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Atelier Shallie : Alchemists of the Dusk Sea ~Review~

I’ve never played an Atelier game before—ever! I like Anime and Japanese role-playing games, but the prospect of having to make EVERYTHING to use in the game, including healing items, armor, weapons and all of the base elements required to synthesize before you make those things I just mentioned through harvesting and also time sensitive objectives that make up the core gameplay experience, has always discouraged me from trying these games out.

Atelier Shallie, however, is one of the most streamlined and approachable games to come along for newcomers like me. For starters, there are no time sensitive objectives any more. You can progress the story further or hang out and synthesize or go out harvesting all you want with no time limit whatsoever. It’s more of an open world experience. The game gives you experience for almost every stupid little thing you do like walking or talking to anybody, so you can level your character and alchemy experience very easily. The synthesis menu list all the recipes you’ve learned, including any missing items you need to gather and there are plenty of recipe books to acquire through shops or story progression. The fusion system can get very deep, but I was able to make all of my items without any real penalty.

Now, the thing that I really enjoyed about the game, surprisingly, was the combat! You have between 6-8 characters to build a party from towards the end of the game, which is about 35+ hours long, and your party members all have flashy skills and super moves, and the bosses can get pretty tough and tricky at times, as well as some of the enemies out on the field. On the surface the game looks like any other generic Anime role-playing game, but its crafting system is pretty fun and deep but easy to use and the combat is pretty fun and has enough of a challenge to keep battles interesting.


You can play as either of two characters, who pretty much join each other and follow the same overall path half-way through the game, but they have slightly different stories and your stuff carries over in new game + so you can play with the other character to see their side of the story. The story I played through reminded me of a Final Fantasy game. In it, a young girl alchemist, Princess Stera, travels by airship over a sand ocean to seek help to solve her homelands drought. On the way her ship is attacked by a sand dragon, and gets stranded in a city where she has to use alchemy to do odd-jobs to repair her ship, and later to explore the world to solve the water crisis. Very formulaic, but epic enough to keep me invested in the characters and story nonetheless. Overall, I’m a fan of this series now and can’t wait to see where else they go with it in the future as this is the last entry in the Dusk series, and last Atelier game on PS3 until PS4. 

~asreal