Crafting a good time with Atelier Ayesha!
July 30, 2024
I finished my first Atelier game a few days ago!
I have to preface everything with saying that I was introduced to this series in probably the best way possible; I read a game review on The Callisto Protocol, where the author takes the first and last paragraphs to bring up Atelier and how it epitomizes the idea that games don't need more money put into them, just more thought. Aside from the fact that they were obviously SPITTING, I was brought to my knees by the sheer dedication involved in using a review of a shitty game to meaningfully propel the merits of your favorites. So I sat the fuck down and listened. Thank you, Rose! You've converted one more...
Please look at my favorite character!
Anyway I ended up playing the first in the Dusk Trilogy; Atelier Ayesha: Alchemist of Dusk. I was drawn to it largely for the artwork, which is done by Hidari. Apparently his work on Atelier came first 😭 but I only knew it from Fire Emblem Echoes, which I adored, so I was gonna jump at the chance to see what else he worked on.
And... I really enjoyed it!! The visuals were lovely... it's got this great post-post apocalyptic (is that the word.) thing going on, a tranquil world that holds signs of having recently recovered from some kind of desolation. The environment design really stuck out to me with that in mind; you go through a lot of locations in the game and there's some real interesting looking standouts that make you wonder what happened so long ago. Hidari's designwork is as lovely as ever! Ayesha herself is a real sweetie and she absolutely looks the part, with the loose floral elements sprinkled about it and the use of warm and grassy tones. Designs like that are just totally my aesthetic and how I want to dress 😌 I also love ROBOTS!! and the character Odelia delivers, she's got these little wings and a windup key on her head and huuuge sleeves and AAAAAAAA SO GOOD i love you precious darling robot woman
In general narratively Atelier Ayesha felt like a real "vibes" kind of game; I read that Ayesha had a "better plot" than the others, and that it was more "plot-y", but I felt like there was barely any! There's really tiny beats that amount to "now go do this", and there's some big events at the start and end (and you can miss a lot of the actual lore at the end, still!), but a lot of it is slice-of-life events and skits as our super darling doofus of a main character bumps into people on her journey. I didn't mind this at all and thought it was just right. The character interactions are for the most part really charming! The characters aren't very deep, but they feel fun and likable and there's a really organic feel to how you can bump into them on the map over the course of playing and have a brief little interaction. I didn't find any of it to be like particularly hilarious or super emotional, but it's the kind of feel-good stuff that makes it really hard not to smile a little! It was a bit more... otaku-y than I expected in areas, though? There's a few jarringly out-of-place jokes about breast growth, a male character I found kind of unintentionally creepy, and an unusually large amount of interactions about losing/gaining weight (because women...?), and I guess a part of me hoped it was the kind of series that skewed more "written with girls in mind" rather than just "written about girls, for men", but that's the territory for ya I guess 🤷 At the least, it never gets gratuitous or distasteful and I definitely enjoyed the fun, low-stakes writing and cast a lot more than I was frustrated with any particular aspect, so I walked out with positive, warm-feeling impressions on the whole.
The RPG mechanics and battle system were good fun too! I read that people found the combat kind of weak here but I thought it was super mechanically-solid. There's this support system where you spend a gauge to have your allies tank hits for each other and reposition themselves, and I really really enjoyed how this played with the way you thought about battle. Assuming you manage your resources correctly, you have a lot of control over who takes damage on the fly, and I thought this was fun to get a hold on, especially in later encounters. The real issue I suppose was that a lot of the enemies weren't strong enough to really push you— I think the biggest challenges ended up being near the end of the game and in the postgame, where your knowledge of the systems are truly put to the test, and it's there where I came to appreciate the combat like never before.
Help me
But the "meat" of these games is said to be the crafting, and I quickly saw it when it threw me into an insane screen full of words and numbers and bars I felt like I barely understood! I FEEL LIKE IT DID NOT EXPLAIN IT TO ME VERY WELL 🥹. There were some brief pop-ups but I don't think it was the best at elaborating on what I should be doing, even though the system at its core is actually fairly easy to understand!!! But after reading the online manual (phew!) and looking more thoroughly at what was going on, it started to click and before I knew it I was making bombs and ointments like nobody's business. It's a truly addictive system that's fun to learn and progress in; you can make the same item and come out with totally different effects based on the ingredients, and not only that but knowing what order to put them in and what to put in previous ingredients helps bring the power out of the various gear and items you make. As someone who loves fun crafting systems in RPGs, Ayesha won my heart with the sheer depth and complexity of it, and even moreso when the postgame bosses are clearly designed in such a way that you have to really optimize your crafting and work towards making the best equipment possible. And apparently this is the weakest crafting of the trilogy? I can't wait.
I felt my enthusiasm crumble a bit initially when I first played because I ran into the game's dreaded Time Limit— you have 3 in-game years to wrap up the main quest, at the bare minimum. I spent so much time waffling around with how navigation and crafting worked that I squandered a lot of that time, and got the bad ending roughly 3/4ths into the game. I wanted to blow up! But I decided I really needed to properly beat this, so I decided to New Game+ now that I understood what to do (tip for anyone else interested: prioritize the main quest and the tasks with the star icons ASAP. any other side content can be done in postgame! also please craft the shoes and the glasses.), and finished it with about a year to spare. Go me!! On that repeat play it's actually where my appreciation of the game grew stronger, because I was doing better than before in part thanks to grasping the ins and outs of time management and thinking a lot more about my items and goals. It's not the kind of thing I'd want to deal with all the time, and I understand why it's so controversial (I hear the newer games just outright remove it?) but I can see the appeal of the time limit system. Amidst my initial frustration there was satisfaction in trying to work within it, and I liked that. Plus it was just such a fun game I realized I didn't mind running through a lot of it again! That's always a great sign.
So that's another franchise I'm set to consider myself a fan of! I was supposed to be going to Dragon Quest XI next, but Atelier Ayesha really scratched some kind of itch I didn't know I had, to the point where I'm already considering picking up the second game in the trilogy: Escha & Logy. Ayesha just felt like a really pure, satisfying game; a combination of strong gameplay, fun writing, and great audiovisual (I forgot to mention the OST RULES). It was as game as it got, and I was really happy to be able to get into it. I definitely will be furthering my journey into the franchise in the future ^^