i went after the atelier series cause i was searching for relaxing/cute/not too long rpgs to play on my vita. turns out this is probably one of the hardest titles in the whole franchise so.. yeah. I'm guessing around 50+ hours deserves a detailed review

pros
• very charismatic characters and plenty of funny/wholesome events around them
• fun to mess around with their clothes in the dressing room system (all escha clothes are ugly tho)
• good time management/quest system

cons
• the alchemy system is kinda difficult to learn (specially if this is your first atelier game like it was for me)
• the translation SUCKS. i think they managed to fix things in the plus version, but quest descriptions are a Mess so it's almost impossible to understand what you have to do if you don't search it up
• gameplay gets boring if you intend to complete all assignments
• in psvita the game runs poorly with frame drops during many moments and I've seen some complaints about this in other platforms

final considerations:
i really liked the ost, all the characters and the chemistry around them! made the experience worth it :)

i think the games sells itself for having two different routes (escha & logy) and that's why it becomes so difficult at the end, maybe it's to reinforce the idea of starting a new game+ so you can only get 100% completion by playing with both of them but uhhh im not gonna play with escha cause shes the only annoying one so bye

Took about 57 hours in all, not including the bits where I was reloading trying to get items. This isn't far off how long it took me to get through Ayesha twice, and I think it's a bit too long overall. A few too many bits where you're passing time waiting for the next areas/items/etc to unlock. I'll be buying Shallie (no time limits!) when I head to Japan in October, so I might consider going through with Logy as nearly 700,000 Cole and some endgame-level weaponry complete with rare properties should help speed things up a bit.