I’ve been bad about sharing what games I’ve been enjoying on Fami outside of Red Monster’s awesome weekend threads these past few months, so I’m going to make an effort to change that. The past few months I’ve been whittling down my PS3 backlog from 40 games down to 29. I played the games I was less enthusiastic about first that way if I have less time and enthusiasm to tackle the project in the future I’d have games I was more excited about left to motivate me. My goal was to hit 30 left before the year ends so I’m ahead of schedule.
Anyway, I’m quite excited I finally started Atelier Rorona Plus as part of this project. I’ve been collecting Atelier games for a long time now, but I never played more than an hour of any of them. I’m in the middle of the first year, third month right now, so I’m still early, but I’m having a great time so far. I’ve always been intimidated by the time limits in the series, but now that I’m almost done with the first big assignment period, I think I’m going to be ok. In something like Persona, I tend to get choice paralysis once I run out of obvious choices for how to spend my time. In Persona 3 for example toward the very end, I had hung out with everyone I wanted to and felt my party was more than ready to tackle the final boss and so each day was painful as I had no idea how to spend it. The only way I finished the game was by deciding to sleep in the whole final month which felt bad, but at least allowed me to see the ending.
In Rorona here by contrast, the goal of the game is straightforward. There’s twelve big assignments and you have 90 day windows to clear them in. What I didn’t know walking in, is that if you finish an assignment early, you can spend your time working towards a second set of big goals, and numerous small assignments plus there is a separate goal entirely of exploring all of the dungeons. What I like here is that it does a good job surfacing the information you need to help you best navigate the game and so far there’s always appealing options to work towards. The days fly by fast too (and I imagine even faster as you get deeper into the game) and according to How Long To Beat the overall playtime isn’t too large so while this sounds overwhelming on paper, as I got into it, it actually doesn’t seem that bad at all. I actually finished the first big assignment with 55 days to spare and cleared out the entire second set of goals with 21 days to spare. I still have time to further get ahead here then by entering the second dungeon, gathering more ingredients, and leveling up. The actual game feels pretty cozy so far too with solid enough production values and the classic style turn based combat has a good flow so far. I was concerned at first about having to hire allies, but the one guy I have so far who charges money ultimately charges very little for what he helps bring in and has only gotten cheaper as his friendship level rose.
Last thing briefly it was kind of funny when the story starts and your mentor is like “nah I still don’t want to work even with the castle threatening to close down our Atelier so here’s an instruction manual, the store is yours now, good luck and bye!” as it really felt like I was being thrown into the deep end immediately. But yeah as I’m finding so far almost 1/12th of the way in, this might not be so bad after all. Wish I played this one sooner, I’m feeling optimistic I’m going to have a good and maybe even great time here.
I suddenly got an itch to replay this. So many interesting jrpgs locked to ps2 (xenosaga, suikoden and shadow hearts im looking at you...)
www.gematsu.com
