Let me level with you, this wasn’t a game that I requested to review. The way I wound up with it mainly went like, “Atelier Iris 3, it’s a sequel to a fantasy RPG series I’ve never played before, huh? Well, I’m not looking at anything else at the moment, so go and send it my way. It can’t be that bad.” Sounds like a recipe for disaster, right? Well much to my surprise, I wound up enjoying this game a lot more than I expected to. The turn based battle system and alchemic item creation system have a lot of depth to them, making them really fun to use. Unfortunately the story, and game world aren’t nearly as deep.

JASON GLICK

How shallow is the story? Let’s start at the beginning…

Iris, an alchemist, and Edge, her warrior friend, are members of the guild in the city of Zey Meruze. Each day they go around performing odd jobs as requested by anyone who posts a notice to the guild’s (pencil and paper) message board. One of these jobs leads to Iris finding out that the sealed book that’s been in her family’s possession for years is actually the Escalario, a magical item of great power. At least, it used to be before its power was broken into eight fragments. Now it’s said that whoever collects these fragments will have all their wishes granted, and that’s a pretty appealing quest for Iris and Edge.

So, if you think that there’s more to this quest than meets the eye, than you’d be correct. If also you think that there’s a SINISTER and EVIL force behind the power of the Escalario, then you’d be correct as well. If you think further and assume that our heroes will encounter a checklist of anime character types like the stoic badass guild member who becomes the group’s rival, and Nell, the energetic and outspoken (or loud and annoying, take your pick) who winds up joining your party, you’d be right too.

In case you haven’t figured it out, the storyline is extremely predictable.There wasn’t one plot twist that I couldn’t spot coming, or bit of character development that I haven’t seen done before, and better in other titles. Really, the only redeeming factor I can find with the story and characterization is that it’s not aggressively awful; while there’s nothing original to be seen here, there’s nothing too painful about the execution. So for the undemanding gamer, or the one who likes lots of cute anime hijinks, it’ll probably go over better for them than it did for me.

It’s a good thing that the gameplay is there to pick up the ball that the storytelling drops, because this review could’ve gotten nasty. As it is, the battle system is one of the most involving turn based ones I’ve encountered in recent years. While I’ve bitched before about the generic menu-based combat of other RPGs I’ve reviewed for this site (in its previous incarnation), the combat here has a welcome strategic element, and rewards aggressive play.

First of all, you can see every enemy in the areas you visit, and they’re helpfully color-coded for your convenience: blue for weak enemies you can simply destroy with your sword, white for stronger enemies, red for mid-boss and boss-type creatures. Being able to see the enemies before you fight them is a plus, but it’s even better to be able to destroy the weaker ones so you don’t have to worry about fighting them. Once combat starts, you’ll want to finish the fight as soon as possible, because a quick finish means that no time will have passed during the battle, leaving you with more time to explore the given area (more on that later). To do so, you’ll have to use your standard attacks, magic and special techniques, but the latter two are handled a bit differently in this game. Instead of magic or technique points, you’ve got a charge gauge that increases with every attack, and the party’s ability to use special moves and magic is drawn from this gauge. It’s relatively easy to build up the gauge between battles, so you’ll never really “run out” of the power to use techniques and magic, but you will have to manage their use so that you don’t run out of them at a crucial moment.There’s also the “burst” meter, which builds up with each successful attack.Once full, the enemies become dizzied, your charge gauge maxes out and your special attacks do more damage. It’s a great way to wipe out enemies quickly, but it becomes absolutely necessary to use against the stronger enemies and the bosses. Fortunately you can fill it quicker by attacking enemies with their specific elemental weakness (ice against fire, etc.), but as you’d expect it fills slower if you attack their strengths.

Last but not least is the battle order chart, which tracks who will be attacking in what order, and how long they have until that time. Having this information is extremely handy, not only because it’ll allow you to take out the enemies that will be attacking next, but because some weapons have “delaying” properties. This means that if you attack enemies with these weapons, you’ll be able to knock them back in the attack order, giving your characters more chances to attack them. Yes, this might seem like a lot to take in at first, but the game does a good job of acquainting you with all of it so that in time, you’ll be exploiting it to your advantage like a pro.Then you’ve also got the “Blades:” different profiles for Edge and Nell to make use of. For Edge, they mostly consist of different styles of physical attack, such as the Ninja which does less physical damage, but has high speed, and can make multiple attacks. Nell’s usually emphasize magic, either of the attacking, healing, or status variety. While you’ll encounter some of the “Blades” of the natural course of your adventure, others will be found through the sidequests you’ll undertake. There’s a lot of variety between them, so you’ll want to experiment with them all to find the ones that are right for your style.

Regarding those sidequests, you’ll get them the same way you do the main story-related quests: on the guild’s message board. Throughout each chapter you’re able to undertake a number of sidequests that will have you performing a task for one of the townspeople or the guild itself. You’ll gain cash, weapons, items, or quest points that are used to raise your rank at the guild. Once you’ve ranked up, the final mission for the chapter begins. Before that, you’re able to complete the missions in any order, allowing you to do as few, or as many as you’d like.

The reason you’d want to do as many sidequests as you can is because of alchemy. Iris can use alchemy to synthesize new and useful items from other items, and all you need are the right reagents. Naturally, she’s able to make far more useful items than you can find in the stores so you’ll be wanting to find more reagents and more recipes to create new items. Trying to create new items is very addictive, since you can also tinker with the existing recipes to create even more new items, and the more new items you create, the more Iris’ alchemy level increases, giving you hints that allow you to create even more new items. It’s a vicious cycle, but quite an addicting one.

However, in completing these sidequests, looking for reagents, or alchemic hints the game reveals its other main deficiency. The city of Zey Meruse is actually a hub for several other magical places known as Alterworlds, home to several different races of beasts and lots of monsters. While their designs range from bland (two are forests, one is a castle), to inspired (one is a realm of crystal, and the other is made from giant swords and hammers) the one thing they all have in common is that after you’ve spent a certain amount of time there, you’re booted back to Iris’ house. While the characters seem to regard something like this as “magical” I view it as “a crutch used by the developers to keep you from realizing how small the game world actually is.” Having such an arbitrary limit placed on your visits to these areas is meant to discourage players from exploring them at their leisure; because if they did, they’d notice that the actual game world of “Atelier Iris 3” is very small indeed. That in itself isn’t a problem, but when the missions and sidequests you perform take you to the same places over and over again, it becomes VERY annoying. Credit where credit is due, there is a fair amount of interactivity with these environments, as aside from your sword, you’re also able to get a hammer to smash rocks, and a lantern to light fires, which can open up new places in these areas. The amount of time you’re given in each area is usually more than enough to complete the task at hand, but you’ll never think of this aspect of the game as anything more than a hedge used by the developers to hide the actual size of the world.

Though some of the Alterworlds do boast a nice design sense, the actual quality of the graphics in this game is about what you’d expect from a Nippon Ichi game. Pretty good… for Super Nintendo. Seriously, with the exception of some of the spell effects, there isn’t a whole lot here that couldn’t be done by that classic console (for that matter, everything here could probably be done without a hitch on the PS1). While I’ve got nothing against 2D sprite-based graphics, technology has advanced to the point where you can do so much more with them than this. Take a look at the last game I reviewed, “Odin Sphere” for an example of what I’m talking about. Interestingly enough, NIS America’s next game (“Grim Grimoire”) will be from the developers of that game, Vanillaware.

As for the sound, the English dub isn’t too bad, but it wasn’t compelling enough to keep me from changing the spoken dialogue over to Japanese. I was in for quite a surprise, as this turned out to be one of the few games where parts of the Japanese dialogue managed to annoy me! Specifically, Nell and a few other female characters have such high pitched, squeaky-sounding (“KAWAII!!!”) voices that I almost considered changing the dialogue back to English. I didn’t, but only true otaku will be able to appreciate these kinds of voices.

In fact, the game itself is pretty geared towards the otaku gamer. They’re the ones who’ll be able to appreciate the game’s colorful look, cute female characters, and deep gameplay the most while being able to overlook its faults because the game is specifically catering to their needs. For the rest of us, “Atelier Iris 3” is a somewhat above average RPG that has plays better than most of its kind, but fails to tell a truly compelling story and has some real issues with its design. As I said at the beginning of my review, I did have more fun with this game than I was expecting, but it still wasn’t enough to make me recommend this game at full price.

Pros: Deep battle system, compelling item creation system, fun to actually play
Cons: Predictable story, bland characters, irritating design choices

Overall: 6.5

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 at 6:55 am and is filed under Atelier Iris, NIS, Playstation 2, RPG. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.