So I played 4 more hours of Atelier Sophie and looked up some info on the Atelier series as a whole to get an idea of what I might be missing were I to quit right now. Apparently, not much. So I'm going to tell you what I think about it.
The Atelier series is just a month and a half younger than me at 20 years old, and has apparently stuck to a similar theme throughout the entire time, releasing more or less one game every year. It differs from most RPGs in that the story is very "trivial", and there's a very heavy focus on crafting.
What I mean by the story being trivial is that there's no huge issue to solve or a grand plot, but it's more like an amplified slice of life. Really not my cup of tea, and I could've literally fallen asleep had I played for a little longer. And while I'm a big fan of crafting, then at least in this installment, the crafting depends way too heavily on the rest of the game, while not giving much back. That is, in order to experience the most of the depth of the crafting system, you have to really grind some other aspects of the game, but the difference in actual results is negligible. But if you don't want to spend more time than is fun on the other parts of the game, then the finer points of the crafting system might as well not exist. So, really, it doesn't tie in too well to the rest of the game, yet is dependent upon it.
And as is tradition for JRPGs, they overdo certain aspects. The first of which is of course cutscenes. I came to play a game, not to read a 3D visual novel, so I wouldn't be surprised if someone just quit before even getting to the game since they were stuck watching cutscenes for the first hour of the game. Secondly, the incredibly complicated, but not equivalently deep mechanics and game systems strike again. There's pages upon pages of tutorials explaining to me the multitude of possibilities, yet a sizeable portion of them go unused for the most part.
And a short but very important note is that the keyboard controls were simply atrocious, not listed anywhere except a text file in the game files (and even then lacking two very important keys), and none of them were rebindable, making navigating the world and the menus a hellish experience.
Each next JRPG I play further drums it into me that all JRPGs are pretty much the same. Although I felt this one was perhaps even slightly better than the average JRPG I've experienced. It felt kind of sweet, for lack of a better word, and I like that, but I'm really going to doze off from how boring and bland it is for the most part. As such, this is the last I'll play of it.
I'm quite sure all of this also applies to the next game in the series, Atelier Firis, which I've removed from my backlog as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment