I played Atelier Sophie. It’s a cute game where you play a young girl learning alchemy. Witch Simulator 2015, more or less. It’s the first game from the Atelier series I’ve played. A certain Twitter superstar always talks about them in glowing terms, so I figured I should give it a go.
Atelier Sophie is:
- 20%: a meaty crafting system. So you’re combining your items and the items have modifiers that carry through to the output, but there’s a minigame that determines the quality of that output.
- In the minigame, you collect values out of grid cells by placing different shapes over the top of them.
- When you place a shape, all the values around its perimeter increment.
- If you overlap existing shapes, they pop loose and you lose the value you collected. On the other hand the perimeter increments remain.
- 80%: the most formulaic JRPG imaginable. Visualise a JRPG in your head. OK. Not quite, it has an offensive/defensive stance mode and the attack menu is a pie menu not a text menu. Uh… yup, you got it. It’s exactly that.
It’s like a dog ate the second half of the GDD so they replaced it with a post-it note that reads “JRPG?” Why do people do this?
- Is there a tax incentive for orphan protagonists in Japan?
- Is there a long running dare about who can make a game that you can play for the longest just by pressing ‘A’?
- Does the editor of Famitsu have a notorious fetish for slimes?