And so ends my time with the original Arland sub-series of the Atelier series. A good few months back, this was another game I co-streamed with a friend of mine, but she did all of the playing, and I just watched most of it. While the game certainly did look pretty fun to play, I came away from it with a pretty harsh view on the quality of the writing, and so I wasn't originally intending to play this one myself at all. However, in the interest of having first-hand experience with the series (and because I was able to find it for just 300 yen), I figured I should give this game its fair dues on my own time. I ended up quite surprised both negatively and positively, but I'm certainly glad that I did end up giving this game a fair shake in the end. I got the Witch's Tea Party ending (the second highest in priority, as this game has no "true" ending like these games often do) in the Japanese version of the game in about 47.5 hours.
Atelier Meruru is a sequel to Atelier Totori. As these games so often do, it tells the story of the titular alchemist Meruru. Unlike the humble origins of most of the series' protagonists, Meruru isn't some girl from a back country town, she's the princess of a back country kingdom! Totori ended up in her kingdom of Arls and wound up teaching her alchemy, which she took to with fervor. Meruru's father, the king, is quite reluctant to let his daughter play at magician instead of doing governmental duties, but he makes her a compromise. In five years, the kingdom of Arls will unite with its sister nation the Republic of Arland (whose former royal family the Arls are a junior branch to). If she uses her alchemy to help develop the nation in preparation for their unification, then she's allowed to do it. So, with her first objective at getting to 30,000 citizens by the end of her third year (and then if that's completed, 100,000 by the end of the fifth), Meruru has a goal with which to start out her new life as an alchemist.
Now while my opinion on the game's narrative has certainly softened during my own playthrough, Meruru's narrative is still remarkably weak compared to the other two games in the original Arland trilogy. Meruru herself has a quest but no real personal goals to overcome or confront, and she winds up as a remarkably flat character as a result. They try and play it up like this has all been some big task of proving her capabilities as a hard worker in the final act (or what amounts to it in a somewhat non-linear game like this), but it doesn't exactly impress when the narrative up to that point hasn't been telling that story at all. In fact, the game's larger plot feels really remarkably confused and at times outright contradicts itself (such as during Meruru's soliloquy under the moonlight after you hit the 30,000 population goal) and it overall feels like a compromised mess that was the result of several competing drafts of the game's script (which I have BIG theories about in how Meruru was probably going to have a sibling at some point, but I won't get into that here). Meruru ends the narrative the exact same person she starts it as, and it makes her feel like a side character in her own game, and that's not a good sign for a series whose main strengths are often character writing.
This weakness in writing also extends to the rest of the cast too, for the most part. With some very small exceptions (such as the gate guard Lias), your party members are all also similarly flat and boring characters whose character quest lines often don't change them meaningfully if at all. The game is PACKED with flat, fluffy dialogue which is fine in and of itself (usually, when it isn't diving into some pretty vile sexual assault/harassment jokes of which this game has a significantly higher amount than either previous game in the sub-series), but given that it's with characters you have a difficult time caring about, it can often times get kinda boring.
This is even more unfortunate considering just how much of the cast isn't new characters but returning characters from the other two games. Just two of the nine non-DLC party members (the DLC characters up it to four out of 13) are actually new to Meruru's story (and they're the two I played the game with, Lias and Keina), and the rest are all returning characters. Atelier Totori did a good job balancing new characters with old, and ultimately making the story both mostly about Totori and also giving returning characters (mostly) good new arcs and stories. Atelier Meruru is not only a quite unfocused story, but it also gives a TON of time to these returning characters when there are several new characters (such as Meruru's own father) who are sidelined to the point that they're barely even characters at all.
And what makes that ALL worse is that these aren't so much returning characters so much as weird distortions of what you remembered those characters to be. It's particularly bad with Astrid and Sterk, but all of old characters have had their prior character development changed or warped in some way as to leave them awful perversions of themselves. It's a problem I had when I originally watched my friend play this, and it's a problem I still very much have now, as Atelier Meruru's bad writing isn't just contained to its own story, but also does a lot to harm the ultimate stories of the other two games in the trilogy too. Atelier Meruru on many levels just isn't trying to have a very meaningful story with deeper messages. While that doesn't make it particularly interesting and also makes it a very weird follow up to two quite meaningful and well-written games, that isn't in and of itself a bad thing. What IS a bad thing is all of the very distasteful humor and ruining of old characters, and that's stuff I have a much harder time forgiving this game for no matter how much I may've enjoyed other aspects of it.
Speaking of things I enjoyed about the game (finally), the gameplay is actually really really solid! It takes a lot of the things that worked best about the overall formulas of both Atelier Rorona and Atelier Totori and makes it into something that works really damn well. Where Rorona was more of a very guided experience with its dozen 90 day tasks, and Totori was a quite unguided experience composed of one longer slowly unfolding journey, Meruru is a slowly unfolding journey that's quite guided along the way.
Developing the kingdom is done through a constantly growing list of things you have to do, whether its killing monsters or delivering/crafting materials, and completing those gets you points very much like advancing your adventurer's license worked in Atelier Totori. However, unlike that game, these points don't just raise an overall rank (although they do do that too), as they can also be used to build buildings in your kingdom that both give population boosts as well as provide passive bonuses such as giving you more EXP from crafting and fighting, giving you a monthly free money boost, or making your popularity go down slower. It for the most part keeps the exploration along a larger map that Totori used, but it reigns it in a bit, and the checklist of developments constantly keeps you focused on current objectives rather than worrying about what COULD come from some secondary main plot. It's a really clever system and it's a great way to structure the usual alchemy stuff in a way that's both challenging and dopamine-providing~.
The alchemy itself is very much like Atelier Totori handled it. Items still have unique properties to themselves such as their quality and inherent traits, and crafting things as well as traveling places, gathering materials, and fighting monsters takes time that you need to manage (although thankfully the amount of time for gathering and fighting have been reduced since Totori). Trying to perfect a recipe for getting just the right traits and qualities is as fun and addictive as ever, and they haven't tried to rock the boat much in that regard.
The combat has been further refined into something better, but it's also still very recognizable. The biggest and most important change is that while you still have the turn order indicator on the side that Totori introduced, you now have much more meaningful ways to affect and manipulate that turn order. Your alchemist's attacking and support items have had their area of effect and strengths buffed, but so have the skills of your other party members. It gives you a lot more choice in what you wanna do in tackling each battle, and while their character writing may not be terribly great, each party member really does add a whole new flavor to how you're going to go about fighting. Meruru is overall a much easier game combat-wise than Totori, and that's due in no small part to just how much stronger and flexible they've made the options available to you as a player. One last thing I'll mention about the combat that I really liked is that while they haven't changed how super moves can be used by your non-main character party members, they've introduced two different animations for them! A different animation plays depending on if you're dealing a finishing blow or just dealing damage, and that was a little touch I really appreciated.
The presentation for the battles is quite good, but outside of that it's a bit of mixed bag. On the more positive side, you FINALLY have the 3D models looking JUST like the 2d portraits. They were pretty close in Atelier Totori, but now we've finally made it to where they're basically never looking quite so uncanny anymore. The music is also good, but it's quite different. The more slow going orchestral ballads from the earlier two games give way to a soundtrack packed with a lot more pop-rock flair, and while a lot of it is stuff that's really good and I really liked, it's another big stylistic and thematic change from the first two games. On the less great side, you have first how the game has some pretty significant framerate issues when walking around (not that they ever meaningful affect gameplay) as well as a far heavier reliance on the 3D models for in-game cutscenes.
This is the last Atelier game in the main series to use 2D portraits in visual novel-style dialogue scenes, and that manifests partly as a lot more in-game cutscenes with these nice 3D models. What it also amounts to is not only less 2D visual novel-style scenes but also less 2D portraits, full stop. There were many times when the particular portrait selected for a line of dialogue didn't really seem to fit the emotion behind the line, but no other better expressions existed, so they had to the best with what they had. It's a really weird cost-cutting measure that just adds to that whole slapped-together feeling the game's narrative has in general. It also means there are a lot less hand-drawn CGs for in-game events to boot. This is a trend I really don't care for in how these games are presented. Like a visual novel, there is a lot of imagination used in interpreting the scenes in your head for the 2D scenes, just as you would a book. When it's just relatively simple 3D animated cutscenes, it's a lot harder to look like anything less than simple/cheap in-game 3D cutscenes, and it makes the whole game just feel cheaper and less engaging than the prior games. It's a sacrifice seemingly made simply to usher in the 3D era and usher out the 2D era, and while this game is the first game in the series to start leaning towards that inefficient sacrifice, it is far from the only game in the series to suffer from its many drawbacks.
Verdict: Recommended. Though the writing may be as rough as it is, a lot of the fluff is still enjoyably written fluff, and what good stuff is there (such as with Lias or the last act's emphasis) IS still good. However, the real star of the show is just how fun this game is to play. If it weren't a fun RPG to play, it'd be pretty impossible to recommend, and while I do have some pretty heavy reservations about its humor and overall writing caliber, I can't deny how much fun I had playing the game. It's definitely my least favorite of the Atelier Arland trilogy, but it's still a game I'm really glad I gave a chance, and I can still recommend people play it despite its faults. While Atelier Meruru may fall pretty flat at being the conclusion to the Arland trilogy, it still manages to be fun on its own merits.
Atelier Meruru is a sequel to Atelier Totori. As these games so often do, it tells the story of the titular alchemist Meruru. Unlike the humble origins of most of the series' protagonists, Meruru isn't some girl from a back country town, she's the princess of a back country kingdom! Totori ended up in her kingdom of Arls and wound up teaching her alchemy, which she took to with fervor. Meruru's father, the king, is quite reluctant to let his daughter play at magician instead of doing governmental duties, but he makes her a compromise. In five years, the kingdom of Arls will unite with its sister nation the Republic of Arland (whose former royal family the Arls are a junior branch to). If she uses her alchemy to help develop the nation in preparation for their unification, then she's allowed to do it. So, with her first objective at getting to 30,000 citizens by the end of her third year (and then if that's completed, 100,000 by the end of the fifth), Meruru has a goal with which to start out her new life as an alchemist.
Now while my opinion on the game's narrative has certainly softened during my own playthrough, Meruru's narrative is still remarkably weak compared to the other two games in the original Arland trilogy. Meruru herself has a quest but no real personal goals to overcome or confront, and she winds up as a remarkably flat character as a result. They try and play it up like this has all been some big task of proving her capabilities as a hard worker in the final act (or what amounts to it in a somewhat non-linear game like this), but it doesn't exactly impress when the narrative up to that point hasn't been telling that story at all. In fact, the game's larger plot feels really remarkably confused and at times outright contradicts itself (such as during Meruru's soliloquy under the moonlight after you hit the 30,000 population goal) and it overall feels like a compromised mess that was the result of several competing drafts of the game's script (which I have BIG theories about in how Meruru was probably going to have a sibling at some point, but I won't get into that here). Meruru ends the narrative the exact same person she starts it as, and it makes her feel like a side character in her own game, and that's not a good sign for a series whose main strengths are often character writing.
This weakness in writing also extends to the rest of the cast too, for the most part. With some very small exceptions (such as the gate guard Lias), your party members are all also similarly flat and boring characters whose character quest lines often don't change them meaningfully if at all. The game is PACKED with flat, fluffy dialogue which is fine in and of itself (usually, when it isn't diving into some pretty vile sexual assault/harassment jokes of which this game has a significantly higher amount than either previous game in the sub-series), but given that it's with characters you have a difficult time caring about, it can often times get kinda boring.
This is even more unfortunate considering just how much of the cast isn't new characters but returning characters from the other two games. Just two of the nine non-DLC party members (the DLC characters up it to four out of 13) are actually new to Meruru's story (and they're the two I played the game with, Lias and Keina), and the rest are all returning characters. Atelier Totori did a good job balancing new characters with old, and ultimately making the story both mostly about Totori and also giving returning characters (mostly) good new arcs and stories. Atelier Meruru is not only a quite unfocused story, but it also gives a TON of time to these returning characters when there are several new characters (such as Meruru's own father) who are sidelined to the point that they're barely even characters at all.
And what makes that ALL worse is that these aren't so much returning characters so much as weird distortions of what you remembered those characters to be. It's particularly bad with Astrid and Sterk, but all of old characters have had their prior character development changed or warped in some way as to leave them awful perversions of themselves. It's a problem I had when I originally watched my friend play this, and it's a problem I still very much have now, as Atelier Meruru's bad writing isn't just contained to its own story, but also does a lot to harm the ultimate stories of the other two games in the trilogy too. Atelier Meruru on many levels just isn't trying to have a very meaningful story with deeper messages. While that doesn't make it particularly interesting and also makes it a very weird follow up to two quite meaningful and well-written games, that isn't in and of itself a bad thing. What IS a bad thing is all of the very distasteful humor and ruining of old characters, and that's stuff I have a much harder time forgiving this game for no matter how much I may've enjoyed other aspects of it.
Speaking of things I enjoyed about the game (finally), the gameplay is actually really really solid! It takes a lot of the things that worked best about the overall formulas of both Atelier Rorona and Atelier Totori and makes it into something that works really damn well. Where Rorona was more of a very guided experience with its dozen 90 day tasks, and Totori was a quite unguided experience composed of one longer slowly unfolding journey, Meruru is a slowly unfolding journey that's quite guided along the way.
Developing the kingdom is done through a constantly growing list of things you have to do, whether its killing monsters or delivering/crafting materials, and completing those gets you points very much like advancing your adventurer's license worked in Atelier Totori. However, unlike that game, these points don't just raise an overall rank (although they do do that too), as they can also be used to build buildings in your kingdom that both give population boosts as well as provide passive bonuses such as giving you more EXP from crafting and fighting, giving you a monthly free money boost, or making your popularity go down slower. It for the most part keeps the exploration along a larger map that Totori used, but it reigns it in a bit, and the checklist of developments constantly keeps you focused on current objectives rather than worrying about what COULD come from some secondary main plot. It's a really clever system and it's a great way to structure the usual alchemy stuff in a way that's both challenging and dopamine-providing~.
The alchemy itself is very much like Atelier Totori handled it. Items still have unique properties to themselves such as their quality and inherent traits, and crafting things as well as traveling places, gathering materials, and fighting monsters takes time that you need to manage (although thankfully the amount of time for gathering and fighting have been reduced since Totori). Trying to perfect a recipe for getting just the right traits and qualities is as fun and addictive as ever, and they haven't tried to rock the boat much in that regard.
The combat has been further refined into something better, but it's also still very recognizable. The biggest and most important change is that while you still have the turn order indicator on the side that Totori introduced, you now have much more meaningful ways to affect and manipulate that turn order. Your alchemist's attacking and support items have had their area of effect and strengths buffed, but so have the skills of your other party members. It gives you a lot more choice in what you wanna do in tackling each battle, and while their character writing may not be terribly great, each party member really does add a whole new flavor to how you're going to go about fighting. Meruru is overall a much easier game combat-wise than Totori, and that's due in no small part to just how much stronger and flexible they've made the options available to you as a player. One last thing I'll mention about the combat that I really liked is that while they haven't changed how super moves can be used by your non-main character party members, they've introduced two different animations for them! A different animation plays depending on if you're dealing a finishing blow or just dealing damage, and that was a little touch I really appreciated.
The presentation for the battles is quite good, but outside of that it's a bit of mixed bag. On the more positive side, you FINALLY have the 3D models looking JUST like the 2d portraits. They were pretty close in Atelier Totori, but now we've finally made it to where they're basically never looking quite so uncanny anymore. The music is also good, but it's quite different. The more slow going orchestral ballads from the earlier two games give way to a soundtrack packed with a lot more pop-rock flair, and while a lot of it is stuff that's really good and I really liked, it's another big stylistic and thematic change from the first two games. On the less great side, you have first how the game has some pretty significant framerate issues when walking around (not that they ever meaningful affect gameplay) as well as a far heavier reliance on the 3D models for in-game cutscenes.
This is the last Atelier game in the main series to use 2D portraits in visual novel-style dialogue scenes, and that manifests partly as a lot more in-game cutscenes with these nice 3D models. What it also amounts to is not only less 2D visual novel-style scenes but also less 2D portraits, full stop. There were many times when the particular portrait selected for a line of dialogue didn't really seem to fit the emotion behind the line, but no other better expressions existed, so they had to the best with what they had. It's a really weird cost-cutting measure that just adds to that whole slapped-together feeling the game's narrative has in general. It also means there are a lot less hand-drawn CGs for in-game events to boot. This is a trend I really don't care for in how these games are presented. Like a visual novel, there is a lot of imagination used in interpreting the scenes in your head for the 2D scenes, just as you would a book. When it's just relatively simple 3D animated cutscenes, it's a lot harder to look like anything less than simple/cheap in-game 3D cutscenes, and it makes the whole game just feel cheaper and less engaging than the prior games. It's a sacrifice seemingly made simply to usher in the 3D era and usher out the 2D era, and while this game is the first game in the series to start leaning towards that inefficient sacrifice, it is far from the only game in the series to suffer from its many drawbacks.
Verdict: Recommended. Though the writing may be as rough as it is, a lot of the fluff is still enjoyably written fluff, and what good stuff is there (such as with Lias or the last act's emphasis) IS still good. However, the real star of the show is just how fun this game is to play. If it weren't a fun RPG to play, it'd be pretty impossible to recommend, and while I do have some pretty heavy reservations about its humor and overall writing caliber, I can't deny how much fun I had playing the game. It's definitely my least favorite of the Atelier Arland trilogy, but it's still a game I'm really glad I gave a chance, and I can still recommend people play it despite its faults. While Atelier Meruru may fall pretty flat at being the conclusion to the Arland trilogy, it still manages to be fun on its own merits.