, etc. It's an unwelcome trend, but so it goes. All in all, it's not a bad game, but suffers from Gust's typical mid-trilogy mechanics fuckery.
Atelier Shallie kinda annoyed me in the same way Atelier Lydie & Suelle did. It's a very radical shift from the previous two games, also it relies much too much on past characters and events, instead of telling a new story. I guess it's to be expected, as both are trilogy finales, but it really confuses me how could anyone recommend it as a standalone game. Unlike the previous two, there's absolutely no time limit here, though you'll have a gimmick mechanic punishing you for dicking around - morale, making you literally run slower if you don't progress. For some reason, halfway through the game the morale counter remained maxed out for me, and I assume it's a bug, directly tied to how the game tackles progression. Like in E&L, there's the core task to tackle per chapter, then you're free to dick around doing 'life tasks,' and you need to do some to progress next. Which makes Shallie the one game which doesn't respect your time at all, since you'll be revisiting locations all the time, in spite of the time optimization habit you picked up playing the previous two games. These life tasks proc very randomly, usually catching up with what you were doing in the pre-life task phase, with a dozen activating at once. Suddenly, you're level 30 like eight hours into the game, because the tasks give you some exp, and remain super confused. The economy is busted, and it really doesn't matter at all. The alchemy speeds up super slowly, contrary to E&L, but as it speeds up it also gains amazing momentum, allowing you to craft broken shit which wouldn't have flied at all back in Ayesha, lol. Very much like E&L, hp bloat is pain, and you will face basic enemies with 4-6k hp in the endgame quite routinely. The game relies a little too much on your burst gauge, which used to power ultimate attacks or support attacks in the previous games, here it unlocks the super damage mode without which you simply wouldn't be able to kill any boss monster. Even main boss is a conscious testament to this design, and spawns trash mobs just so that you have anything to power up your burst gauge on lol. It's not a bad game, but it's a Willbell fanservice game first and foremost, which is surely a pro argument for many.
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