I haven’t played any Atelier games in a while (last proper game was Firis in 2020 IIRC), but I still have a lot of love for the series. A lot of good memories, lots of fun times spent crafting and adventuring, good times. The more recent entries have just left me cold because the focus has been less on that crafting and adventuring and more on character interactions (that never go anywhere in the long run) and “cute girls doing cute stuff” which hasn’t been interesting to me in a loooong time.
But still, Atelier is Atelier, so when I heard a new gacha was coming out, it was like “hey, free Atelier game!” What’s not to like, right? The answer is “plenty.”
The game ran poorly on my phone
The game felt like it had been dipped in coal tar, with everything moving slowly and looooong loading times to do and open every single thing. Every time I want to open a quest, every time I want to switch to a character, every time I want to do anything in this game whether it’s crafting or fighting or just opening the store, it takes forever and a day. Even the skip option doesn’t help because there are still unnecessary scenes to watch before and after. The poor user experience is honestly the biggest reason why I dropped Atelier Resleriana. I may have sat through worse in the Playstation era, but it’s the 2020s now and I’m not doing this to myself any more.
I lowered the graphical settings to see if that would help, but instead I got an ugly game that still ran terribly. It’s possible that the game runs better on Steam (apparently emulators don’t work) but nothing else about it made me want to try a different platform.
The gameplay wasn’t what I had hoped for
When I play an Atelier game specifically, versus your run-of-the-mill JRPG, I want to craft stuff first of all, and I want to forage and go adventuring while I’m at it. For all its many, many flaws, Atelier Online: Alchemist of Bressisle at least let us run around maps and gather all kinds of stuff to make many new things with. Atelier Resleriana takes more of an Atelier Sophie approach to things, with a very small number of largely useless recipes which must be unlocked by jumping through increasingly annoying hoops. Foraging is also no fun, firstly because of the aforementioned sluggish pace of movement and secondly because of the long drawn out fights you have to go through every time you enter a new area.
That brings me to the combat. Which I actually liked, to be honest. I liked the system where you have to juggle the types of attack you use and pick the best time to use items to avoid giving the enemies too many advantages. What I didn’t like was how tanky even the most basic mob was due to the “break” system. I don’t like games with break mechanics, it’s almost always a way to draw out fights by giving enemies extra HP without explicitly calling it extra HP. And, again because of the slowness of the game itself, every turn and every attack felt like wading through mud, so it quickly became a chore I wished I could avoid. Still the Burst system is something I’d like to see done better in a more interesting game, with more skills and options than just spamming S2 and sometimes S1.
I had bad gacha luck
Self explanatory. Part of why I play gacha games is for the dopamine hit of pulling rare characters and other nice things. I pull crap, I don’t get my hit, I don’t want to keep playing. Actually I didn’t do too badly because I had Rorona for attacking and Escha for breaking and they made a good team, but it wasn’t fun seeing people boasting about their super-meta Ryza, Marie, Sophie etc., etc. and knowing it could have been so much better. “That’s a you problem,” you say. Yup, it’s a me problem, and that’s why me quit the game.
The gem income was poor
I hate stingy games. It doesn’t cost you anything to give players a few more rewards, Koei-Tecmo. Especially in a game that just launched and isn’t that great. Giving 50 gems here and 50 gems there when a 10-pull costs 3000 gems, do you think you are Genshin Impact or something? You want me to scrimp and save and get those 3,000 gems and pull crap, and then feel good somehow? Heck no. I’m a little spoiled by Epic Seven and Romancing Saga Re;Universe (developed by the same Akatsuki Games) where you can easily get enough currency to pity several characters a year. Since I know it can be done better, saving drips and drabs for months to get pity at 45,000 gems in Atelier Resleriana sounds like torture. Nope, not doing that to myself either.
The first event was boring and the rewards were pitiful
The game’s first event was a “Score Battle” thing where you have to fight the same boss in stronger iterations and try to deal lots of damage against it. First off, that’s boring and pointless. Like, seriously, what for? Who plays an Atelier game for this? In any case the event was only around for a week and by the time I thought my party was strong enough to fight the stronger levels, it had already ended. The rewards looked like this:
Just increasingly expensive character EXP items and tiny amounts of money. That’s it. No weapon, no event character, no Memoria, no strengthening or synthesis material, nothing interesting to make it worth slogging through pointless battle after pointless battle. The first event of a game is where the developer is supposed to hook players with fun gameplay, an interesting event story and lots of rewards, but this had none of that. It could have been added to the permanent quests and nothing would be missed. I despaired of the future of the game and made up my mind to quit at that point.
The story wasn’t bad, but not enough to stick around for
Cute girls being cute just isn’t my thing any more (was it ever? not sure) so I confess I fast-forwarded everything after the first few scenes, so I have a vague idea of what happened, but not why it matters or why I should care. I figure it’s the writers’ job to make me care, not mine to force myself to care about someone’s alchemy journey. What’s so great about being an alchemist when you can barely make anything you want? Too boring.
Last I saw, some mysterious organization was attacking Valeria and she and her friends barely escaped. You just know that mysterious organization will be after them for 200 chapters before eventually being replaced by even badder guys, and very likely it will turn out the bad guys weren’t so bad and they’ll become available to pull in the gacha etc etc, blah blah. And that’s not even mentioning the roadblocks where they stop you from progressing the story until you clear X dungeon (very boring) or X score battle or whatever. Just let me play and get my ass kicked, then no one will have to order me to go do other content to get stronger.
TL;DR: I’m still open to trying new gacha games, but I’ve got the attention span of a hamster these days, so anything new needs to look good, play smoothly and give me lots of rewards to hold my attention. Atelier Resleriana is not horrible, but it’s not great either, and as a supposedly mainline Atelier game, it is disappointing and completely unsatisfying. I still have at least five “real” Atelier games left to play, so I think I’ll spend my time and energy on those instead.
