Nightshadow (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} illusionbreaker) wrote,@ 2009-07-06 23:11:00 |
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Atelier Rorona - Probably the RPG of the year, and we're only halfway through.
If you couldn't tell how much fun I had with the game already, let me just spell it out to you. Atelier Rorona is the sort of game where you'll play it for hours at a sitting... and not realise the time.
The basic idea of Atelier Rorona is that you could play a game where the world was in fact wide open to you. You set up shop in a town as a budding alchemist who made stuff, and the game gave you an overall objective to get you to gain your alchemist licence, gives you a time limit, and just told you 'Well, that's what you'll need to achieve at some point, you find the best way there.'
The game itself doesn't leave you in the dark or in a static town like so many others, where you'd walk through once, and apart from a couple of minor things, the world never really changed. People come knocking on your door asking for advice, your friends want favours or two (and usually are willing to pay) and the surrounding world would expand as you grew and learnt more about it. People would warm up to you, you could grab your staff and a couple of friends and beat the hell out of the local monsters, you can even go out there and save the world. The town would drag you in, encouraging you to participate, but you didn't have to if you wanted to lock yourself in and make yourself the most advanced alchemist ever.
In itself, that's a lot of fun, but part of what makes Rorona really shine is how the characterisation has been done, drawing you into her world.
Rorona, who you play, is a very expressive, endearing, somewhat clueless and at times cute to the point of cringeworthy, and this is communicated from her VA, to the expressions on her face, and even down to how she does things and what she's able to do. If you're after a cool character to know something about, you might find a protaganist who won't rub you the right way - she's prone to mistakes, silliness and outright goofyness as she struggles to learn and complete her objectives.
You have not seen cute until you see her attack someone by rolling a barrel. Even I couldn't help but smack my forehead as she pulled out a barrel and smacked someone with it, and it gets more clutzy as you move along. As you can guess, even combat is very upbeat and cheerful.
How Rorona is presented emphasises the focus of the game - The goal isn't necessarily to save the world from a huge evil, although you're more than welcome to give that a try. The whole point is to explore, to discover the world, and to find a path that you want to take, using Rorona. She doesn't know everything, and half the fun is exploring the world through her youthful eyes, as she discovers everything from good cakes to explosives and everything inbetween if you want to.
The rest of the town you set up in is populated full of vibrant people, although not necessarily the most active of people, many of the characters you interact with have lives, needs, vices and desires, and as you're the resident alchemist, everyone thinks you're in a position to help them. You can choose to fill those requests, which allows you to get closer to the people that ask you of stuff, if you'd want to. They'll give cash and an insight into their world as you work with them.
You can even explore a lush set of worlds, as you go trepassing in areas, and where you can take two of your friends, and go beat up the resident monsters, often in combat which at times can be called outright amusing, with companions such as a Chef, your rich best friend, your soldier crush and old guy joining in, for various fees, and go walking along, trying to pluck away at the best ingredients you'll need to make items of good quality. You might not even want to fight, and see if you can sneak around monsters to take what you want.
The big point is that barring at the beginning, where the game more or less requires you to try a little of everything, it's entirely possible to finish up the game without doing very much in all the areas which the game offers. You don't have to go outside town more than once every three months if you don't want to, nor do you have to please anyone - As long as you pass the test set every quarter, you're free to lounge around on your couch if you'd like.
And after a little while, you'll find that you can get over the game requirements, and you'll just have this block of time to do whatever you like, in as much capacity as you'd like. The game is very well paced, making sure that you don't get overwhelmed, introducing alchemy recipes at a steady pace to not confuse you too much, and you don't ever get the feeling that you have to so strictly plan your days away.
As you might have noticed, a significant amount of the game can be very optional, and the game encourages you to go look into Rorona's world, to steer her towards the things you want to see, and to make her the sort of alchemist you'd like to play. As the whole game is based around exploration and experimentation, it really encourages you to get into her world and see what you want to see, but this is done in a fashion which doesn't force you to do things only one way. Presented on the PS3, it's difficult to fault the presentation for what it sets out to be.
In terms of the gaming difficulty, considering the easy going pace of the game, it's not particularly hard, even if you don't know much Japanese. There are a few things you'll need to figure out, such as the basic layout of menus, and perhaps what each licence test requires of you each quarter, but you'll find that a significant amount of the game can be played through trial and error, and it won't punish you for it, because it's designed to be that way. Given how there's so many ways to successfully finish the game, finding a path that works is always fun.
And even if your language skills are very limited, you can feel a lot of the time about what's happening - Atelier Rorona is an expressive game, and the title character is the core example of that. You'll laugh when she tries something silly, and cry when things don't go quite her way. You might want to have a friend who can help you on your way through the game though, to get the most mileage out of it.
In the end, Atelier Rorona emphasies what anyone who ventures out and tries to play games in foreign languages actually does - They might not know everything, and they certainly experiment, and they have a lot of fun in the process discovering something new that they might not have known before.
If you couldn't tell how much fun I had with the game already, let me just spell it out to you. Atelier Rorona is the sort of game where you'll play it for hours at a sitting... and not realise the time.
The basic idea of Atelier Rorona is that you could play a game where the world was in fact wide open to you. You set up shop in a town as a budding alchemist who made stuff, and the game gave you an overall objective to get you to gain your alchemist licence, gives you a time limit, and just told you 'Well, that's what you'll need to achieve at some point, you find the best way there.'
The game itself doesn't leave you in the dark or in a static town like so many others, where you'd walk through once, and apart from a couple of minor things, the world never really changed. People come knocking on your door asking for advice, your friends want favours or two (and usually are willing to pay) and the surrounding world would expand as you grew and learnt more about it. People would warm up to you, you could grab your staff and a couple of friends and beat the hell out of the local monsters, you can even go out there and save the world. The town would drag you in, encouraging you to participate, but you didn't have to if you wanted to lock yourself in and make yourself the most advanced alchemist ever.
In itself, that's a lot of fun, but part of what makes Rorona really shine is how the characterisation has been done, drawing you into her world.
Rorona, who you play, is a very expressive, endearing, somewhat clueless and at times cute to the point of cringeworthy, and this is communicated from her VA, to the expressions on her face, and even down to how she does things and what she's able to do. If you're after a cool character to know something about, you might find a protaganist who won't rub you the right way - she's prone to mistakes, silliness and outright goofyness as she struggles to learn and complete her objectives.
You have not seen cute until you see her attack someone by rolling a barrel. Even I couldn't help but smack my forehead as she pulled out a barrel and smacked someone with it, and it gets more clutzy as you move along. As you can guess, even combat is very upbeat and cheerful.
How Rorona is presented emphasises the focus of the game - The goal isn't necessarily to save the world from a huge evil, although you're more than welcome to give that a try. The whole point is to explore, to discover the world, and to find a path that you want to take, using Rorona. She doesn't know everything, and half the fun is exploring the world through her youthful eyes, as she discovers everything from good cakes to explosives and everything inbetween if you want to.
The rest of the town you set up in is populated full of vibrant people, although not necessarily the most active of people, many of the characters you interact with have lives, needs, vices and desires, and as you're the resident alchemist, everyone thinks you're in a position to help them. You can choose to fill those requests, which allows you to get closer to the people that ask you of stuff, if you'd want to. They'll give cash and an insight into their world as you work with them.
You can even explore a lush set of worlds, as you go trepassing in areas, and where you can take two of your friends, and go beat up the resident monsters, often in combat which at times can be called outright amusing, with companions such as a Chef, your rich best friend, your soldier crush and old guy joining in, for various fees, and go walking along, trying to pluck away at the best ingredients you'll need to make items of good quality. You might not even want to fight, and see if you can sneak around monsters to take what you want.
The big point is that barring at the beginning, where the game more or less requires you to try a little of everything, it's entirely possible to finish up the game without doing very much in all the areas which the game offers. You don't have to go outside town more than once every three months if you don't want to, nor do you have to please anyone - As long as you pass the test set every quarter, you're free to lounge around on your couch if you'd like.
And after a little while, you'll find that you can get over the game requirements, and you'll just have this block of time to do whatever you like, in as much capacity as you'd like. The game is very well paced, making sure that you don't get overwhelmed, introducing alchemy recipes at a steady pace to not confuse you too much, and you don't ever get the feeling that you have to so strictly plan your days away.
As you might have noticed, a significant amount of the game can be very optional, and the game encourages you to go look into Rorona's world, to steer her towards the things you want to see, and to make her the sort of alchemist you'd like to play. As the whole game is based around exploration and experimentation, it really encourages you to get into her world and see what you want to see, but this is done in a fashion which doesn't force you to do things only one way. Presented on the PS3, it's difficult to fault the presentation for what it sets out to be.
In terms of the gaming difficulty, considering the easy going pace of the game, it's not particularly hard, even if you don't know much Japanese. There are a few things you'll need to figure out, such as the basic layout of menus, and perhaps what each licence test requires of you each quarter, but you'll find that a significant amount of the game can be played through trial and error, and it won't punish you for it, because it's designed to be that way. Given how there's so many ways to successfully finish the game, finding a path that works is always fun.
And even if your language skills are very limited, you can feel a lot of the time about what's happening - Atelier Rorona is an expressive game, and the title character is the core example of that. You'll laugh when she tries something silly, and cry when things don't go quite her way. You might want to have a friend who can help you on your way through the game though, to get the most mileage out of it.
In the end, Atelier Rorona emphasies what anyone who ventures out and tries to play games in foreign languages actually does - They might not know everything, and they certainly experiment, and they have a lot of fun in the process discovering something new that they might not have known before.
