The latest game in my Atelier series binge of this year, this is the 6th game in the series and the start of the Atelier Iris sub-series. I considered continuing with the PS3 entries after finishing Atelier Meruru a few weeks back, but I decided to go back and fill in the PS2 gap in my knowledge of the series instead. This is a game I've tried playing through three times in the past, and my last serious attempt got forever derailed because of the sudden start of the Mega Man Mega Marathon Month (i.e. basically all of April XD). But this time I was committed to finishing it, and I did! I did most of the things in the game, but not quite all (for reasons I'll get to later), and it took me about 49-ish hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on original hardware.

Atelier Iris is, very oddly, NOT the story of the titular alchemist and her atelier (though they do make a sort of appearance). Instead, much like how Erdrick/Loto were the historic heroes of legend whose actions you were following in the original Dragon Quest, so too here is Iris a long-dead alchemist whose actions nonetheless continue to define the present in ways you are intimately involved in. You, namely, are Klein, a wandering young alchemist who has come to the land seeking the legendary fallen city of Abanberry, a city once known for its alchemical prowess that is now just a massive ruin upon a mountaintop. On the way, you meet up with the mysterious girl, Rita, and her and Klein become fast friends as a much larger plot slowly unfolds with the fate of the world at stake.

Atelier Iris is a MASSIVE departure for the series norms up to that point, and that isn't just because this is one of the only games in the series where a boy is the main character instead of a girl. On top of that, you also have the story being something with world-ending stakes rather than just a story encompassing the life of the titular alchemist. As you meet new party members and go to new locations, you often go back to the same locations, particularly the main town, again and again, and this is just one aspect that shows how unfamiliar and uncomfortable Gust is with telling a more linear story like this. It often feels like episodes of an anime whose events aren't all entirely necessary but fill out the characters' personalities for the audience. While that isn't a bad thing, it does make Atelier Iris have a somewhat plodding pace at times with both the main plot and the character writing.

The character writing is something that hasn't changed from Gust's usual prowess though. Your main party, particularly the relationship between Klein and Rita, are a very endearing bunch who get tons of time to respectively shine. Even side characters and shop keeper NPCs have really long and involved subquests you can delve into, and they were easily some of my favorite parts of the game (particularly Viola, who runs the magic shop). I'd say Rita is the real star of the show, with Klein being a more flat character for her character growth to reflect off of, but it's a dynamic that still works well. The overall themes revolve more around the familiar theme of the use of alchemy for selfish vs. common good means, but with a bit of an environmentalist twist to it. It isn't perfect, but it's a story told through a very personal lens to the point that the world ending stuff feels fairly secondary in comparison. It's certainly far from the best written game Gust has done to that point, and certainly not the best written game on the PS2 in '04, but it's a really solid first try, and I enjoyed it a fair bit more than I thought I would.

Where Atelier Iris really obviously shows its differences from its predecessors is in the game design, and that's in many more ways than simply going back to a larger adventure with no time limit to bind you. The first bit of control you have in the game is the tutorial combat fight, as the game seems to say right out the bat that this is a more combat-focused experience in a way unlike the prior five games in the series. The list of changes to that effect is pretty huge, so I'll just start at the most obvious place: alchemy and synthesis.

Now there IS alchemy in this game, but it's just very unlike the alchemy in prior games, and there are two types of it. First, there is the non-alchemy synthesis simply called "Shop Synthesis", where you bring items for recipes at different shops and new items are assembled for you. This is the kind of crafting most similar to the types in the previous games, and it's most like the first few games, as items once again are not unique between one another, and one puni ball is identical to any other. It's a system that's pretty simple, but they make it more engaging by having little events around the item you've created happen after each first-time crafting of an item.

The only really annoying part about this is that the event flags to get you new recipes to craft can be very fickle and sometimes just don't work at all. The reason I didn't end up 100%-ing the game (as I quite wanted to) is that several events, most importantly the one to craft clothes with 3 ingredients, never triggered for me, so there were a dozen or so items I could simply never obtain (and that actually never triggered for me in my previous playthrough either). Looking online and even in the guidebook I bought for the Japanese version, I can find no explanation as to why it didn't trigger (beyond some theories that some events may simply be impossible to trigger once you advance beyond a certain level?), so I can really only chalk it up to bugs. It's really unfortunate, because the extras such as character bios and the jukebox are locked behind crafting/acquiring/seeing certain sets of items, so there were a few I can just never get QwQ.

The second type of crafting is actual alchemy that Klein can do, but this is totally unlike other game's types of crafting. The game has 14 types of elemental mana (which I will call "sources", to alleviate confusion for reasons that will become clear very shortly). As you go through the game, you come across Mana Items that use different combinations of sources to craft. Sources can be acquired through means such as bopping them with your staff on the overworld, getting the last hit with Klein on an enemy in battle (turning them into source), or even turning normal items into source. This alchemy can actually be done anywhere, even mid-battle, and that's because instead of an alchemy cauldron, you use Mana to do your alchemy.

Mana in this sense isn't MP (although the game does very confusingly call MP "MANA" as well), but it's the name of the cute little familiars you acquire throughout your journey. Sometimes they give new actions you can perform on the overworld, such as shooting fireballs to destroy obstacles or making enemy encounters more or less frequent, but the most important thing they do is give you the ability to utilize new sources when you do crafting. If you don't have a mana who can manipulate water source, you can't make anything that needs water source, and certain mana get more efficient multipliers for using certain sources than others (such as a x1 multiplier vs. a x1.5 multiplier). Mana can even eventually be equipped on party members to give slight stat boosts and also to make certain skill abilities level up faster, and they can also be used to manufacture special boosts you can equip onto certain customizable weapons (which are usually the best weapons and accessories in the game). It's a very interesting new system that contributes a lot to how combat works now.

How combat works now is much more heavily yet sloppily position-based compared to prior games. Finally scrapping the 3x3 grid that prior games used for its enemy placements, now enemies are just scattered along pre-set patterns across from you as you fight. Klein plays an extremely important role in that, while all characters can use normal items, only he can use Mana items. Mana items are much more easy to make and much more powerful (generally) than normal items, making Klein and extremely important party member, and this also mimics how in later games only alchemists would be able to use items at all. You still fight in parties of 3, but in a neat move a lot like Final Fantasy X, you can actually swap between any active party member for one in reserve once you get to their turn for no turn cost at all, and that opens up a lot of opportunity for interesting strategies to approach enemies with.

Different items and skills have different attack radii, but that's where the most annoying aspect of combat comes in. The actual effective radius of attacks is never shown to you outside of enemies who will be affecting starting to blink to indicate they'll be hit by it. It makes using these area of effect moves very awkward and frustrating at times, and it also makes moves that do knock-back to the enemy difficult to use effectively either, as you can never be SURE that you're about to hit someone into an area where they'll be able to be hit. It's hardly something that breaks the game entirely, but it makes combat far more frustrating than it really needs to be, and it's an extra shame in a game that really brings focus away from crafting and towards combat.

Even exploration has been wildly revamped. Where before you had rectangular rooms to navigate, now you have properly crafted maps to wander around in and pick up ingredients in. They even have platforming, as you jump around areas trying to get out of the way goodies and to new found areas. It's ultimately not a huge change, and none of the design is particularly innovative or inspired, but it's regardless a big change for a series that up until this point had left combat and exploration a secondary concern behind the crafting and writing aspects of the game. The whole game plays much more like a traditional JRPG than prior Atelier games, and this (admittedly largely aesthetic) change perhaps more than any other really hammers that home.

The presentation is quite nice, but very lacking in certain regards. The music is once again very good, and the graphics, while taking on a new style, are very pretty. The visual-novel dialogue segments shift from the old style where you were talking to characters head on (effectively seeing people from their perspective) to characters appearing on the left and right to talk to one another (the style the series would continue to use until it abandoned 2D illustrated sprites completely). The most unfortunate thing is the abandonment of a LOT of the voice acting that made the series so distinct up to this point. While there is still voice acting, there is a TON of spoken lines that simply have no VA, and that includes a ton of unskippable story dialogue as well. This wouldn't be an issue if not for the fact that the previous five games had really pushed the boat out to have ALL of the spoken lines in the game voice acted. Perhaps it was due to this being the first game that was localized for the English-speaking market, but regardless of the reason, the voice acting budget for this game was seriously shrunk compared to previous entries, and it leaves a pretty sour first impression on the presentation front.

Verdict: Recommended. While I had way too many annoyances and bugs with this game to ever be able to recommend it SUPER highly, I still really ended up enjoying it. In many mechanical ways, it just isn't an Atelier series game at all, and it's one that a lot of fans of the rest of the series will bounce off of pretty hard if they're looking for an experience more like the rest of the series offers. That said, Atelier Iris may be different, but it still manages to be a really fun JRPG in its own right while also keeping that Gust-quality dialogue and character writing the series excels at so well. It may be a black sheep among Atelier games, but it's still a very solid JRPG worth playing.