Atelier Rorona is the first game in the Arland sub-trilogy of the massive Atelier series. Like all of the trilogies, it’s entirely self-contained, so you don’t need to have played any of the older games to start here. Rorona was one of the first games in this series to get much recognition in the West, so if you ever considered playing one of them in the 2010s, you probably saw comparisons being made to it. Some people would accuse newer Atelier games of being dumbed down in terms of time limits and crafting in comparison to Rorona. Now that I’ve played it, I can confidently tell you that’s nonsense.
Atelier Rorona casts you as Rorona, who is an idiot. You will know that she is an idiot because every character will go out of their way to call her one in every other cutscene, and also because she is pathologically unable to display any agency at any point. But to be fair to her, most of the other characters are also idiots and the entire plot, to the extent that there is one, is mostly driven by idiots misunderstanding each other. A better written game could make a good comedy out of that premise, but Rorona mostly uses it to waste your time with endless streams of cutscenes in which nothing important happens. I eventually just started fast forwarding any time anyone talked and I still feel like I understood everything that happened.
The gameplay loop has you receiving one mandatory task that you must complete within approximately 80 days every chapter, plus a bunch of bonus tasks you can complete for extra rewards. The main tasks are so simple that some of them can be accomplished just by buying items from the store, and the optional tasks are hardly any more difficult until the last few chapters. Tasks are accomplished by traveling out into the world to gather ingredients and fight, then returning to the atelier to turn those ingredients into new items. Most tasks ask you to make a handful of items, but others want you to kill a few enemies. The crafting system is extremely basic compared to later games and basically comes down to picking ingredients that have the right properties attached, and nearly every combat can be won by mashing attack until the enemies die. It’s actually fascinating how bad the combat balancing is. Even without making much effort to be strong, you’ll often be OHKO’ing every enemy and only taking 1 HP in damage, but then you’ll abruptly run into bosses in the same zones that OHKO you and take hardly any damage back.
If you’re not trying to reach the best ending, nothing in Atelier Rorona will ever require you to think at all. The first 9 or so task lists can be completed with full rewards with minimal effort and without spending anywhere near the amount of time you’re given. It seems like the deadlines are actually pretty tight if you’re trying to see all the events, activate all the endings, and beat those optional bosses, but the gameplay and story were not interesting enough for me to want to put in more than the minimum amount of time.
Conclusion
I would not recommend Atelier Rorona to anyone unless you’re trying to play this series all the way through. Other than a few decent pieces of music, nothing in this game is very good, and most of what is interesting about it is much better in later games. If you’re looking for a place to start, I would suggest Meruru from later in the Arland series or any of the three Dusk games. All are far superior to this mess.
Rating: 50%
Time to beat: 14 hours
Price: An absurd $40, but the sale price is a small fraction of that.
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For more reviews, see my Steam curator page: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43219041
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