Hello, friends and Hive Gamers! I'm here with another mobile game review. This one has been out for about a week, but I wanted to give it enough time to really get something out of it before trying to review it.
Atelier Online ~Alchemist of Bressisle~ is an "MMO" mobile entry in Koei Tecmo's Atelier series, popular on consoles. I've never actually played any Atelier games, though I've always wanted to. I have seen them streamed quite a bit on Twitch, though, so I have an idea of what they are like.
The premise of the game is that you're an alchemist at an academy where people learn alchemy and wizardry and stuff. The academy servers as a 'home base' of sorts, and you slowly get further and further from it with each adventure you take on.
Basically you venture out, get as far as you can, and return to the academy to heal up and try again. One nice thing about the formula is there is no limit -- no stamina points that regen over time or anything. And there's not heavy focus on waiting on daily rewards to get stronger, either, so you are free to play as much as you want.
The problem I had, though, was that I didn't want to play that much. At first I thought I was going to be hooked -- traveling around and scavenging, fishing, and mining around the map while occasionally battling monsters seemed like a blast. I love collecting items and leveling up as much as the next guy, but there wasn't a good sense of progress.
The game throws a lot of quests at you right at the start -- there's event quests, beginner quests, story quests, side quests... all kinds of stuff for you to sort through. Which basically meant I was trying to complete them by doing the same easy early-game tasks over and over. Run outside, rummage through a few bushes, fight a Puni, go back and craft items.
There's also some kind of multiplayer aspect, you can choose "multi mode" when you go out on the field, which will show other players running around with you. You're supposed to be able to get into group battles, but I couldn't figure out how to do it. It didn't help that 90% of the time when I tried to play multi mode it said it had a problem loading it and prompted me to play single mode.
Eventually I decided to just stick to the main quests to try to get as far into the game as I could. The scenery changed a bit but I was still running back and forth to the same places quite a bit, doing the same one thing.
Now, normally this is common gameplay from a mobile game. But in this game, I didn't feel like I was actually doing anything. All I did was accumulate a bunch of useless items that I eventually had to sell because my bag got full.
And the battles all felt the same even if I powered up -- you didn't learn any new abilities for battle and it just autobattled until the enemy was dead, usually taking 3 or 4 hits to defeat the enemy. Later on the enemy started doing status effects, which basically just made the battle take longer or required me to go back to the academy to heal even more frequently.
It's the same feeling I had with Diablo 3 -- I watched some numbers go up on the screen, so I should have felt like I was getting stronger and making progress, but in the end, I felt like I was just going nowhere.
I play a lot of repetitive games; in Harvest Moon you literally just do chores on repeat. But there's something about slowly seeing your farm get bigger and more prosperous that is so satisfying. In Lost Relics there's the chance that you can get a blockchain drop at any time, and the risk of losing everything when you die is exciting. In this, there's... nothing that I can find to keep me wanting to play.
There's a lot of STUFF in the game, and I really wanted to like it. You can make all kinds of equipment for your characters, power them up in various ways, dress them up with equips you aren't using in separate costume slots, and of course with the alchemy you can craft all kinds of items here and there. Like I mentioned, there's all kinds of quests to keep you busy if you wanna do that, too.
There was also a story. Like most mobile games, it was pretty bland and riddled with poor translation, so I can't comment on it much. I am pretty easily entertained, and the story didn't catch me at all, so that's saying something. I enjoyed the stories of other mobile games enough to actually read the dialogue, but in Atelier I was forcing myself to read each line for the sake of completion.
In the end, the game soured my view of the franchise, and made me want to check out the other games a bit less. The other games will surely have better presentation value and stories to them, but if the foundation of the gameplay is this, it'll leave me in another rut like Disgaea where the numbers look like they're going up but the gameplay is exactly the same nevertheless. The farm doesn't get bigger. I don't expect any exciting drops. If there weren't raising numbers, I wouldn't even realize I was making "progress" at all because everything seems the same.
If you're attracted to the aesthetic and like the concepts, feel free to try it out. Maybe you'll find what I'm missing. The game isn't lacking in the polish and presentation department; it feels like it should be a great game. But I just couldn't get into it. If you're not already drawn in by the franchise or look of the game, there's probably nothing here for you.