Or, more accurately, long after running out of stuff that I actually wanted to do. You will remember that Atelier Totori Plus is about an alchemist who wants to become an adventurer. For that reason, alchemy is de-emphasized and adventuring is prioritized in this game, meaning you will run out of recipes to synthesize long before you run out to places to explore. The adventure side was extremely robust while alchemy was not quite ignored but definitely “that thing you do when you’re not adventuring.”
…Somehow I’m all tuckered out after finishing the game so I’ll make this brief again. I uh… have nothing to say about Atelier Totori Plus. It was very good. I enjoyed it a lot. I made a lot of stuff, pretty much everything except the Ruby Prism. I had a lot of time to kill near the end of the game so I played around with unlocking different traits and skills in my usable items and accessories. I also beat most bosses except the dragon at the tower and the new ones that show up when you hit Galaxy adventurer status.
Umm… oh yeah, the ending. I got Melvia’s ending. A bit surprised about that, since I ditched her very early on and ran a team of Rorona and Sterk most of the time. But since I got her events involving Ceci, somehow that locked me into her ending. Also I was hoping this would be like Shin Atelier Rorona and show me all the endings I qualified for in one playthrough, so that was a bit disappointing.
But it was a good ending nevertheless because it wrapped the whole story up nicely. While I usually prefer my Atelier games to have next-to-no story, I liked the focused nature of Totori’s story. “I’m becoming an adventurer so I can do X” and then she goes ahead and does X, and then you get an ending that addresses X and that’s it, nice and sweet.
And… that’s it? It’s a good game. The characters didn’t really interest me (hence my clinging to more familiar ones like Rorona and Sterk) but I didn’t hate anybody virulently like I did with Astrid and, to a lesser extent, Esty. The game world takes a while to open up, but eventually you get to explore a lot of places, even overseas. That’s cool.
Alchemy seemed to take a backseat to the rest of the things you could do, especially once you can register goods at stores and double-especially once you get helpful assistants known as Chims. They’re so broken it’s ridiculous. You just show them a sample of what you need and they’ll reproduce it exactly no matter how rare it is. They don’t even need raw materials! And you can get up to five of them without really trying. The game tries to work around it by giving them lengthy production times but in the end the only real limitation is the size of your container. It’s pretty crazy.
What I liked about Atelier Totori Plus
– A lot of alchemy to do
– I didn’t care for “trait” alchemy when Gust first trotted it out in Atelier Lise, but to their credit they’ve really hung in there and made something halfway decent out of it.
– The characters aren’t completely horrible.
– Bright happy colors.
– It’s good to see an Atelier character with a real family life for a change.
– I enjoyed going back to beat bosses that gave me a hard time once I had upgraded gear near the end of the game.
What I didn’t care for
– I wanted even more alchemy! This is how I usually feel after an Atelier game so it’s nothing unusual. I have no idea if this problem is even solvable.
– Totori is too cutesy. Everything about her from her voice to her outfit to her running style is an attempt to be cute.
– Why is there so much fanservice in my Atelier? Panty flash, panty flash, wobbling bags of jelly on everyone’s chest… Am I playing something by Complile Heart?
– I liked the music at first, but it began to grate on me after a while.
– The quests were really boring…
TL;DR – Play Atelier Totori Plus if you like RPGs and/or crafting games. It’s nice. The end.
