In this game, we start off by following Firis, a lonely girl stuck in a small town, wanting to leave the town to go explore the world around her. One day 2 alchemists, Sophie and Pachta arrive in town and they introduce our main heroine to the wondrous world of alchemy. Firis seems a natural and immediately learns the tricks of the trade. She is now convinced that alchemy will be able to protect her outside the town she lives in and she actually ends up trying to perform tasks to prove she could earn herself the right to go outside of town.
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During the game, you get 1 month of gaming time to perform the tasks, letting you brew up items and fix problems faced by other villagers. Fix their issues and that is it! After you finish these small tasks, it leads you to the outside world, where you need to find letters for allowing Firis to become a full alchemist. This part grants you a “1 year” limit.
The good part being the story and the ease of rolling into the game. While the base story is on the light side, you get sucked into it pretty quickly. This is a classic styled RPG, much like any other Atelier games. The open world is a real bonus and the battle system is nice and clean, throughout the game, you get clear explanations when more functions/options become available. All easily browsed from the internal encyclopedia.
The bad part being dropped frames in the game… Something I found to be really disturbing, moving the camera creates this incredible amount of lag and yes, it is annoying, sadly enough it is annoying. In the beginning of the game, when you exit the Atelier and you dare touch your right thumbstick, it just starts lagging. I did end up looking at other reviews, just to make sure it wasn’t just me or my Vita playing tricks on me, but no, it seems to be a well-known factor often mentioned elsewhere too.
Lastly my use of the description: “the ugly”… Many games on the Vita sport much better graphics than this and the basic graphics are a bit misplaced in the current landscape that is gaming. Graphics are just above mediocre and could just be better…
In conclusion, I encountered some really great parts and some really disappointing. I thought the initial part inside the city was more of an annoyance than a treat, mostly due to the limited space inside the village and the constant use of the camera.
Once you finally get out of the village, things do get better and you will start enjoying the game much more, battles are nice and open world is like a sudden breath of fresh air, but is it enough the shake the feeling of being locked into the first part of the story? I do think so, but I am not sure you will feel the same.
I had a real difficult time thinking on how to rate this game, having given the description the good, the bad and the ugly before, so I came up with the following number, a 70% rating. The game itself may deserve a little higher, but the bad parts did weigh in heavily…
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