Not nearly as good as I remembered it being having played a chunk of it when it came out, but never finishing it.

It's an atelier game so the alchemy is fun as usual, I do like how it works in this one although it took me a while to realise that a bigger cauldron isn't always a better one. By the end of the game I was using a 4 x 4 Fairy Cauldron for almost everything because the bonuses for filling the space are so high. I also really liked discovering the combined traits you can get by alchemising certain things together, and taking those and making equipment with ridiculous stats was fun. Though as with all the atelier games I've played, most of my damage was coming from bombs even by the end of the game. The aesthetic of the Doll Building body modification stuff for Plachta is really cool.

The combat is pretty neat although eventually gets repetetive outside of boss battles. choosing your moves carefully to manipulate the timeline, and save your big combo attacks for when you need them was engaging but not enough of the fights actually last long enough for any of it to matter.

The biggest disappointment for me was the writing which felt underwhelming compared to other Atelier games I've played, (mostly the Arland trilogy). Most of the dialogue is super stilted, though it's hard to tell if thats due to a wonky, overly literal translation or not. It unfortunately takes away a lot of the enjoyment of the otherwise cosy story and setting. I do like a lot of the characters in theory but the dialogue is so bland that it was hard to get too invested. I do like Sophie and Plachta's dynamic though, son I'm looking forwards to seeing more of them in Sophie 2 and the rest of the Mysterious trilogy when I get round to them.

Overall an Atelier game for people who already know that they like these games, but not one I'd suggest as anyone's first as it lacks a lot of the charm of other titles even if the art is very nice.

Really fun take on the mystery dungeon formula that has you gathering materials during a dungeon run to build a castle for the town shiren has found himself in. It manages to pack a lot of interesting tension into that concept: do you stockpile loads of materials at the expense of more immediately useful items? Do you take the higher quality materials that take up more inventory space, or risk the castle getting damaged in an attack by taking multiple lower quality materials? And that's on top of all the materials having effects that can get you out of a pinch if you use them up! It's a lot more forgiving that the other Shiren titles and you can expect to clear most of your runs, the real issue is, did you clear it well enough to make progress on the castle? This aspect makes it quite a good intro to the series as you won't be completely failing runs nearly as often (given that in other shiren games the main game is over once you've completed a run).

The game honestly feels a little ahead of it's time, insofar as it more closely resembles a more modern "rogue-lite" game with it's multi run progression than it's rougelike contemporaries.

I played the fan translation and despite being overly literal in some places the game's humour still shines through and most of it's jokes landed for me. It's that very silly, often slightly slapstick, style of humour that you found in a lot of games of the era and for the most part it makes playing through the dialogue scenes quite charming.

The graphics are suprisingly nice as well, the 3d environments have that classic nostalgic N64 look to them and I found a lot of the game very soothing to look at. The music is by the Dragon Quest guy though which means there aren't really many standout tracks, maybe one or two I actually liked (pretty normal for DQ music).

My only real complaint is how fiddly the inventory management is, having to put everything it pots to increase how much you can carry.

Really glad to have given this a shot!

Had a decent time with this one, some unfortunate bugs aside (dialogue triggering multiple times, qte prompts failing to appear etc. It's a generally "okay" level search action game with some clearly Dark Souls inspired structural stuff that never really quite comes together.

In terms of the search-action stylings the game it most reminds me of is a mix of metroid prime 3 and Samus Returns; you have these different planets you travel between, and new paths open up as you get new abilities, but the progress is actually linear. Like in Samus Returns, you go through each area once for the story, and then you can optionally return later with more powers to pick up some mostly insubstantial goodies (some new lightsaber cosmetics or maybe a healing expansion if you're very lucky), so I never felt much pull to re-explore locations. The game feels more like a series of zelda dungeons than a proper "metroidvania", for better and worse.

The combat is fairly clunky I thought and wasn't all that fun, especially the boss fights which range from boring to minorly frustrating (I hear this is improved upon in the sequel), and there's nothing much to encourage you to experiment with your moveset.

One major positive for me was the traversal which was a lot more fun than most of this style of game, you actually have multiple types of climbing, wallrunning and vine swinging type stuff rather than just clinging to a wall and holding a direction until you're where you need to be. It's not much but it's enough to make the climbing and traversal sections feel engaging which is nice.

The story is fine, I kinda enjoyed it but the characters felt like they needed more development time. The opening sections were a really good translation of the pacing and cinematography of the Star Wars movies to videogame format which I really enjoyed! The videogameyness eventually takes over but generally the cutscene and musical direction remains above average and puts you in a Star Wars frame of mind. The visual direction is also a lot better than it's peers if only because it has decades of material to work with rather than coming up with more generic looking locations from scratch.

All in all a thoroughly okay game that didn't overstay it's welcome and which I'm happy to have played.