Reviewed by Anna Slado
Atelier Iris is one of the first RPGs ever to keep its original voices intact, together with English subtitles. This was my biggest reason for buying the game, I have waited for something like this for ages. Not that I know much Japanese, just a few words and phrases, but sometimes when the English voice acting is poor, you would really like to have known what the original sounded like. Unfortunately, the game saves every other option that you change, except for your choice of language. Turn the game off and start again, and you will notice that it has switched back to English. That is lame if you ask me. I mean, what are memory cards for?
The adventure starts off pretty simple, just outside the town of Kavoc, which becomes your base. Atelier Iris feels like an adventure RPG at first, since you can jump and extract elements from most items you see, in towns or in dungeons. There is always an action-dial on the top left corner of your screen. With the L/R buttons you change to the action you want to execute and then the square-button will be set to it. Sounds simple? Hold on, there is more.
The game’s first hours will take you through a series of optional tutorials, most of which cover the action dial. Fortunately they are not ridiculously long, but there are quite a lot of them. If my first thought was that it feels like an adventure RPG, I can safely say I was right. Half way through the game you will have a bunch of different things in your action-dial that will allow you to go to places you could not reach in a place you visited earlier in the game for example. Pretty nifty, huh?
The story is somewhat linear, even though it says on the back of the game’s case that “400 different events can occur depending on your actions”, but you cannot go to new places unless you have completed certain tasks or quests. Let us say you manage to save someone from a dangerous cave and what do you know, suddenly you can travel to this place and that place! Most of the time you get the option of seeing the route to those new places and you might want to say yes if this question comes up. I am 24 hours into this game and still there is not a world map in sight. Sure, there is a tiny black and white map in the manual, but I do not think it is good game design to leave out the world map in an RPG.
Speaking of the world, you cannot rotate the camera, even though the world map is in 3D, the camera will just adjust itself to your main character. It works, but it would have been nice to actually see more of your surroundings. The rest of the game is in 2D though. The towns, characters and dungeons are all made up by colorful pixel graphics. Cute, but it is not the best 2D-work I have seen. Somehow it does not feel up to date.
Story-wise, I have to say that I am not really impressed with what the game has offered so far. In the beginning people just tag along with you as if it was no big deal, you do not really get any background information on any of your companions until way later in the game. When it comes to background information on characters, you will befriend store clerks (you heard me) in this game and learn more about them, for some reason. Yes, this is the first game I have ever played that had such emphasis on stores and even synthesizing. At least 50% of my time played, has been spent in stores synthesizing new items. And this is not really a choice either. You do need better items as the game progresses and you can only carry 9 items of each at a time. Sometimes an item is sold out and it is up to you to synthesize the item you want.
The main character, Klein, can synthesize mana items even in battle and he is the only one in your party with this ability. I mostly use his stuff, because it is that good. And yet, this is not all of the synthesizing you can do: you can also synthesize weapons and apply the power of mana to them. I have actually forgotten where I was supposed to go next because of all this mixing and matching with items, but luckily there is an option on your action-dial where you can find out what your mission is, in case you forget. Synthesizing is cool, and making new items for your favorite stores can be a blast, but it is quite time consuming and I want to play an RPG with a good story to see it advance and not just fiddle around with items and weapons. Then again, if you are a collector type of player, you will love this game, since creating certain items will open up bonuses in the game, like artwork, music, etc. All of that can take hours but unfortunately I do not have that kind of time.
Let us move on to battles; they are actually pretty simple. Atelier Iris has the same function that I loved in Final Fantasy X, allowing you to switch characters. You don’t lose a turn here either and you have the advantage of being able to change a member that has fallen in battle. The battles become boring after a while since it is basically the same thing over and over again, but the battle theme changes and that is always refreshing. Otherwise, the game’s soundtrack has done little to impress me. The tunes are very bland actually and I cannot feel the game’s atmosphere. Too bad.
I mentioned the voice acting earlier… Although there are voices for pretty much every line a character says and they’re quite expressive, the Japanese voices are better than the English ones. But a few times in the game even I who do not know that much Japanese noticed flaws in the translation. That is a big no-no. This annoyed me a lot so I decided that I would shut off the voices instead. Much better. However, they are not shut off in the battles (and are in Japanese). When it comes to synthesizing, some of the English translation is poorly made. You get reviews on your items, but how can “little smells bad” be considered good English? NIS America gets credit for keeping the original voices, but lets try to work a bit more on the translation next time, okay?
Atelier Iris is fun, no question about it, but will it be remembered for anything more than its breakthrough with voices? In my opinion, this was just another “okay” title that soon will be left forgotten in my bookcase.
Editor’s note:
I had to leave my own thoughts on this one, since I’m currently playing Atelier Iris. I am really enjoying it although I am not too far in, so this is just my superficial opinion, which right from the animated intro became a very positive one.
What really stood out for me first was the artwork, it’s really well done. There is this colorful, cheerful tone to the game that I quite enjoyed. Better yet, this is a classic example of a 16-bit RPG, with your standard group of adventurers trying to save the world, and your usual bad guys on one side, good guys on the other.
It will certainly please both anime and RPG fans, especially those like me who enjoyed them back in the days of Shining Force and Lunar. Atelier Iris has brought back fond memories of those titles and I am sure I will enjoy watching the story unfold.
Special thanks to Jack Niida and NIS America for providing a copy of the game.