/v/ - Video Games

How old are the returning characters supposed to be?

I've never played these games, but have some interest in checking them out eventually. Why is the no time limit a bad thing?

Poor Sterk, he did not deserve to end up alone…

>>16499285

The other games had you balance creation and gathering with a time limit, so part of the fun of the game was making up your own strategy to make sure you could do as much as possible before you hit the deadline. No time limit means all difficulty in the series is gone.

>>16499206

Yea, unfortunately there's a lot of fucking casuals that play it. The time limit was really generous in Meruru and Ayesha so I thought it was about right. WIth no time limit there's basically no challenge to the games anymore and in exchange they made getting the best materials super grindy and not fun. (I don't know what it's like Lulua though).

>>16499445

Yea dusk was still good. It started to show signs of going to shit towards the end as it started to get more and more casualized.

>>16499369

Yes,all in the name of keeping 35 year old Rorona "pure".

>>16499334

So it's like Dead Rising but kawaii?

Older Atelier games were about accomplishing objectives within certain constraints such as the amount of materials that can be gathered in a single trip, the limit of your inventory, the time required to travel to certain destinations, the time required to make certain items, and many other things. Time limit enforces all these constrains. It's where the majority of the gameplay comes from.

Removing the time limit makes a lot of things in the game meaningless.

Why do we have travel time when there's no time limit?

Why do we have synthesis time when there's no time limit?

Why limit the amount of things I can carry with me when removing the time limit means I can go back to a certain area over and over to grind for the same item again and again without any penalties? It's just making the game tedious.

Why even have an in-game time at this point? You can ignore all these since there's no time limit, then it becomes Yet Another not-so-impressive JRPG with budget wasted on some meaningless system stuck in it. Just remove the time element from the game entirely, replace it with something else, and don't call it an "Atelier" game.

>>16500257

Meant to quote >>16499285

>>16500745

>So which of the series are good?

The first three Arland: Rorona, Totori, Meruru.

The first two Dusk: Ayesha, Escha&Logy.

>I heard that Mysterious is awful.

Sophie is sort of okay.

Firis is a disaster.

Lydie&Suelle is boring.

>>16500750

What about the earlier games?

>>16500754

I've never played PlayStation 2 era Ateliers (Salburg, Gramnad, Iris), so I can't comment on those. I've played Mana Khemia, and personally I think it's "casualizing Atelier" done right. Definitely worth trying.

>Not blood-related

GARBAGE. If they don't have the balls to >imply that someone impregnated Rorona, then I don't have the will to open my wallet.

>>16500745

>Arland (PS3/Vita)

Time constraints in full effect. Story & characters are fun.

>Dusk (PS3/Vita)

Time constraints relaxed (Ayesha), then extremely relaxed (Escha & Logy), then vanished altogether (Shalie). First two are good and have far stronger stories than Arland, on top of nice characters and being comfy as fuck. Wilbell is best girl.

>Mysterious (PS4)

No time limit, open world shit. Cute designs but doesn't look all that appealing. DLC practices get far worse, too.

There is a Vita release. Avoid. It's non-optimized garbage that runs like molases.

>>16499206

>it got no time limit, so it's instantly shit

Thank fuck, might be worth a playthrough now.

>>16500991

>open world shit

Firis massively benefited from having a real open world and in that aspect it's probably the best Atelier game in terms of level design/exploration out of all three generations. The biggest problem with Firis is the ridiculously obtuse recipe discovery system. Character stories also suffer a bit in terms of where and when they happen.

>>16500991

>Time constraints relaxed (Ayesha)

I hear this often. However when I played through Ayesha on hard difficulty I finished just about everything with 8 months left. That may sound like a lot of time, but it's similar to (or less than) the time I had left playing through the Arland trilogy.

Why is Ayesha considered to have relaxed time constraints compared to the Arland trilogy?

>>16501070

You're about the only Anon I've seen with experience on the Firis port for Vita.

I'm too lazy to burn my decade-old PC hardware with GUST's shitty unoptimized ports, but through Amazon reviews and fan sites I've read that the Firis version tends to crash somewhat often, which is pretty frustrating considering you lose on some progress more often than not. How true is this? Honestly, I can tolerate low framerates and shit graphics, but actual crashing that makes me lose an hour of play is something else entirely.

Should I play Firis on Vita without a worry for crashes or should I just avoid/skip the game entirely and play something else instead?

The mysterious trilogy was good.

>>16501517

It's been a while since I played Firis on PC, but I don't remember it crashing at all. Either way if you are losing an hour you need to save a lot more.

>>16501325

>that face

>not sculpted by Adonis

You know, sometimes I think that maybe Atelierfags aren't anti-male, they're just a bit fanatical. But than I realize this is the sort of propaganda they consume and I immediately know better.

Check em.

>>16501579

He just has a severe case of resting bitch face. When he doesn't look pissed off he's fine.

>>16500754

Iris 1 was quite good. Iris 2 was playable, although in my opinion much more of a typical JRPG with some crafting tacked on. I found Iris 3 to be kind of boring and off-putting and never got far into it, your mileage could vary.

>>16499697

>>16499369

fucking chinks

>>16501711

GUST's PSP ports are pretty bad overall (only Judie managed to get a decent one, Violet has a whole lot of bugs that can fuck over an entire playthrough and even delete your save, see https://wikiwiki.jp/viorate/%E3%83%90%E3%82%B0#o927285b) but Mana Khemia's are on a whole new level.

I can understand suffering through the PSP version of Violet for the extra content, at least through PPSSPP to avoid some of the more serious ones, but as far as I know the Mana Khemia ports have no extra content so I have to question why you'd play them in the first place. And yeah, that kanji is nigh-unreadable.

>>16502176

I wasnt aware of Viorate's bugs in the PSP version, although I havent played it yet to be honest. The fact it's still available on the jap playstation store (with a rather good user score rating) and officially compatible for Vita, made me believe things were fine overall.

>but as far as I know the Mana Khemia ports have no extra content so I have to question why you'd play them in the first place

They were the sole jap versions I could pirate easily + portability. From what I've read in amazon comments, the main problem seems to be the longass loading times and the recurrent freezes, which I wonder if they're "fixed" by playing digital rather than in UMD format. I should again should get back to it even if I agree the font can be a trouble to read properly.

I plan on getting an external dvd burner for my birthday soon so I could burn my jap PS2 imports, and share them, since they're usually a bitch to find on the internet

Time limits are terrible and should never exist except for short sections. One big "Game ends" time limit is worst sin of gaming.

>>16511668

>>16511694

No mention of a time limit in this new one, which is good news.

>>16511694

>>16511743

Terrible sales ahoy.

>>16511668

>Exposed toes

Why. The boots are meant to protect your feet and legs, why do this? Fucking footfags can't keep it in their goddamn pants anymore.

If the Atelier girls start young, why do so few of them wear print pantsu?

>>16511668

MEATY FUCKING THIGHS

>>16511743

REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

They should just make a easy kiddy modo for children who can't handle the time limit

There's zero challenge without it, therefore it's not a game without it, it's just a toy

>>16499206

Is this the kinda game where I have to play all the previous ones, or can I just play the latest?

>>16512032

The story is usually completely irrelevant and has nothing to do with the previous game. Most Atelier games are a "coming of age" story for the main character and that's it. However, they like to lean heavily on the previous characters. There's usually lots of nostalgic talk referencing previous games and such, so you'll probably feel like a huge outsider in many/most conversations if you haven't played them.

"All the previous games" means the current sub-series. Lulua is the 4th game in the Arland series. Anything outside of the Arland series (such as the Dusk or Mysterious series) is more like Final Fantasy where each game is a completely different world/universe, with just a couple of coincidentally connecting threads (FF has Cid the engineer, Atelier has Pamela the ghost girl, for example).

>>16512032

Meruru have massive spoilers for Totori

I don't remember anything else besides this

>>16511865

The "challenge" with the time limit is too autistic. It's literally only possible to succeed by knowing everything beforehand and using a walkthrough, or playing through the entire game start to finish seventeen times.

>>16512176

I've always beat every single atelier game on my first try without guides, it was not enough to be able to beat the extra content on the first playthough sometimes though.

There's so much time for the base game that if you fail you are a mouth breathing retard or a child

Also, as I said earlier, they should just add the kiddy baby mode that have no time limit instead of straight out stripping it

>>16512211

He means perfect ending, maybe all-endings if the game supports it. Obviously any idiot can complete the basic bad end.

>>16512297

>>16512364

But that's correct. Her name is エスティ, which romanaizes to Esuti and the U is dropped in pronunciation. So Esti or Esty for best English.

>>16512387

Oh anon. Youre so pure and innocent. Please dont change.

>>16512391

I played the game in Japanese so I really don't know what NISA did. The rare scene I saw in English looked fine.

>>16512408

They changed Esty's surname from Erhard to Dee for a shitty joke.

>>16512416

>>16512417

We have proof and we have their names.

All we need is just a bit of rope on the coming day.

>>16500750

Firis a best.

Get a dick.

Fuck you bitch.

>>16512416

>>16512435

You think there's a chance NISA might die when NIS goes out of business? NIS is in pretty dire financial straights right now, and I don't mean the "their stock dropped 5 points it's finally happening" shit we get with EA all the time.

>>16512448

I mean we Cartelstyle murder these 'people' responsible for this.

For desecrating my Esty and precious, precious Filly.

>>16512448

Honestly, i get an eerie feeling that since the only two people that even remotely cared about translation and localization integrity at Xseed have left, that they would just absorb NISA. From the execs point of view at Marvelous, the idea would probably seem like an advantageous endeavor. Theyd have an entire extra team of peole to shit out more games.

>>16512435

Calm down.

For now, this is a simple text change. Can anyone go into the game's files and replace all instances of "Dee" with "Erhard"? Then provide us the changed files?

>>16500750

>>16512446

So far I'd say Firis>L&S>Rorona>Sophie>Totori in terms of gameplay (alchemy+exploration). Haven't played any others yet (except Iris 3 a long time ago).

Totori has REALLY weak alchemy. There are no combination traits and no cost level up traits, plus half of the traits that do exist are either purely negative or have negative side effects. As a result there's no thought to put into mixing the best traits to make god items and you can't even carry traits on low-tier items to try to shift them around, so you just mix the best of whatever you have on hand or farm for better shit.

On the other hand, Firis has fairly weak story and characters, especially the non-returning characters, but this rating is mainly on gameplay. The open world suits Atelier's gathering gameplay perfectly and Firis builds on Sophie's already pretty strong alchemy. The only major flaw is the recipe discovery system which is as obtuse as possible

>>16512508

Totori is story wise my favorite, and I've played all Arland + Mysterious and dabbled a bit on the dusk

Arland series still the best series overall

>>16512448

FYI the guys who were in charge of Atelier at NISA moved onto whatever company it is under KT that localizes the newer games nowadays.

>>16512536

It's hard for me to judge based on story. Totori is alright, Firis and L&S are pretty bad I think, but I don't think story is the strong point of the series to start with.

>>16512541

That would be Actill. And they carry the NISA spirit with them (e.g. Shallie crashing in the growth menu in version 1.0)

>>16512569

>>16512541

No wonder the name wasnt fixed in Rorona+. Thank fuck i can pirate the PC releases now.

>>16512469

Everyone at NISA deserves death. Fullstop.

>>16512244

Every game i've played after Meruru I've perfected first time (I think I fucked up slightly at the end so i ended up missing and ending or two), the time limits are super generous and you would have to go out of your way to be as inefficient as possible to run out of time. After playing lulua I can tell you it suffers from having no time limit since it feels grindier.

>>16512614

>After Meruru

If they are so generous, why include them at all? Time limits just aren't a fun way to add "challenge" to these games. The best thing is when simply grinding won't make you strong enough and the way to beat the enemies is to properly learn the alchemy system and craft items with good traits and quality. Time is irrelevant, success comes from technical mastery of the system.

>>16512686

>properly learn the alchemy system and craft items with good traits and quality.

Pretty simple to do when you can grind for the best ingredients all day every day, now isn't, idiot? Even a monkey could make the best items by randomly smashing shit together if they have infinite materials. The challenge in crafting comes from using the limited resources at hand, in the best way possible, to make the best possible items.

>>16512709

Not really. In many of the games you have to go through a dozen steps to carry the best traits onto the best items. Figuring out which intermediate items you can craft in order to take multiple traits from your base ingredients all the way up to the intended result while also maintaining high quality is not something that "even a monkey can do".

>>16512762

Given infinite materials, yes it is. It's all good though; whatever makes you feel smarter and more accomplished for achieving a braindead task, stupid.

>>16512775

Thankfully it's a multiplat. I can already see the PS4 cover art cutting off the thighs.

>>16512686

Because it rewards being good at managing your time while also allowing people who are not as good at the game to still progress but at a disadvantage and gives them incentive to get better at the game. If you compare the atelier games with time limits to the ones without, you'll find that the ones without time limits are the ones that are often grindy and less fun. Where as the games with time limits have to be balanced so that the obstacles can be overcome within the time limit which often rewards players making smarter decisions with their time i.e searching out and making items to overcome the challenge. Compare this to Lulua where you basically mash your face on all the resources in your path and then just make as many bombs as you can make.

>>16512686

Kamidori Alchemy Meister has no time limit and its gameplay is shit because of it. You can overfarm everything, overcraft everything, generate enough gold to carry 99 of each consumable for each battle. Alchemy games simply can't have a good alchemy/battle system without constraints in place. Having infinite time and/or resources at your disposition goes against the concept of alchemy: transforming something common into something rare.

>>16513080

Quality>Quantity. Haven't played Lulua yet but I have played the Mysterious series. While grabbing all the resources is a thing (it's also a thing in Rorona, where time is per-stage rather than per-resource/enemy), ideally you would rather make one "perfect" bomb with the best traits you can get and then duplicate it, rather than spamming shittier ones that aren't actually powerful enough to kill the enemies easily.

The games aren't grindy if you don't play like an idiot, at least not until the endgame bonus shit where you have to farm for rare traits of specific enemies/gather points, but that's a thing in the time limit games too (rorona in overtime, for example). In those you simply reload your save every time you don't get the thing you want.

Anyone have the "START HERE ATELIER FAG" meme?

>>16513167

Mysterious also doesn't have batch crafting, so if you want to combine a bunch of different traits you have to do it on the intermediate components and then combine those in phases, all to get ONE output you can use. In Arland you could, if you had unlimited time and resources, simply craft a thousand copies of a single item at once and automatically have all the traits you own on it.

>>16513167

Because there's no challenge. Crafting a perfect bomb is far more satisfying when you actually have restraints. You're making the same argument as people who whine that you should have infinite revives in sekiro.

If you have no repercussions for being shit there's no game and no incentive to get better.

>>16513191

The repercussion is that you can't progress, you fail the fight and you have to go gather some more shit and make another one. Same as Sekiro come to think of it. The game doesn't end because you suck, you just keep sucking until you git gud.

>>16513195

Yes and the solution is to grind more, thus you proved my point. With a time limit the game must be balanced around that. With no time limit the game just makes you grind more if you die. With no time limit you feel like you're playing a spread sheet, with a time limit you're an alchemist who has real obligations that's the difference.

>>16513236

Couldn't agree more with this.

After "beating" firis with 45~ish days remaining and taking a beating from sophie, I loaded the game and crafted away all of my materias into the best shit I could craft and defeated her on the last day in a 40 turns epic battle.

If I could just grind more, it would be a boring 3 turns battle as I spam perfect bombs at lv99

>>16512292

>>16511761

Shame about the footfag shit

At least give her sandals instead of boot sandal cancer

>>16513689

I think you might be a closet footfag yourself. Normal people wouldn't even notice that shit to begin with.

>>16512176

>It's literally only possible to succeed by knowing everything beforehand and using a walkthrough, or playing through the entire game start to finish seventeen times.

Or just by not being retarded.

>>16513714

Quite the contrary, I fucking hate feet fetish shit

>>16512775

Thats pretty fucking lewd m8

>>16512775

Someone get this bitch some looser shorts, she's gonna cut off her fucking circulation.

>>16512706

That's the natural result of yuri, the truth yurifags like to ignore. All their cute girls will end up as lonely, childless, barren spinsters.

>>16512360

lol fucking Australian ratings board is pathetic.

>>16514792

Ryza is too lewd, in all honesty. To the point her design throws all subtlety right out of the window, wish they could've held back at least a little.

>>16514802

Okay, fag.

>>16514826

Those feet.

>>16514860

Imagine being this butthurt. I can't. I genuinely can't imagine the butthurt this person is feeling right now that this person is willing to burn all the money he or she spent on buying games. All because Gust made an attractive girl who isn't a disgusting carpetmuncher (as far as I am aware). Actually, I don't know anything about the series, never played any of them and they aren't my kind of games. Seeing this reaction is both confusing and entertaining. I have a few games from shitty developers, you don't see me screaming. Hell, I own a pair of really shitty comic books whose story turned to absolute homosexual shite, I really should get rid of them, but they cost me quite a bit. I think I'll just sell them online instead.

>>16514882

Just a fujo/tranny/tumblr and probably a secondary that thinks Gust only does yuri pandering. Also an absolute moron for thinking Gust wasn't pulling an obvious bait and switch with Rorona's daughter.

>>16514860

It's really incredible how these people just want to use words with no meaning. It's homophobic because a character isn't a blatant homosexual. Ridiculous.

>>16514792

Looks like another open world atelier, or at least one with very wide open level design, should be fun. Shame about the fat ass though.

Is there alchemy babies yet?

>>16515183

Isn't that basically what Hom and Chim are?

>>16514860

This is why Rorona never got with Sterk. Yuri fans are the worst type of autist. As soon as there's a hint of heterosexuality that wrecks their head canon, they throw a bitch fit.

>>16515775

Why not? She could definitely be that young.

>>16514792

Will this game be horribly optimized like the last Atelier games on PC and crash every few minutes?

>>16515795

Nah man nah. That much sexy can not possibly be packed into a 14 year old. She's gotta be at least 16 or 17.

Unless they're shooting for some sort of gap moe, where she's ridiculously sexy but very immature and naive, but that's not my sort of thing so I am personally not hoping for it.

>>16515775

Pretty sure rorona and sophie are 17-18, and this new ryza girl might be about 16, the japanese love big breasted school girls or JKs as they like to call them.

>>16515822

Rorona is 14 in her game and Sophie is 16. I could accept Raiza as 16, but anything less is stretching the limits of imagination.

>>16515821

Women stop developing around 14-15. There is absolutely no reason she could not be that young.

>>16515022

Not sure about open world, maybe just a little more spacious stages.

>>16515887

That would still be a huge step up from Rorona, Totori, and Sophie, just out of the ones that I've played.

>>16515887

>>16515917

Technically Firis was not open world, but HUGE stages instead.

>>16514825

Okay, fag.

>>16512176

>It's literally only possible to succeed by knowing everything beforehand and using a walkthrough

Anon, I think you might have brain problems. The games aren't hard even with the time limits, but at least they have a structure.

>>16517595

Right. Yuri is not lesbo as 2d is not 3d. 2d can be pure and have babies if we want. Anyone have that doujin with the nip and russian girl as the last two humans who find an alien machine to have yuri babies with?

>>16499206

This review was posted a bit for some time before the english version came out and it turned out to be pretty accurate. Only thing I'd personally disagree on is the music, thought it was kind of bland though there's a couple of good tracks.

https://www.frontlinejp.net/2019/04/29/review-atelier-lulua-the-scion-of-arland/

>>16521112

When I heard Totori and Meruru were DLC I figured there's story reasons for them to not join up and the DLC is like bonus shit but nope

They just fucking stand there doing nothing all fucking day as if you can recruit them to your party only you can't because fuck gust

And Mimi isn't even fucking DLC what the actual fuck?

>>16520939

>totori and meruru is dlc only

Yar my friends, only one way wer getting this outta the water

>>16512775

>Thigh chub

>Thigh gap

YES

>>16521842

>And Mimi isn't even fucking DLC what the actual fuck?

Not every character SHOULD recur. I'm not sure what Mimi's circumstances are in Lulua, but too many recurring characters takes too much of the spotlight away from the new ones, and too many characters in general makes managing them a chore.