Atelier Totori: The Adventurer of Arland is the second in the Arland trilogy on the PS3. This is a direct sequel to Atelier Rorona which focuses on alchemy and features beautiful cel-shaded graphics. The game has a slower pace in the beginning and can threaten to bore you but once you start to understand the mechanics, it is addictive and interesting. The core of Atelier Totori boils down to time management, which can be annoying as everything you do takes time. These activities range from gathering to fighting monsters, and time can become tight during later parts of the game as you have to decide whether to complete quests by travelling or stick around to do some alchemizing. Balancing between exploration and alchemizing is addictive and you will always feel as if there is not enough time to do everything that you want. There is a lot of returning characters so it is highly recommended that you play Atelier Rorona first otherwise you will miss out on a lot of references. However, it is not essential and Atelier Totori can stand well on its own.
On the field, you will encounter monsters. Atelier Totori features a simple turn-based battle system. Turn order are shown on the bottom left of the screen for you to plan ahead, and each character have limited additional skills, as well as the standard attack and guard. Only Totori is able to use items and there is a simple assist system where other characters can aid Totori by taking an attack or add their power to her attacks. You earn experience from battling these monsters (known as Adventuring) and level up to get stronger. Enemy levels spike up dramatically between each new area and it is essential to keep levelling up or synthesize good equipment in order to keep up and not get wiped out. The other side of the equation is Alchemy. Atelier Totori focuses deeply on gathering ingredients from the field and then using these to create items. While you just need to get the required number of items to create new items based on recipes, what starts making this process complex are the quality of your ingredients and also the traits that you can carry forward. Each ingredient has particular traits, which can be good or bad and in order to create the best items, you will need to carefully select the ingredients with your desired traits.
Creating items will push up your Alchemy level which allows you to create better items. Of course, alchemizing will also use up time. We keep mentioning time management but what this means is that Atelier Totori takes place over 6.5 in-game years. After of which, the game ends, there is no way out of this. This will still take around 30 hours in order to complete if you're not rushing through everything and take your time. Exploration is fine but areas are small and disappointing. Enemies will roam the battlefield but you never get the satisfaction of progression or discovering secrets since there are none. The game makes up for the small areas via the quantity of different places you can explore, especially towards the end of the game when all the places are unlocked. The other annoying thing during exploration is the fact that the camera is fixed so you can't even enjoy the view. The game has dual audio for those who prefer Japanese voice acting. The English ones are less than ideal to be honest, and can seem a bit off. The menus can be confusing especially when you want to find out what particular traits of each items mean.
The tutorials aren't that comprehensive in explaining all the mechanics of the game. It does a poor job of revealing key items such as things that allow you to warp to places and items that shorten the time spent while travelling or gathering. The story is basic and is told via character dialogue and portraits. It can be a bit boring since the scope isn't that big. All in all, the story is weak. You control Totori, the apprentice of Rorona. Totori becomes an Adventurer in order to find her missing mother (who went missing as an Adventurer many years ago while Totori was still young). Of course, travelling around Arland, she meets up with a lot of people and creates friendships. As part of this, she has to keep fulfilling Adventurer type quests in order to keep her Adventurer license. This ties into the gameplay because you need to earn points in order to go up to the next Adveturer rank, which unlocks more areas and also prevents you from getting the bad ending. This mini-achievement system is fun and addictive, requiring you to do things like explore, fight a certain number of enemies and synthesize.
Atelier Totori is all about the endings of which there are eleven. The multiple endings each have their own requirements and it is annoying that you can actually fail and cut your game short. If you want to see all endings you will have to play the game multiple times or follow a guide which can be quite strict in terms of what you have to do in order to trigger the requirements of each ending. One wrong move means you will be locked into one particular ending and will need to replay the game. The ending creeps up on you though so quickly without much of a build-up. It's like, "well done, here's the final boss and that's the end of the game!" Then again, towards the end, you get heaps of free time which allows you to catch up. However, the caveat is that you also start to get a lot of ingredients at a faster pace than you can use them and inventory management becomes an issue. Overall, Atelier Totori: The Adventurer of Arland is a fun game to play, however, it can get somewhat stressful and it is easy to get lost into the game's mechanics at times.
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