So this was a bit of a surprise announcement. The Atelier series is pretty popular nowadays but that wasn’t always the case. In fact the first 5 games in the series never made it outside of Japan (more if you want to count side games). Atelier Marie is the first game in the series and it took until now to finally get a western release.

So I grabbed it, to see where the series started. Let’s see if it’s good!

What I liked

This was the beginning of the Atelier series, so clearly they were trying to find something that worked. And a lot of the conventions of the series are clearly set up here, and a lot of the basic elements are here already.

Alchemy, for example, is really simple. In the games I played, there were a lot of elements that are just not here, such as quality of ingredients, or the ability to customize items by transferring traits and such. Here, if you create a bomb, you get a bomb. It’s the same bomb anyone else would create, and you can’t make a better bomb. I think it makes sense for the first game of the series to not have the more complex mechanics, and here it’s fine.

The core of the game is much like you’d expect from any Atelier games. Alchemy in the atelier, events with characters in the city and exploring areas to gather ingredients. It all works fine, though every element is simpler than in most of the other games in the series. The combat is probably around the level it is in most of the games though, it’s a fairly simple turn-based system.

My last few Atelier games were 2 of the Ryza games, and they were very good, but they were lacking the time mechanic this has (and most of the other Atelier games have). There was no urgency in doing anything, so you could just keep making all the best items and shit forever. Here, you have set time, set goals and it’s good in letting you know that you can’t just mess around. Every action you take uses up one day of time, so a trip to an exploration area can last over a month of time if you want, so time does go down pretty quick.

Basically, it’s an Atelier game that does most of what Atelier has done since, just a bit simpler.

What I didn’t like

As much as I liked having a time limit… holy shit do they give you a lot of time. 5 years, 30 days a month, that’s basically 1800 “things” you can do, may it be gathering or fighting or alchemy or opening the door to your atelier (which is fucking stupid btw). The problem with this? Well, I had actually accomplished all alchemy-related things that the game requires from you long before I even had a year left, and beat all the bosses. Making the time limit 4 years would be a bit more reasonable. At that “you have one year left” point they didn’t even try to make it sound urgent anymore. The teacher somehow knows I made the philosopher’s stone (which is weird because you see her, like, twice in the whole game and you never show her anything you make), and just says “I wonder what she’ll do for the rest of the year”… which just led me to the question…

What AM I gonna do for the rest of the year? Other than maybe getting more character cutscenes, there’s nothing left. I can keep making shit with alchemy… Not that there’s any reason to. There’s a few bosses that are completely optional (only one you actually need to fight to get a good ending, and 2 separate ones needed to get a specific good ending), but that’s really about it. Try to get one of the events you may have missed maybe? It’s possible (like it was for me) to completely miss the martial arts tournament (because it requires seeing an event I only saw literally after the last tournament). I never got into the castle either, no idea what’s in there.

This also makes me question the replayability of the game. There’s 7 endings, each with specific goals. Said goals are kinda dumb. I basically qualified for all the endings which is pretty funny, but having Marie and/or Schea at max level or not ended up being the determining factor for which I’d get. I don’t know if I feel like I’d want to just do the same thing again but making sure Marie doesn’t go above level 49, or make sure Schea gets to 50… or just fail on purpose at everything.

Oh, just one weird thing, the weapon store… At the start of the game they mention that it will stock more stuff as you keep selling glasen ore to the store… well, there’s 2 armors that eventually pop up and I think 1 spear, 1 staff and 2 swords. That’s it, and it takes almost no glasen ore to unlock everything. I was expecting more stuff that didn’t appear no matter how much ore I sold (and you end up actually doing the ore grind a bunch because it’s the best way to earn money so you can hire more fairies). I did find one extra sword (and I was given an extra staff in a quest), I don’t know if there’s any other extra equipment to find… maybe there was, I didn’t see all possible equipment.

Overall

For maybe around half the playthrough, I was really enjoying this. Figuring out how to manage time and such was great. But the lack of depth and things to do kinda started being a bit of a drag for me. I was legitimately considering just resting for the whole last year because, at that point, I had nothing left to accomplish. And maybe I should’ve done that, because not doing that turned out being a total waste of time.

So I’d say this is a fun game, and a good starting point for the series, but the series DID improve a lot after this one. I’d recommend getting this on sale for a single playthrough. Getting all the endings would take a good amount of time, but also each playthrough would be basically the exact same.