Recenzje Atelier Sophie: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Book DX

TLDR It's a good game sir, alchemy minigame my goat, combat is a little too developed for the uis that are dragging it down. Post-game is hell. 1) The [b]story[/b] is a cute. What it's lacking is definitely some graphic or technical quality, like the cutscenes could really be more than just a couple predefined exclamation poses and a looping mouth movement animation. The story is kinda the main appeal of the game so they really could put a bit more effort in, I appreciate the nice drawings for key scenes but it's not enough. 2) Character and prop models are nice and all but the [b]environments[/b] are oh so bad. The game's got its specific style and it's cute but for god's sake it's a 2015 game we deserve at least a cardboard grass texture. On that topic, please for the love of god never make a run/walk mechanic where the character animation speed is not matched to the environment scrolling speed it's SO bad. 3) [b]Music[/b] is fine? I wasn't a big fan of the default atelier music but that's where the bgm change function comes in clutch, allowing you to choose any of the previous games' tracks. I didn't change anything else other than the atelier music, the score for exploration, cities, battles etc. were all just enough to not make me desperately want to turn on my own stuff instead. Some boss themes go pretty hard though, and the credit roll theme is the absolute goat. 4) [b]The alchemy minigame[/b] is the absolute goat, carrying the game on its back. Really neatly thought out gamemode with decent depth, coming with cauldron upgrades (CAULDRON FLUID GOES SPIIIIIN), could sit at it for hours straight and it's one of the most relaxing games i played on its own; even trying to discover the 8-item route for an hour straight was pretty fun. Not exactly sure how I feel about the crafting field obstacles - the mode would be just as fun without them but maybe that's an issue of me sitting on my 4x4-grid fairy cauldron until the end of the game, with bigger fields it's likely the main "difficulty" spike, which is appreciated for the lore-relevant items. A couple related things I was missing: sorting by color category in alchemy, better search at merchants' craft/enhance menus. 5) [b]Combat[/b] is a little bit of a mixed bag for me. On one hand it's surprisingly deep allowing you to cook a nice buff/debuff game to go and deal really satisfying damage with the dps. Turn system has its own bit of complexity (like trying to manipulate the turn order so that the right character does the super ultra 300% chainlink attack), statuses are nice and unique; big fan of how pretty much every stat of your characters can be manipulated to some extent, either by yourself or by the enemies (shoutout to the light elemental decreasing my tank's max health to 25%). I have a couple rather important qualms though. The combat is definitely lacking some visual clarity and imo it's a little too technical for its simple ui - the slowly-scrolling status ailment icon should be expanded to some sort of icon list, the break bar should be more accentuated in general and probably put together with the other status info, for bosses - hp and break bar should just be visible more of the time (like put in an upper corner of the screen), along with making a more clear the exact values they change by, numbers go brr are nice but i was struggling to keep track of all that was happening if my attack skill has 10 separate hits and applies 3 ailments at the same time. Many of the issues i mentioned would be fixed with a proper inspect option that would just fully show and describe all of the unit's current and max stats, status ailments, buffs and debuffs with their lengths; maybe even actions it can take - imagine that! Or at least allow opening the encyclopedia mid-battle. As for the difficulty, most of the time the game felt either too easy or too hard with not much middle ground, especially some of the post-game had me stuck for a while requiring to really min-max the eq and/or grind adv exp to max the stats. Not a big fan of how the damage values are matches to the health values, i'd be content with the fights being longer for the virtue of not having to rely on revival items which became an absolute necessity by the endgame. In hindsight i wish i experimented a bit more with different teamcomps rather than just powering through with the one team i had - especially for the unique endgame bosses; but i could not imagine grinding forgotten materials and gold for the eq for every party member, lol. On that topic, I think the amount of gold you gain on normal mode compared to the cost of endgame items is very bad and I'm not sure how else were you supposed to get enough for upgrades and crafting without farming gold puni on despair difficulty; I think I spent ~100k on the armor and weapons, not including convieniences like Cornelia's duplication, purchasing rumors or just spending gold for the [spoiler]Pamela[/spoiler] achievement. So yeah Kirchen Bell's economy is in a very bad spot. I wrote a lot of words complaining about the cons but just wanna stress how much fun and relaxation this game has brought me, definitely warranting a thumbs-up review and forgiveness for its shortcomings. :) Onto Firis!