I love the Atelier series and really looked forward to playing this game. I got the bad ending around the first 1/3rd of the game and got NG+. I kind of enjoyed that the game was built closer to the Arland games in that way where you can keep certain bonuses to help with sequential play throughs. On my second run I looked up some tips and got a few turns away from getting the true end before I hit the end. I’m tempted to do a third run, but I’m so burnt out.

The game gets really grindy at about the half way point. I optimized each turn up until the last ten turns before giving up and just trying to get the main story. This meant some turns were taking me over 30 min each. I really wish in the later game there would be some auto functions. Like if I need all my groves set to a particular item I could select them all instead of needing to adjust over ten groves to that item. I probably could have left a lot to default settings, but I didn’t want to feel like I was half ***ing my way through it.

I was really looking forward to the dialogue scenes but found myself just rushing through them all at a certain point because it became too much to read through. I got impatient and just tried to rush through to get it done. I would recommend if someone is burnt out to probably just put it down for a while instead.

Looking back I’m not sure if I would recommend this game or if I liked it. The part of me that liked play NG+ with Arland is still tempted to go for that third run to be a completionist, but I think I’ll settle for YouTube cause I don’t think I can sit through another 20-30 hours of spreadsheets.

I watched a video where someone said they didn’t care for the lack of exploring or how the battles are done. I’m sort of torn. It reminds me a lot of Marie and Elie, so it didn’t bother me as much cause it’s basically the same level of “game”, as the early Atelier titles. I actually loved the auto battle feature. By removing the battles though, it became even more of just dialogue and spreadsheets, which wore me out.

I hope others are able to enjoy this game. I really like the idea of it. Maybe someday I’ll go back for the true end run. If you like the game, maybe try the fan translations of Marie and Elie if you haven’t already.