Even when I'm not marathoning several of them back to back, I co-stream on Twitch with a friend of mine every weekend and watch her play them X3. Well a couple weeks back, like the first time I started playing Atelier games, I got so in the mood to play more of them after watching her play them, I decided to finally play through Atelier Elie. I was so into playing Atelier Elie that I beat it in like two days over some of my last days of spring vacation, which likely speaks well to how much fun I was having X3. Using a guide to make sure I hit the flags for the ending I wanted, I got the best ending after playing for like 20 or so hours.

Atelier Elie is the second game in the series, coming out in 1998 when not much of the quite prolific series had been codified yet, and is a pretty direct sequel to Atelier Marie, although not starring her. You play as the titular Elie, a student at the alchemy academy that Marie was trying to desperately to not fail out of in the first game. Saved by Marie (who had gone to be a philanthropic, itinerant alchemist in the canon ending to the first game) from an illness thought terminal, Elie journeyed to Salburg from her tiny village to learn more about this powerful thing called alchemy that somehow saved her life. You have a few classmates whom you both have academic/romantic rivalries with as well as get into hijinks with, and there are a lot of returning characters from the first game peppered about the place (even Marie herself~). Your goal is to graduate the academy at the end of four years there, with a nearly identical normal ending win condition as the first game (which makes sense, given you're graduating from the same place only a few years later). However, there are quite a few beyond that as well, including a two-year extension that's effectively a grad school program if you've managed to do well enough during the first two years.

Atelier Elie is effectively the first game but "more and better" in just about every regard, and that also includes the story. You have more characters and more events with them, and following along for the best ending even sets you along a path of discovery that Atelier Totori would go on to pay homage to and evolve upon many years later (complete with your own sea serpent to fight!). In a bit of an odd turn compared to the rest of the series, you even have a few potential romance options. Though mechanically they're what would effectively become character endings in later games, it's still a neat oddity for the series. It's a sweet game with lots of fun slice of life goodness. It's still nowhere near the level where we have significant larger themes or character arcs quite yet, but what's there is entertaining and lighthearted in a way very similarly charming to the other handful of Atelier games, and I really enjoyed it~.

Mechanically with the crafting, Atelier Elie is also quite similar to the first game at first, but it quickly reveals that it has quite a bit more to the table aside from just having twice as many items in the game (200 compared to Atelier Marie's 100). As you progress through the game, you first unlock the ability to rebalance your synthesis, and then the ability to create entirely new "original" synthesis recipes. The rebalancing of recipes leans into the whole student aspect of the game, and it allows you to experiment with the amounts of each ingredient of a recipe to try and get better quality or effectiveness. This is pretty time consuming and trial and error-filled by design, so I never experimented with it much, but it's pretty neat. The original recipes are around ten or so in number, and they involve the game telling you Elie's hunches about what ingredients might be used in such hidden recipes as well as other clues you get from NPC dialogue or item descriptions. It's another idea that's more cool than actually fun in its implementation, but it all makes for a deeper mechanical experience around alchemy than the first game offered, and it's a great step forward in that regard.

Leaning into the whole "being a student" thing again, you even have tests annually (which you can just skip, if you aren't concerned with an ending that requires doing well on them) that you'll need to study up on your alchemy for. And this isn't just being good at crafting, this is also knowing what ingredients and tools are used to synthesize each item on the study list. It's a really neat, if somewhat overly difficult, feature, and just makes the game feel that much more like really being an alchemy student.

Other aspects of the game have also been carried over and/or improved a bit. You still pick areas around town to visit and walk around in as your little chibi-looking sprite, and you still simply travel to an area and auto-collect ingredients rather than having proper environments to walk around in. However, there's been quite a bit added onto that experience quantitatively. If you follow the story the right way, you get a whole second town to go to out west, and there are a bunch more places to go exploring for items there as well. You still get requests for items from the bar, but you're more likely to get requests for things you can actually get, which is nice. There's even a new kind of request you can take that request certain types of items, which are great ways to earn fame and also get way more alchemy EXP and money~.

The only thing that hasn't really been changed all that much is the combat, which is still quite simple. The only thing new about it is the ability to use money to augment the power of existing equipment, which is a nice feature, even if you can only do it once per weapon and the buffs it offers are at times difficult to actually get (some effects are pulled randomly from a pool) and the boosts aren't really that life-changing.

The presentation is good, as would be expected of the series, but it's also been cleaned up in a really nice way. The art style has been refined a fair bit, and character designs look much nicer and more appealing, and people generally have a less wide and abstract look to them. It's not necessarily an objectively good change (as what in art truly can be?), but it's an art style change I like at the very least. The music is also once again very good, and there are a lot of new tunes as well as really good remixes of tracks from the first games. My personal favorite tracks were some of the ones that play when different traveling musicians come to the bar~.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. Part of my ease in understanding this game's mechanics may very well be because I've already earned my lumps playing the quite mechanically similar Atelier Marie, but nonetheless, I really enjoyed my time with this game. It's only the second of two games on the PS1 for the series, but it's a really solid sequel and a good capstone for the series up to that point. This is actually one (like Atelier Marie) that has a fan translation available, so if you're curious, it's well worth checking out if you're into PS1-era RPGs and want an RPG with a bit of a lighter flair to the story~.