There’s rarely a game that I have no strong feelings about either way. Normally, I can say and deconstruct exactly what I like and dislike about a game, and either tear it to pieces or praise its name on high. As a player, I feel that I can take along quite a lot of messages from a title, good or bad, and use them as reference when looking at the mechanics or presentation of future games. However, Atelier Totori: The Adventurer of Arland really has me stumped. It’s a labor of love kind of game, a title that would feel right at home in the late PS1/early PS2 era with its old, forgotten, turn-based brethren. And, for better or for worse, it remains faithful to that era of gaming while doing its own thing, leaving an end product that has me more confused than anything.
Atelier Totori is the sequel to the equally as difficult to pronounce Atelier Rorona, taking place five years after the events of that game. As someone who has never played Atelier Rorona, I did feel very comfortable in the universe that Atelier Totori was able to produce. Characters from the previous game do enter the game here and there, occasionally referencing plot elements from the previous game, but it’s all done for the benefit of using those elements to enhance the new characters. The plot from the preceding game doesn’t completely overtake the main story, they are just characters who happen to be in the same world as the Totori characters. This is the best way to design a sequel – make it reward players of the previous title without dumping a massive amount of information on new players to establish the universe’s rules or expecting them to know it. The characters feel natural, just like NPC’s in a fresh, new title with bright personalities that enhance the main characters.
As for the story itself, Totori isn’t particularly big on it. You’re a girl named Totori who is one of three alchemists in the world. However, you’re a ditzy anime teenager, so you make yourself explode rather than alchemize great items most of the time. The remainder of the story is basically an expansion of this concept – Totori is an airheaded teenager who travels through the world and has wacky interactions with characters while gathering ingredients for alchemy. This is framed by Totori’s mother being an adventurer and having gone missing. Totori doesn’t want to believe her mother is dead and desires to find her dear old mama out in the world, but that element of the story feels more like an excuse than a driving point. Totori and those around her never have that great of an emotional connection with their mother, to the point where Totori’s mother could be replaced with a cute kitten she found one day and lost before the game began; the entire plot thread just feels very superfluous in the grand scheme of things. As for Totori herself, she’s a very standard protagonist, filling the role of a not-very-intelligent, optimistic, and driven main character to a tee. There’s never truly a point where she begins to stand out as a character. Other side characters, too, seem to be placed in solely to fill roles; the headstrong and goofy best friend, the burly and boisterous older friend, the aloof badass guy who broods a lot, the set is all here. Traditional tropes and clichés all apply with these characters, making their interactions forgettable and, ultimately, uninteresting. That’s not to say the characters are bad, by any stretch of the imagination, just nothing special that the player can take with them after the game’s end.
This is just like all of my Japanese animes!
The heart of Atelier Totori, however, is in its gameplay mechanics. Totori manages to do something that is impressive, admirable, and terrifying all at the same time; create a game entirely about grinding. Atelier Totori is a quest-driven title with turn-based RPG combat. The basic gist of the game is you report to a quest-giver to give you one of several quests with an in-game deadline. You then accomplish these quests by either going home to perform alchemy or, more likely, going into a pre-selected wilderness area to fight monsters and gather materials. The combat is handled in a manner very similar to Final Fantasy X, with three playable party members at a time and turns for both allies and enemies shown in a helpful display.
Combat is exceptionally simplistic, having attack, defend, and flee commands, as well as special skills unique to each character that pierce defense, ensure a critical hit, improve item drop rates, or inflict status effects. It’s a very simple system that rarely expands on its base concepts, with one distinct exception: only alchemists may use items. For the majority of the game, this means that the player will have access to only one healer, as healing abilities are conspicuously absent from the skills of the other characters. In addition, there are no inns in Totori – the only way to heal is either through items or devoting in-game time specifically to healing up. However, this limited inconvenience does little to really shake up the formula of a turn-based RPG; it just ends up encouraging the ‘adventure for as long as I can, heal between battles, then run home’ strategy that is commonly employed in turn-based titles.
Items, however, tend to be the main focus of the game over its combat. As an alchemist, Totori can mix items together to create newer items, based on pre-existing recipes from books she finds or purchases. In addition, oftentimes quests will revolve around collecting a certain amount of ingredients or a particular alchemized item, furthering their importance. On top of this, each item that is used for alchemy has its own special properties, and based on the complexity of the recipe; these properties can be redeemed, such as improving the selling price of an item, improving its effectiveness in battle, or giving it explosive properties to be used as an attack. On paper, this is a deviously complex system that makes the player mix and match ingredients to alchemize in order to create the best items possible. In reality, the differences between items based on these stat gains are pretty negligible, and most ingredients of the same type have similar properties anyway, making it more of a mix-and-match. Each ingredient also has a “quality,” which basically improves the odds that an alchemized product won’t end up exploding randomly. Typically the higher quality ingredients win out over those with unique powers, again, making the process a bit more pointless.
Here a character demonstrates the 'cleavage highlight' skill.
The game runs on a time system where certain actions – fighting enemies, traveling to locations, alchemizing, resting, and gathering materials, most specifically – take up certain amounts of an in-game day. Most actions take up either one day or a majority of one day, with the game putting a time limit of three in-game years to reach a certain point in levels, areas explored, alchemy recipes discovered, etc. In the end, the title just seems to be grinding for the sake of grinding – you go to more places so that you can complete more quests, and after completing more quests, you get more items which you can use to defeat the enemies in more places to get more items to complete more quests to get more money to get more items and then you combine those items with other items to get more items and… well, you get the idea. There is some variation in that, as time passes and new areas are discovered, you do get new party members, but as there are only a handful of special techniques per party member; most of them are pretty insignificant. The overall game actually reminds me a bit of a turn-based Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, with the map layout and distributing your time evenly in different areas being very similar.
For the little details, Totori has a pretty lovely graphics system. The characters aren’t quite as well-rendered as, say, Catherine, but they look very pretty and bring the anime art style to a 3D realm well. Seeing the characters and enemies in motion is rather pretty as a whole, capturing the spirit of the art style used well. Backgrounds, however, are far less detailed, kind of making the very colorful and detailed characters pop out and catch the player’s attention more as a result. Though this does help highlight the lovely character models, there feels like an odd dissonance between the characters and the world they live in. Voice acting is serviceable, but nothing spectacular. NIS typically has a stable roster of voices for its localization projects that do a fine job, but the voice actors and actresses in Totori aren’t really up to snuff. They aren’t horrible or detract from the experience, by any extent of the imagination, but they’re fairly bland and add little life to the characters. Music, as well, is soft and underplayed, creating a ‘cute’ medieval-type mood but never really going anywhere with it. There’s no ‘standout track’ to be found in this title, and I’ll probably forget most of the music in a day or two.
D'awwww she's so forgettable, I mean adorable.
I leave Totori with a truly odd feeling. I can’t call it a bad game – it’s a very solid turn-based RPG at heart, it has a sound concept, and it executes what it wants to do competently. However, it’s just so understated that the entire experience becomes underwhelming as a whole. Nothing, from characters to graphics to music to gameplay, really stands out and leaves a strong impression. As such, I can’t, with a full heart, recommend this title to anyone other than someone looking for a turn-based RPG fix. Totori is a fine game, but that’s all it is – ‘fine’. All of the elements do exactly what they have to and nothing more. In a future game – and based on my Google-Fu, I know there’s a sequel to this game being made – I would really like to see the development team run with this idea, maybe flesh out the characters and unique properties of items more to make a more unique experience. They have a solid foundation with Atelier Totori, but a foundation needs to be built upon, or else it is quickly forgotten.
