| Ammadeau 277th Post
 
Copper Customer
    
|  "Atelier Viorate Quick Impressions"
, posted Fri 4 Jul 02:19
A quick example of the tone of Atelier Viorate:
If you choose the main character's brother for one of her combat partners, Viorate gains a special attack where they engage in a huge sibling brawl in a rather cartoonish style with a dust cloud, wacky sound effects, and odd objects flying all over the place, which smacks into the monsters they were fighting, doing damage to them. That ought to teach bears who offer people booze and eat box lunches.
The world is not in jeopardy. There is no spiky haired hero with a mysterious past or arrogant bastard out to take over the world. There are no in-game cut-scenes. There is no 3D whatsoever. This is not your average Japanese RPG. This is the fifth game in the Atelier series by Gust, a series which sadly has never come to the US.
Variety is the spice of Atelier Viorate. Unlike most Japanese that dish out combat after combat with a heavy portion of story in between and sprinkled with the occasional mini-game, AV has no set recipe the player needs to follow.
If you feel like gathering ingredients and battling monsters along with a little exploring you can do that, or you could stay in your home town, buy ingredients from a store, and make money by combining these items via alchemy into things you can sell. Or you could focus entirely on your alchemy research, creating new items which in turn are used to create even better items, like taking milk to produce cheese and later turning that into some tasty cheesecake. Or once you have progressed far enough into the game, you can open your own shop to sell your wares, specializing in whatever you like or having a little bit of everything, and hiring someone to run it if you don't feel like doing it yourself. Or you can bond with various NPCs by taking out monsters with them, which will in turn prompt sub scenarios with the particular NPC.
There's variety in other ways. Like the over a dozen NPCs that can join Vio in combat, each with four unique abilities, like the maid who falls flat on her back to take a quick nap in the middle of combat to restore hit points or the drunken girl who chugs down alcohol only to spit it out as fire at her enemies. Not to mention the hundred or so alchemy recipes Vio can follow, all the various equipment, everything from combat feather dusters to magical bracelets, that can be bought or made, all the different places Vio can go, though these only open up at the game progresses and some areas only accessible via special items that need to be made (but there's always several possible items to choose from).
An interesting first for the Atelier series is tutorials. Whenever Vio needs to do something she hasn't done before, the player can choose to see a short slideshow which explains exactly how the task is done. These are in Japanese like the rest of the game, but the pictures alone helped me understand some of the new aspects this game introduced. This, combined with a number of other minor tweaks, makes it the most accessible Atelier game to people who can't read Japanese.
Graphics are 2D with a lot of attention to detail, from the way a cat is startled awake to the grass blowing in the breeze. Some monster, NPC, and item graphics were reused from the previous two PS2 games, but Atelier Viorate is still about 85% original. All the little details in Vio's bedroom alone show how much care went into crafting this fantasy world. There isn't a single spot in the game which feels vacant or lacking in detail.
Unlike the music in Judie, which felt like remixes of tunes from the previous games, the music here is unique and rather wonderful in Dolby Pro Logic II. Overall, it has a light feel which suits the game perfectly.
This is not by any means a difficult game, at least if you don't try to take down monsters you're not ready for or make items without obtaining the proper tools first. It's meant to be light-hearted fun that can keep you entertained for five minutes or five hours at a stretch. And it fulfills that goal better than any other game I have ever played.
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