As I said I would last time, I decided to move my Atelier Online: Alchemists of Braceir playing to an emulator to free up my smartphone for better uses. A reader suggested the Nox emulator, which I hadn’t heard of before. It didn’t take long to set up and hasn’t given me any trouble yet. The only slightly tricky thing was having to sign into to QooApp through the built-in browser before downloading the APK, but once you treat the whole emulator as a smartphone, you can do everything you do with a smartphone on it, so it’s not that weird any more.
On to the main question: Does emulating Atelier Online improve the experience in any way? Actually it does. Significantly. The main things I’ve noticed are as follows:
- Instead of Atelier Online shutting down randomly every 10-15 minutes on the smartphone, it has only shut down once in about 5 hours of play on the emulator. So it’s much more stable.
- There’s still a bit of lag here and there, but it’s not as bad as it gets on the phone and it doesn’t signal an impending crash. Nox claims I can avoid lag by enabling virtualization, whatever that is. The jury online is out as to whether 1) that’s a good idea and 2) it makes any difference at all. I’ll do a little more research first and see.
- Controlling the game with the mouse is a little fiddlier than using my hand or a stylus, but it’s much more convenient once you get used to it. It leaves the whole screen clear for me to see instead of having something constantly in the way. And my hands don’t get tired holding the phone in a strange position for a long time.
I pulled Marie’s costume! The gacha rates in this game are the best I’ve seen to date.
- Playing on a bigger screen is niiiiice~. I like it. It’s even better when I use high-resolution graphics, though that does cause a little more slowdown.
- There’s still plenty of loading and downloading. Which is normal, because the emulator has nothing to do with my internet speed. But with an emulator I can tab out and check other things while the game is loading. This applies to battles as well. Every time I touch an easy enemy, I just change screens until the battle is over and the victory music plays.
- Because it’s easier to play, I find myself wanting to play more. I think I played about 3 hours straight earlier today, thus living up to the “play as much as you want” gimmick they promoted the game with.
All in all, emulating Atelier Online on my desktop instead of playing it on the smartphone was a good decision. It’s a much more comfortable and more game-like experience.
Buuuuut. The gaming environment may have changed, but the game itself hasn’t. Thus most of the flaws are still present, and more besides.
Chief among the complaints is the constant use of tedious roadblocks to stop you from progressing too fast. Roadblock, okay. Tedious, no. No way. A game is supposed to be fun. Ever since I hit chapter 17 or so, unlocking new chapters has required ridiculous feats of grinding or farming. Ridiculously unfun feats.
For example, I thought I had escaped from the Hobgoblin boss grind, but no. They set “Beat the Hobgoblin 10 times” as an achievement to unlock chapter 21. “Try buying your way out of this one, suckah!” Then there’s the always horrible “earn 9000/12000 Academy Points.” Where even the most generous quests only give you 50 points. And can only be done once every 24 hours.
Totori is cute today, too!
Even worse is the “Get Rank XXXX in Alchemy” type of roadblock. It’s an alchemy game, shouldn’t that be the best part? Nooo… At least not yet. Maybe in the future when they have more recipes available. Here it’s endless grinding on the same few items. Not only that, but there are some ingredients like Uni, Flour, Tonelico and Slime Jelly that are used in the majority of recipes. You will run out of them pretty quickly, leaving you unable to make almost anything until you forage for more.
Why am I still playing? Because it’s getting more fun little by little as I unlock more dungeons. There’s been a slow trickle of new enemies, ingredients and recipes, just enough to keep me interested. My main party now averages level 60, my sub-party is approaching level 30, I’m getting closer to outfiting all my teams in 4- to 5-star equipment. Y’know, the usual things they put in place to keep gamers playing.
The system is a lot like Granblue Fantasy’s where you have a pool of equipped weapons that you need to uncap and level up and stuff
In short, Atelier Online is still an annoying game, but it’s less annoying to play physically, so I’ll be fooling around with it for a while longer.
