Just finished Atelier Firis. The Atelier series is one of my favorite RPG series (if not *the* favorite), I've played them all starting from hmm… Mana Khemia? maybe earlier. At least 10 games. I can say that Firis is my least favorite game of the series, by far.
Core gameplay is similar to all the previous ones. Basically you're a newbie alchemist and need to gather materials and craft items with alchemy, while combat is party and turn based. So far so good. One main difference from this game to the previous ones is that now travelling is done open world, where it used to be almost instant travel to different locations.
My problems with Sophie are numerous. I played it in my PS4, so here they are:
- First part of the game involves you having 1 year to travel to the capital and pass the alchemy test. My problem with this is that you have no idea how long it takes, you have a map where you can see several steps to get there. Should you stay and explore? should you craft a lot? Should you explore the whole map or run towards the capital? I didn't know any of this, so I basically erred towards caution and ignored a bunch of areas, got to the capital with like 80 days to go.
- After you pass the test, your only goal is to decide what to do with your life, with the hint of 'Do things and meet people'… So basically, it's now visit every place, talk to everybody, do all their side-quests, I personally don't like 'open world' games, I like having clear goals, so this killed the game for me.
- I mentioned travelling now is open world. Well, this means that having to go from one place to another means lots of useless travelling. in each map you can find landmarks and camps where you can insta-travel to from inside the map, so basically it was enter map, insta travel to closest landmark to exit, run towards exit, repeat all steps until you reach your destination.
- The above wouldn't be much of a problem if game didn't involve going back and forth to all over the world map. Eventually you get a means to insta-travel the map, but this comes far near the end of the game.
- In all previous Atelier games, companions were integral to the game. Here it's basically you and your sister, the rest of the companions are actually optional and other than a couple of side quests for each, totally forgettable.
- Firis is the only game in the series where I experienced bugs. It crashed several times, making me lose a total of about two hours of gameplay.
It's sad for me because basically the previous game in the series (Atelier Sophie) was my favorite of them all, and to go from most favorite to least favorite in one step sucks. Sophie for me was a 10/10, this one is more like a 4/10 (with all the other games in the series around 7-9).
