Atelier Totori ~The Adventurer of Arland~ DX

pro: adventure themed have some great osts cute basically an anime in the Japanese dub

NOTE: Other reviews mention bugs and crashes that I'm sure continue to exist. With my playthrough in particular I frequently experienced a crash that would happen when visiting a shop and a cutscene would play. Talking to the vendor afterwards and selecting a cancel option would cause the game to crash. To get around this, I would leave the shop before returning to talk to the vendor. It's certainly unpleasant to deal with and I saved several dozens of times to avoid losing progress, but that's just an unpleasant reality of these old, niche ports so I accept the tradeoff I play/intend to play these games casually so don't particularly care about achieving the true endings or multiple playthroughs. I spent my playthrough mostly synthesizing and fulfilling quests, though did spend a while grinding hunts and exploring to obtain low-hanging points towards ranking up. I enjoyed the gameplay loop well enough, and while combat continues to be somewhat barebones, I was able to get through while keeping it a mostly enjoyable distraction As a follow-up to Atelier Rorona, you can expect more of the same with slightly revamped systems. The builtin timer is both more strict and more generous,…

Melvia <3

Pretty much everything in this game is better than in Atelier Rorona. The only downgrade from Rorona is the fact that you can't see your chance of success or alchemy level when you are in the cauldron menu, which is mildly annoying.

Great Game.

It's hard to fully not recommend Totori because maybe part of my not liking it nearly as much as Rorona is due to it those two being the only two Atelier games I've played? But there were so many frustrations and mechanics I didn't enjoy that I can't imagine recommending it over Rorona to anyone so No it is. I had heard it was much more punishing than the other games in the trilogy, but it turns out that the time limit itself wasn't even close to my biggest issue; I had no interest in trying to mix-max following a guide the whole time to get the True Ending so I just played the game going for finishing it at all and it turned out that was much more forgiving than I expected it to be. The opening section of the game drags, and until the point where I unlocked the ability to use the lab and take requests in Arland the only thing keeping me going was stubbornness because the idea of wasting a bunch of days every time I wanted to rank up, buy recipes or items from the majority of the merchants, or make armour/weapons and then more to be able to take quests again almost made me quit. Overall the mechanics just didn't work for me nearly as well, even if the experience from Rorona m…