gonna put rocks and flowers into a pot until they turn into a bomb that can kill god

ryza 1 is incredible, and I enjoyed ryza 2 but it was kind of trivially easy. Haven't played any of the older ateliers but they don't use the same mechanics as ryza so I'm hoping sophie presents a new difficulty arc

omg the encyclopedia has commentary on all the items this is adorable

(context: "uni" is a nut with a spiky shell that's used in a bunch of basic recipes)

the townspeople here have extremely normal desires

atelier what,

this game takes place in a town named Kirchen Bell and every time my brain reads it in the kristen bell christian bale voice

holy shit lmao

ryza had a text log that I could just screenshot if I wanted to show a bunch of dialog

unfortunately sophie lacks that feature so uhh I hope you read text at precisely the same rate that I do, or watching me click through it is probably super disorienting lol

this is sophie's friend oskar

this is sophie's friend oskar's... distractingly hot mom?

given that you're probably going to spend 15+ hours listening to the crafting music in these games, you'd think they would make it longer than like a 2-minute loop

brian eno music for ateliers

why are slimes so fucking powerful in this game

tfw

more normal townsfolk with normal problems

lmao same

so this game's combat system has a Defensive vs Offensive stance system, and it took me 30 hours of getting my ass kicked by slimes to discover that you're actually supposed to USE the defensive stance

who makes a JRPG where defending works and also matters???

I've been playing videogames my entire life; if you're presented with a "do more damage, or take less incoming damage" choice, the correct decision is ALWAYS "do more damage", because killing enemies faster prevents them from attacking and therefore negates MORE incoming damage

...except in Atelier Sophie, apparently, because the defense mode doesn't reduce your damage output very much, but reduces INCOMING damage by something like 90% lmao

and the game is balanced for that, so in offense mode a slime can kill your whole party in two turns lol

ROBOT🤖GIRL👩ROBOT🤖GIRL👩ROBOT🤖GIRL👩ROBOT🤖GIRL👩ROBOT🤖GIRL👩ROBOT🤖GIRL👩ROBOT🤖GIRL👩

you would think this would be a major spoiler except it's literally in the opening video, so I've just spent the whole game like Robot Girl When

also the back of that outfit is just Largely Exposed Ass which is kinda hot but I dunno I think if my friend was trapped as a disembodied consciousness and asked me to construct a magical robot body for them I would probably also build them some Pants

oh SHIT

omg there's an entire set of systems where you upgrade your robot gf by building new body parts for her?? this is incredibly weird and also incredibly rad

this is like the poppiswap thing from xenoblade 2 except Really Cool and Arguably Gay instead of Immensely Tedious and An Elaborate Maid Fetish Joke

lowest-tier cloth armor lmao

actually, I've been thinking about this more, and realized I've been looking at it from the wrong perspective

if *I* was trapped as a disembodied consciousness and my friends made a magic robotgirl body for me, *obviously* I would want them to build me a fucking incredible ass

galaxy brain minmaxing

i like that even nearing the end of the game, Sophie is afraid of bosses and doesn't actually *want* to fight giant monsters lol

her personality isn't super memorable but rather than being A JRPG Protagonist she's mostly a totally normal person, which is very cute

this is particularly funny in comparison to Ryza, who just earnestly loves explosives so much that she keeps dragging her friends into the woods to help her detonate wildlife

Ryza was sort of a breakout hit in the west so most of its systems are well documented in wikis/gamefaqs posts/etc, but Sophie is old and niche enough that I'm like.... unable to find complete answers to things because I cannot read japanese lmao

the game is from 2015 but searching for details is an extremely 2000s-core experience, where the only google result is a gamefaqs post with 1 reply that's like "idk i tried [thing that does not work] and it seemed to work"

I am not nostalgic for this era but at least it's funny

a genuinely great aspect of the atelier games is you end up so rabbit-holed on crafting mechanics that you're making incredibly mundane objects like Flour and your brain is like Yes ha ha YES behold my Enormously Powerful Flour

obviously zero people care about how kickass my Flour is, but it feels amazing, and that fact is the result of some *really good game design*

so I've been slowly plugging away at the late-game portions of Atelier Sophie and it's.... decidedly much more Difficult than ryza was but also maybe less fun lol

the crafting system has a lot more variables, and a lot of progress towards higher-tier recipes is gated behind some REALLY complex crafting challenges

it's not *bad* or anything, but for my brain specifically, it maybe overshoots ryza's "interesting puzzles" into "headache" lol

(also in fairness, ryza was the first one I played, so discovering the deeper layers of complexity for the first time was incredibly cool, and by definition no game I play AFTER that first one will be able to replicate that experience)