I heard a lot of good things about this game, so I bought it today. It was like 20$ packaged, and I now know why.
It starts off incredibly fucking slow. They don’t explain how to use things. I did, however, like jumping about, smacking things with my staff. The battles are neat, a bit easy.
It’s not really motivating me to play any more of it. I’ve played for 20 minutes, and I already want to bring it back. The loading times are garbage; sometimes it lags for like 1 second between animations to load.
My question is, does this game pick up any time soon? If not I’ll return it for like ICO or something.
If you don’t like it now, I doubt you’ll like it later. It’s redeeming qualities are basically the same as Disgaea’s (In other words, character dialogue), but not quite as good. Also, the entire game is a side-quest since the actual “plot” isn’t interesting at all. To me, the best part was watching Lita and Veola fight.
Speaking of which, the second game improves the battle system and Alchemy system a bit, but the rest is downgraded. Felt, Gray and Fee are really the only characters with truly good voices, and yet none of them stand out too much.
EDIT: Wait, wait, what the hell do you mean with they don’t explain how to use things? Popo gives you a full blown step-by-step tutorial of every possible action in the game O_o
If the game is considered rare, I might consider keeping it (being a collector and all). I like the battles, but that’s about it.
edit: For starters, in response to your edit, she does explain a bit, but the menu still has things that aren’t explained. Synthesis I got down, but just even navigating the menu is confusing.
NIS was only the publisher, the Atelier Brand games are all produced Gust. Speaking of which, there’s a ton of Atelier games before Iris, but they are only centred around the synthesis instead of battle (AI2’s Viese was modelled after those).
AI1 had some really good actors in it, so the voice acting was very good as a result. The ones most people will recognise are Sandy Fox (Disgaea’s Flonne) as Popo, Barbara Goodson (Laharl) as Zeldalia and my personal favourite, Delsus (Crispin Freeman).
Don’t expect any major changes. As I said, the battle system and sysnthesis are touched up a bit (You no longer have to pamper the goddamn Mana, thankfully) but the rest is either the same or worse. The meaningless dialogue (Which is to say, AI1’s major charm) is much more scarce and the voice acting took some serious blows.
Her VA sucks, but Noin has one of the best lines in the game early on: “Listen up you random encounter!, I will play you a tune called ‘My Fist in your Face!’”
By the way, can anyone confirm who Fee’s English VA is? The endgame credits only list the Japanese crew, but I could swear that it’s Amanda Winn Lee (Etna).
AI just has an old school feel and it’s not for everyone. I liked it…though it was easy. I believe you have to turn off the english dub off before you finish the last boss…or you will regret it.
Yes, there is a common glitch there. Having the English audio on might cause a freeze right after beating the last boss. It doesn’t always happen though, I had it on both times I fought that thing and nothing came up.
There’s also the chance of a sudden freeze when exiting/entering some places, but this is thankfully less frequent. It happened to me twice, once exiting Iris’ Resting place through the east path and once exiting Arcose.
I really enjoyed the first Atelier Iris game. It brought me back to the days of the old RPGs, especially with the soundtrack.
I liked the second Atelier Iris game, but as it was pointed out, the only improvments the game got were in the battle system and alchemy system. There were about, 10 times more items to make, and you had to expierment to find certain ingredients to make some of the items. The battle system was fast and fun, but the game was too easy until at the end.