I meant to come back to Atelier Firis after I’d played some other things, but I fired it up again last night and realized I’d done everything I wanted to do. The areas I haven’t explored and the bosses I haven’t beaten all require more grinding and synthesis than I’m prepared to do, and more than anything I’m just mentally done. I had a lot of fun, and now it’s over.

Story

Barely there, just the way I like it. Atelier games are like dungeon crawlers: they don’t need stories. Especially since the “story-heavy” Dusk trilogy wasn’t that heavy on the story and left me cold in the end. Atelier Firis is nice and simple: “Here’s this objective. Once you fulfill it, you can have the fun you always dreamed of.” Then you complete the objective and then you have fun. Sweet.

Characters

Nobody was too annoying, but no one was interesting either. TBH I didn’t spend much time on their character quests because I was too busy exploring and stuff. Someone was looking for her origin, someone was going around recording stuff, someone liked dolls and kept getting lost. It felt like Gust was throwing rejected character ideas into a game where no one would notice how shallow and forgettable they were. I’ve already forgotten most of them, and nothing of any value was lost.

Gameplay

Atelier Xenoblade! All the Atelier games are set in very interesting worlds you only get to explore a fraction of, so it’s great to have a game that sets you free to see the sights. You’re still limited to a single continent, but it’s a biiiig place. They even included a variety of locales, including a floating island and an icy tundra smooshed right next to a parched waste. I hear there are underwater locales as well, though I quit before I got there.

I really enjoyed Atelier Firis as a one-off, but I wouldn’t want more games in the series to be like it. The confined nature of the series isn’t that bad (plenty of other games let you roam the world), and the focus on exploration relegated alchemy to second fiddle. And while I’m being nitpicky, I’ll also say that while the variety of outdoor locations was good, there wasn’t enough exploration in towns, with places like Riesenburg and Flussheim having almost no houses to enter and little activity at any time of the day. Even the towns in the Dusk trilogy were livelier, and that world was supposed to be dying! I’m not usually one for immersion, but dead empty cities are just depressing.

Alchemy in Atelier Firis left almost no impression on me. Except it was annoying how you had to make the same item or a similar one repeatedly to unlock traits and ingredient rotation. I never got the hang of the percentage boosts for successive elements blah blah, who knows what was going on there. That aside, being able to buy recipes with Idea Points was a good addition, and finding the ingredients to make any recipe was usually quite easy. The number of recipes wasn’t high, and the number of useful ones… hmm, not that many. It wasn’t a frustrating system, but it wasn’t fun either.

Combat is the same. Not frustrating, not fun, but actually not that bad now I think of it. Making new weapons and equipment would have been nice if you didn’t have to farm high-quality ingredients and grind recipes to unlock trait slots before getting anything good. If you enjoy that aspect of the game, or you like challenging combat in general, then you’ll get a kick out of the unique bosses and more difficult areas.

Soundtrack and Graphics

Bright happy colors! You’ll have to look a long time to find a post on this blog where I say anything constructive about game graphics besides “bright happy colors.” It’s not something I really care about. Same goes for music and voice acting, where I only notice if something is really good or really bad. I don’t remember a single tune from this game, but I can picture most of the locations. That’s it. Everything was passable.

Overall impression

I had great times in Atelier Firis exploring various nooks and crannies, taking on all kinds of quests and going at my own pace. It’s good for the freedom-focused player, and the open world format is a breath of fresh air in the series. The time limit only lasts a year before you are set free, so it’s good if you’re worried about time management as well.

However the lack of focus on alchemy makes Firis a standard I do not want other games in the series to emulate. This, added to the lack of a story, means that once the novelty of exploration wears off, there’s little prompting you to keep playing. That said, the 40+ hours I got out of Firis is equal to or higher than my play time in other Atelier games so I got some good bang for my buck. Give it a try if you enjoy combat and exploration, think twice if you’re more into story, character interaction or alchemy.