Atelier Rorona was a cozy little game! Not as individually good as Ryza was, but I'm excited to keep going through the Arland saga and see how her presence continues to influence the world that develops. Wanting to fully appreciate the sweet feelings of Lulua from the fourth game being Rorona's daughter was low-key the reason I decided to play the first three in the first place.

Felt a little soured right at the end because the game apparently has multiple endings with very strict criteria for the true ending. Which, I dunno, just isn't fun for me. I've never been a fan of multiple endings.

The pre-Sophie games in the franchise get criticized often for the deadlines and time limits. To me the time management aspect isn't a bad thing for the gameplay in and of itself since it makes planning out your journey an important part of the challenge (though Atelier Rorona using time simply to move between areas in each dungeon was a very iffy design decision), but despite that component being fun I'd argue it is still quite a bad thing overall because it makes it virtually impossible to see the entire story in a single playthrough. When you have 90 days in each segment, each gathering area is 2-8 days away, moving between individual sections of each area takes 1-3 days, returning to the workshop takes 2-5 days - most of your allotted time disappears in a flash. There's such a limited window to actually take the cast out and build up your bonds that unless you use a perfect guide right from the get-go you are not getting all the character events in your first run-through. Which then leaves me hesitating on what to do now, whether to just look for scenes on Youtube or move on with the experience I got (since I don't plan to immediately play the whole game over again).

Having come back to this later after playing the Dusk Trilogy, I can say that it feels like later games did it better, but this was a fun time.

Synthesizing was fun, there were some interesting characters, exploration was the usual, but I enjoyed it for the most part.

My only major gripes with the game:
-- The soundtrack (the merchants having four versions of the same track I didn't like definitely didn't help)
-- Some aspects of organization and sorting in the UI weren't that intuitive.

Looking forward to playing Totori and Meruru in the future.

This is a game where I liked pretty much all of its individual parts, but man! I don’t really know what to say when it comes to… how it wanted me to play it properly, I suppose. I guess I’m not super used to time management games? I also played this game over a long time so I genuinely don’t know if this game has a really punishing difficulty curve when it comes to expecting you to understand its systems. Or maybe I’m just dumb. I am probably just dumb because it took me so long to actually use items in fights… at the same time, it does kind of feel like it’s pretty easy to coast through and then suddenly slam into a wall where you’re just barely keeping your head above water, you know?

Anyway, aside from that, I did genuinely enjoy my time with the game. The characters were pretty fun and charming with maybe one exception, and while the game felt a little janky I can’t say it was unforgivably janky. I’d definitely like to revisit a new game plus kind of thing after playing other games in the trilogy and getting a better handle on things.

With that said, I feel like Astrid fell really flat for me as a character and I’m not sure what messed her up for me. Like I was kind of expecting her to be worse based on some impressions friends gave me, but I feel like she’s just Weird enough at Rorona to make me not particularly like her. Which is a shame because I like the rest of the cast a lot and I wish she pulled through! But unfortunately nah.

Moved back to the backlog for awhile. I like the relaxed pace of the game, but it feels like the trade-off is that some stuff takes substantially longer to do.

More importantly, the lack of polish in this is magical. The first load screen says "Loadning" and I've also been able to complete some of the side goals in Life Tasks by doing the wrong things for them. Every time I collected Water from the City Water Source location, my "Break X Barrels" count went up.

At one point, I finished a fight and it updated my info to tell me I had completed 50 jumps and was on track to complete 100 swings outside of combat, so I proceeded to jump around for awhile to try and get more jump counts (since there's no penalty for doing so), only to note that each time I jumped, the "X swings" value would update in real time and kept updating until I completed the "100 Swings" goal. Haven't tested it further, but that's kinda bad.

Currently in Chapter 3, will update someday if/when I go back to it.