Developer: Koei Tecmo
Publisher: Koei Tecmo
Release Date: Feb 7th, 2017
Editor: LoliNia
Marking the first major foray into the global PC game market for the definitive item-crafting JRPG series, we have Gust Co. Ltd.’s Atelier Sophie: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Book. Released for the PS4 in 2016 and PC in 2017, Atelier Sophie is the 17th main installment of Gust’s classic Atelier series and the first game in the Mysterious sub-series. It has the interesting position of simultaneously being part of a well established series and starting its own independent story line, leaving it accessible to new players and series veterans alike. In the case of this reviewer, it was my first venture into the series so I won’t be bringing up comparisons to past installments. However, that doesn’t mean I dove into the series completely blind.
At the very center of the series’s mechanics is some form of alchemy system that is instrumental in your progress through the story. No, I’m not talking about FMA-style shenanigans; the stories tend to be much more lighthearted. It’s more along the vein of tossing some plants, rocks, and dead things in a pot, giving it a good stir, and pulling out some explosives. Grinding levels in an Atelier game will only get you so far so you best learn how to kit out your squad. Develop your gear and figure out your own combat style to succeed, even if said style is just endlessly lobbing instakill AOE bombs at folks. The other hallmark of the series is some sort of time mechanics, usually in the form of a deadline to reach your goals. The games actively encourage the players to optimize and ration their time in order to succeed. With this in mind, we’re brought to Atelier Sophie.
Our titular heroine Sophie has a pretty normal life in the town of Kirchen Bell. She has normal interests like cute dresses and barrels. She’s best friends with a girl from the church choir and the grocer’s son. Her days are relaxing, filled with making snacks for her friends, picking shiny plants in the forest, and occasionally launching hand-crafted missiles at chimeric beasts to restore the memory of a magical talking book she found in her dead grandmother’s workshop – Oh, yeah, about that. See, dear ol’ Gran was the previous alchemist of the town, responsible for creating the many niche goods the citizens requested. Sophie took over for her once she passed away, but she can be a touch forgetful when it comes to recipes. By happy chance she finds an oddly empty reference book amidst her grandma’s tomes and promptly started jotting her own concoctions down. Next thing she knows, the book is flapping around, talking, and has set her on an epic quest to restore its lost memories and power— by doing what she normally does anyway.
That’s the thing about this game; it’s more of a slice-of-life, character-based JRPG than a typical adventure. Sure, you’ve got your goal of restoring your new bookish, well-read friend and alchemy tutor, and there may be rumours of an encroaching demon lord or some such, but there’s no reason to stress over those. In a departure from established Atelier tradition, you’re free to take your time. The closest thing you’ve got to a deadline is the time limit for optional fetch-quests and bounties. In this game you can just relax and live your (or rather, Sophie’s) life. Practice your craft, explore the nearby ruins, make some new friends, maybe take that cute bunny waitress from the cafe out on a date. If your fun happens to inspire a new recipe or jog a certain tome’s memory, then more power to ya. It’s possible to single-mindedly rush through your objectives, but you’ll get through them anyway through exploration and character interactions, so you may as well stop to smell the roses. Unless they’re secretly Alraunes, in which case you bomb them like there’s no tomorrow.
Of course, you’ve gotta get your pyrotechnics from somewhere. It’s not like the locals are about to sell high-powered explosives to a 16 year old! Fortunately for the Anti-Alraune-Association, Sophie is an alchemist. Go out into the wild, forage for materials, mug a couple o’ slimes for loot, and toss the spoils into your cauldron. With the right recipes, Sophie can produce all sorts of goodies; snacks, medicine, projectiles, weapon materials, and tools are all fair game. To make alchemy a little more interesting, instead of just tossing ingredients in a pot and waiting, Atelier Sophie introduces a sort of grid puzzle interface to the process through which you can improve and customize your final product. There’s a surprising amount of complexity and flexibility with the process; your end item will not only be influenced by the ingredients you chose, but also the pot you put them in, where you place them, and even the order in which you added them to the mix. You’d better get creative if you want to take on the harder fights.
The combat in this game starts out straight-forward and doesn’t get too terribly complex. Battle is initiated by walking into your enemies on the map. You start with three fighters and can have a maximum of four in your active battle party. It’s a fairly simple turn-based system, with turn order of combatants determined by their speed and the variable cooldown period after they execute their actions. Character commands are simple with an offensive or defensive stance that can be adjusted each turn, and the choice of using a normal attack, a skill, or an item, defending, or fleeing. Standard stuff. The only effect of positioning your characters is that the fighter in front is most likely to be targeted. Honestly, the battle system seems outright dull at first; you’ve only got basic items, your skills quickly deplete all your MP, and battles become a simple back and forth of smacking each other. This undergoes a dramatic revamp once you recruit your fourth team member. Thanks to training from your new cohort, you unlock the capacity for team maneuvers such as automatic follow-up attacks, special moves, and coordinated defenses (e.g. You can make Oskar tank everything).
With the floodgates open, you’re now free to customize your squad to your tastes. As you progress you’ll find new materials with new traits to mix, match, and combine to devastating effect. Some of these traits can be easily transferred from materials to products while others are unique to the individual items you produce and depend on how, exactly, you cooked ’em up. Passive regen and defense for your tanks, zero-MP cost for your skill spammers, auto-resurrection, instakill, life-drain, and more are at your fingertips; all it takes is some creativity, curiosity, and maybe a smidgen of pattern recognition. That, and farming for materials. You need to craft your weaponry out of something, after all, and those somethings can vary quite a bit based on not only where, but also when you find them.
Time limits may not be a major mechanic in this game, but time itself is. This manifests itself in a day-night and days-of-the-week cycle that progresses in time with in-game actions. Along with a rudimentary weather system that consists of stormy weather or clear skies, this provides more than cosmetic effects. Gathering at night or during rough weather, or both if you’re brave, will usually net you rarer, higher-quality materials while also amping up the nasties comin’ at you. Gotta plan your escapades to find the stuff you want, lest you get ambushed by a posse of trident-wielding demons. That’s more or less the extent of the effects on your field work, but there are more noticeable effects in the actual town. Weather-wise, characters will take shelter in alternate locations to hide from the rain, but that’s about it. Time of day and day of the week have a much more important affect, altering the quality of merchants’ goods, availability of specific attractions, and the characters you can meet at a given location. The town is a town after all, with people who have their own lives to live and schedules to keep, and the game doesn’t let you forget it anytime soon.
The socializing aspect is a surprisingly substantial and satisfying component of the game. The notable characters in the game have various scenes and requests that can be accessed based on when you encounter them that really help to develop them as individuals. I’ve chatted with the doll-maker about his daughter, courted the weekend-only rabbit-eared waitress at the cafe, and contemplated the worth of dreams and aspirations with a jaded couturier. One night I decided to just go for a walk to the cafe and bumped into the nun from the local church. After expressing mutual surprise that we were both out so late, we spent a while talking about how pretty the night was in spite of the associated dangers. Most people could probably find at least one character they relate to or understand closely out of this cast. True, improving relations does offer new skills or vendor services at times, but that never really struck me as the point. The only gripe I have about the system is that there isn’t really any choice in the way you progress your relationships with the characters. You can chose to ignore the event cues, thereby not progressing, but otherwise it’s a fairly linear path for each of the characters. To be fair though, the friendship segment isn’t meant to be one of the core draws of the game, so devoting as much time to it as the game did is certainly worth appreciating.
The art-style is a fairly standard anime-esque sort that you can usually find in JRPGs. Most of the cutscenes in the game are rendered in real-time using the in-game 3D character models and locales. Significant character moments and key plot-points are occasionally graced with a more detailed 2D CG. When you start up the game you’re greeted by a smooth, pre-rendered animated opening, but don’t expect to see much of that elsewhere in the game. The overall aesthetic of the game, barring intentionally intimidated enemies, seems to be about soft, comfy forms without too many sharp or glaring details. It lends itself quite well to a relaxing atmosphere. I do find it a touch off-putting when characters return to their default dazed grin after their speech animations in cutscenes. Nitpicking, I know, but I tend to notice character-expressions, particularly when they clash with the context. In-combat character expressions are on point, though. Speaking of combat, the animations for special and team attacks are surprisingly dazzling. Gotta give ’em props for unexpected flair.
That said, it isn’t all sunshine and daisies with the graphics. Once you get them in the state you like they’re nice, but it could take some tinkering to reach that point. This is a PC port, after all, so some configuration confusion isn’t entirely unexpected. (Editor’s Note: It’s a Koei Tecmo PC port, at that. They’re kinda horrible at porting most of the time and they should fix that.) Turns out, though, that there isn’t really all that much to configure graphics-wise. There’s multi-sampling, without which your characters will appear painfully pixelated, shadow detail, and resolution. This last bit’s what might hang some people up. If you uncheck windowed mode and go full-screen, you’ll be fine. If, however, you want to play it windowed, there’s a rather small selection of supported resolutions the two smallest being 1280 x 720 and 1600 x 900, limiting options for those with less spacious displays.
The audio is less troublesome than the graphic configurations. The game features dual audio to appeal to both those who enjoy English dubs and those who prefer the original Japanese. I’m usually a dub guy myself for games, though Sophie having the same voice as Nepgear did throw me for a loop. However, a major thing to note is that while there is dual-audio, the two language options aren’t exactly equal. In the Japanese, every scene, most actions, and even minor interactions with generic townsfolk are voiced in some form or another. The English version is comparatively bare bones. The most important aspects, such as combat, gathering, major cutscenes, and interaction with named vendors, are voiced, but the more expendable segments are unvoiced. This isn’t deal-breaking in any sense for those who fully intended to play it dubbed; if you started on English from the very beginning you wouldn’t even realize anything was missing. I just personally find the little nuances of detail like that to make the experience feel that much more immersive and endearing. At the very least, the English audio keeps the original vocal music performances at Horst’s cafe.
The music overall is quite homely. It normally gives a sense of a peppy life in a small town and kicks it up for combat. The combat BGM even changes based on how challenging your current battle is expected to be for your party. This is all well and good on its own, but the Steam version also comes with a hefty pack of music from the previous Atelier games built-in. Keep in mind that this is the 17th game in the series, which means you’re presented with an almost overwhelming assortment of audio options. There are some convenient presets, but that’s still a ton o’ tunes to try. Could be pretty nice for completionists, since it’ll give ’em something new to listen to while grinding for rare items and achievements.
Taking all that into account, there’s not much else major to address. My only real complaint left is that the keyboard layout is somewhat sub-optimal; it’s not absurdly convoluted or anything, but it’s not really optimized for quick, efficient play. The thing is, that’s not really what the game seems to be about anyway. It’s not a fast game in any sense of the word. This is very much a game where you take your time to explore, experiment, and enjoy yourself. It’s just about as slice-of-life as an RPG can get, with the main satisfaction coming from watching the characters grow and come into their own. A legitimately soothing feel-good game, I can see myself enjoying this for quite some time to come.
Atelier Sophie: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Book is a relaxing and entertaining game, and an altogether enjoyable addition to the longstanding series. Thanks to its role as the start of its own storyline and the laid-back tone of the game, Atelier Sophie is also in a perfect position to welcome newcomers to the series and teach them the core concepts without the usual pressure from time-constraints. At the current price of $29.99 on Steam, I would wholeheartedly recommend this game to fans of character-driven RPGs or those who enjoy games such as Animal Crossing and Recettear. For those more inclined towards fast-paced action games I would suggest snagging it during a sale. It’s good for unwinding and you may find yourself surprisingly taken in.
Pros:
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Complexity of mechanics and combat scales nicely with game progress
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Multiple methods to achieve story goals
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Soothing Visuals
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Dual Audio
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Relaxing Soundtrack
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Lovable Characters who can develop throughout the game
Cons:
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Keyboard layout is sub-optimal
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Character development and relations progress in a linear fashion
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English audio forgoes some of the less crucial dialogue
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Initial combat is simplistic to the point of dullness
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at-lee-er
Mileage May Vary:
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Turn-based combat
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Can either feel relaxed and soothing or meandering and dull depending on how driven of a story you want
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Dubbed Sophie is literally Nepgear
CrimsonMomongaSSS gives Atelier Sophie: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Book a Drastik Measure 8.6 out of 10 (86).
