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Sometimes I feel like a one man JRPG defense force. I’m the one who has to jump in front
of the bullets, and explain that it’s not just candy-colored moe schlock, boring turn-based
combat, unending and infinitely tedious quests, and that the plot actually goes somewhere,
you just have to follow the clues.
And then, we have My Neighbor Totori... erm... Atelier Totoro. Part of each of those. It’s...
well, no splitting hairs now. It’s a piece of candy-colored moe schlock, with boring
turn-based combat, unending and infinitely tedious quests, and the plot doesn’t even
begin to go anywhere until you’re three game-years (that’s easily around 15 hours)
deep.
I don’t know if it’s because my first experience with the entire Atelier concept
was the side-story Mana Khemia, but I’ve come to hold that PS2 gem as the high-water
mark for the series. The story was detailed, the quests made sense, the characters were
interesting, the mechanics were amazing, and the boss battles were not only massive, but
knuckle-blisteringly intense. (And always fair.) Atelier Totori is none of those.
You play as the eponymous this girl, and hire whoever you can find to protect you as you
gather materials, build things, and be an adventurer. Unfortunately, your now-missing
mother was an adventurer in a similar vein, but she was the kind of rowdy ne’er-do-well
that caused nothing but problems. As such, your experience in the business is met with
miles of red tape, bureaucracy, and restriction, most of which was enacted in her wake to prevent...
well, her... from happening again. You advance as an adventurer by fulfilling certain discrete
conditions, whether they be completing a certain number of syntheses, killing a certain number
of monsters, or exploring the kingdom. Each of these goals is worth a number of points,
which accumulate until you can talk to this pint-sized beancounter and improve your rank.
And then you do it again. The B plot - actually finding your mother - doesn’t even become
possible until several years into the game, at which point you’re tired of the grinding
and are desperate for anything else to do. But to do that, there’s a huge boss that
you’re not even remotely prepared for. BACK TO THE GRIND.
Fortunately, you can build homunculi to cut down on the level of absolute tedium required
to gather materials and whatnot. They’ll even do your grunt-work for you, so long as
you keep a healthy stock of pies on hand. This frees you up for more inane vignettes
involving the strange and oftentimes creepy people you call your “friends,” from the
stoic, hyper-vigilant swordsman who doesn’t even try to hide the fact he’s ripping off
Squall from Final Fantasy VIII, or the aristocratic tsundere spear girl wearing fetish-tastic
bloomers, or... Rorona, the star of the last game, who occasionally just goes off on a
tangent making callbacks to her own adventure.
At least the vocal work is halfway decent, even if the things they’re saying make you
want to jam stakes into your ears... and not the meat kind either. And while the Japanese
track actually has more lines of dialog spoken aloud... that’s not really a good thing.
It’s just more passive aggression, more posturing, more chaff detracting from an already
flawed game. I realize that the focus of the Atelier series is more on crafting than beating
down monsters - heck, Atelier Annie for the DS had so little fighting, I scarcely deign
to call it an RPG - but for all the resource management in this title, you’d think “fun”
would be one of them. They had the recipe once before, but you know how recipes get
lost.