Atelier Sophie: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Book DX Reviews

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cozy!

It's certainly a good game.

An amazing and unique crafting game with a sub-par jrpg mini-game attached to it.

Never been a huge JRPG guy but my friends convinced me to play it. Game was alright, felt like something an overworked salaryman would enjoy since it was pretty casual. I got to the big bad evil guy and figured I had a skill issue when I couldn't beat him. 25 hours of grinding levels and equipment later and I still couldn't beat him. Turned down the difficulty and I still couldn't beat him and I also lost 2 hours of progress due to a game crash when I accessed the dollmaking menu. Tried cheesing the fight with various overpowered items and strats and nothing. So I looked it up and found out the only way to beat him without glitches was to stack three super-rank traits on everyone's equipment that I'd need to grind for. Decided to uninstall the game, watch the ending on youtube, and add the Atelier series to my "never buy again" list of games.

A great start to an atelier series with an intriguing story and a cast of 'some' loveable and interesting characters, mostly in main cast, the supporting casts are pretty much forgettable. Atelier Sophie have fully done away with the time limitation and the hard failure conditions of the older games, making it more of a JRPG than a time management game of the previous games in the series. Difficulty is therefore greatly affected, as every challenges can essentially be brute force through and overcome, making it one of the easiest game in the franchise so far. Elevating the game though is a robust alchemic system that is easy to wrap your head around, but infinitely fun to engage with. This game is far away from being the best in the franchise. Its probably not even in the top 5. But still, it have a story worth experiencing and a gameplay system that is fun, but lacking in challenge.

Started the game while I was high, didn't really notice the quest log existed until around 10-15hr mark. Had most of the map explored and had holes in my alchemy list. Great game, easy 9/10. (Little bit annoyed there's a missable trophy though. I missed it because I never failed alchemy, punished for not failing ;<)

Finally managed to beat Atelier Sophie. I started with the Ryza series and beat all 3 games so I decided to try out the other Atelier games, It didn't disappoint lol. At first it put me off because it did a lot of things different from Ryza but the more I played it, the more I enjoyed it. That's one thing that suck about these games, the start. I wouldn't really say it's boring but the "fun" really comes late game. Compared to Ryza, this one was a lot more difficult. Any enemies that were higher level than me (pretty much all game) whooped my a$$. Especially the final boss, I had to switch it to easy and take a couple hours just grinding levels/skills and creating the best armour I could. Which eventually made me just kill the boss too quickly and all that struggle went away but overall I struggled with the combat. Didn't like how it wasn't open open world, so exploring wasn't as exciting as Ryza but that's one of the thing that kinda grew on me and didn't end up minding as much. Story wise it was better than Ryza, but character wise the trio in Ryza I just cared a lot more about. Overall though, characters were great. OST was wonderful as always, I'd rate it a solid 8.5/10