Atelier Sophie: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Book is the first game in the Mysterious trilogy. As a result, it features a new protagonist in a new part of the world, with new supporting characters. The story is standalone so a newcomer to the series can jump in with ease. It’s not your typical JRPG though as it has a heavy focus on alchemy (known as crafting in other games), but not as restrictive on this point as previous games.
The game’s new protagonist is Sophie. As per usual with a lot of Atelier protagonists, she is not very good as an alchemist but will improve over the course of the game. Sophie had inherited the atelier and discovers an old book left to her by her grandmother. The book then comes to life, being able to float and talk, going by the name Plachta. Upon reviving as a book, Plachta had lost her memories and the main aim of this game is to recover those.
Story progress is tied to recovering Plachta’s memories, which isn’t too difficult. This involves doing the usual things such as exploring, battling, fulfilling requests and alchemizing. Unfortunately, new items to alchemy are locked behind story progression and specific actions you need to take. You don’t just buy a recipe book to learn a bunch of new items anymore. A lot of the content is tied to the side characters, who are quickly introduced in the first few hours. Each side character has their own chain of events, again unlocked through the normal thing you’ll do in a game.
The game loses the time limit mechanic though. Now you can take as long as you want without the game forcing you to progress or causing a game over. This means that there is no more stressing of missing something crucial or planning out your days to maximise the things you can achieve. It’s a natural evolution of the series since the previous game, Atelier Shallie, was extremely lenient with its time limit already. There are some side character events that you can still miss but if you pay attention to the cutscenes, you should be fine.
However, there’s still the calendar system though. The game runs on a five-day week with a thirty-day month, and every action takes time, this means gathering to traveling to alchemizing will cause time to move forward. Day will turn into night and eventually into tomorrow. This is not a huge deal as the day night cycle affects strength of monsters, some different items that you can gather, where side characters will be in town, and specific events on weekdays or weekends.
A big portion of the game is exploration where you go out to the fields in order to gather ingredients required for alchemizing various items. The alchemy system will be familiar to anyone who has played an Atelier game, although it can be overwhelming for newcomers with its various sub-systems to look out for. The biggest change here is how the quality of items work. There is now a minigame of sorts where each ingredient has a different shape and you need to fit them onto a board. Placing them in different orders, or in different places, whether they overlap or not, will change the outcome. This is quite an annoying addition to be honest. The Dusk trilogy’s various different methods balanced intricacy and simplicity perfectly whereas this version is not as efficient.
Enemies roam the environment and getting into contact with one will transition to the battle screen. Battles are turn based but once again, it’s slightly different when compared to previous games. Here, your party and the enemy pick their actions and then the turn begins. This means that speed only dictates the order within that turn, a speedy party member can never have more turns than the enemy now. Each character can attack, use special moves or use items that you have alchemized. You can also change stances from offensive (higher attack power) or defensive (higher defence power).
Annoyingly, enemies respawn as soon as you’ve walked a little bit away. Gathering an item can refresh that area’s gathering points and enemy spawns. This means that you can never really clear out the area as it’ll just keep refreshing or what’ll happen is that you gather, then plan to gather at the point next to it only for the area to refresh and that point despawns. Of note are that character models are absolutely fantastic, while the environments are terrible. The character models are cel-shaded, contrasting the drab 3D graphics of their surroundings.
Like previous Atelier games, once you get into the swing of things, that’s when the gameplay loop becomes addictive. There’ll be plenty of story and side story events to unlock, items to alchemize, monsters to defeat, and equipment to upgrade. At one point, there are too many things to do and you need to pick one to do first. The story is low key as expected as it covers Sophie’s journey as an alchemist. It’s tied to Plachta’s predicament and the memories that she slowly regains, serving to unlock new areas and other stuff during the story, until the very finale.
The story is slow paced and flat overall, with nothing much really happening to be honest. Most of the good stuff are the supporting character events, where you get to understand them more rather than a big story spanning the game. Even the final boss kind of creeps up to you without fanfare. It takes around 25 hours to get to the credits but there are still a ton of stuff left to do. You wouldn’t have finished alchemize everything available yet (although unlocking new recipes are quite annoying by this point) and the game allows you infinite time to finish seeing all the events you may have missed.
The post-game involves several bonus bosses, however, there is free DLC which adds a new area and several more bosses. If you thought the bonus bosses from before were tough, these ones are crazy. To help offset it, the ingredients you can gather here have crazy good traits, so that you can alchemize some amazing equipment. It’s still quite a high difficultly curve from the beginning though, so it stretches out that content for hours as you’ll need to grind and slowly build your strength up. Still, it adds new story content that helps bridge the gap (but not completely) about Sophie and her decisions that will lead to her appearance in the next game.
Overall, Atelier Sophie: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Book is another solid entry into the Atelier line. That being said, the story and gameplay loop is noticeably weaker than previous entries, just purely because that single motivation for Sophie throughout the game, being Plachta, just isn’t quite enough to carry through twenty hours. Nevertheless, the nice graphics, sweet music (including the traditionally epic final boss theme), and chilled gameplay still makes this a worthwhile Atelier game to play.
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