#oneaday Day 20: Overtime

I finished Atelier Rorona DX today. I'll be covering the series in detail on MoeGamer in January.

I've been looking forward to revisiting this series for quite some time, as somehow I've only ever gotten to various incarnations of Rorona, never Totori and Meruru.

The upside of this is that I now have a pretty good understanding of how Rorona's mechanics and structure work, and as such I not only managed to bag the True ending in the main game (plus Cordelia's character ending), I also managed to successfully clear the Overtime mode that was added in Atelier Rorona Plus. (This is why this post is so late, to be frank; I was playing the game all day!)

Atelier Rorona has always been an extremely addictive game that tickles all of the pleasure centres of my brain. We have satisfying RPG combat with a strong focus on equipment. We have interesting dungeons to explore, each with their own unique lineup of enemies, items to gather and enemies to defeat. We have a time management element. And, of course, we have cute girls.

I didn't used to be a big fan of crafting systems in games, and I'm still not hugely enamoured with them in many games where it's not the main focus — while I appreciated the mechanical depth in Final Fantasy XIV's crafting, for example, I always felt like I'd rather be doing something else whenever I engaged with it. But in Atelier Rorona, I love it. There's a really satisfying cycle of gathering ingredients, making things with them and, as you progress, then making further things with the things you just made.

This is taken to an extreme in the Overtime mode, where Totori and Meruru from their respective games come to "visit" after some sort of temporal accident. The only way to get them back to their correct times is to build an item called a Dragon Hourglass; in a year, Rorona's master Astrid will successfully complete one of these and be able to call Totori and Meruru home, but Rorona sets it as a bit of a challenge for herself.

Constructing the Dragon Hourglass is a daunting task. It requires four ingredients, two of which have to be crafted, one of which is very rare indeed and one of which is a drop from probably the first powerful "boss" monster you encounter towards the end of the main game. Of the two crafted ingredients, one of these also requires another instance of the rare ingredient, so you better find a good source of them quick. (Thankfully, I discovered that one particular group of enemies on the first floor of one of the two "postgame" dungeons drops this item fairly consistently, so that saved me a lot of headaches.)

Then there's a snag when you come to construct the Dragon Hourglass: it requires 400 MP to craft. My Rorona only had 280 MP at this point, and if you attempt to craft something without enough MP, you have a base success chance of 0%. How to get around this?

Well, you have a few options. For one, you can carefully construct equipment specifically for crafting purposes that emphasises boosts to Rorona's MP, though you pretty much need to fill every available equipment slot with a suitable item if you take this approach, and it's not very efficient or economic.

The other alternative is to ensure you make ingredients that have a "Success" trait attached to them. Atelier Rorona is all about Traits; these are attached to ingredients, and when you craft something, you're able to pass down up to five Traits from the ingredients to the end product. If you're clever, you'll stack different levels of the same Trait to create an even more effective "super-Trait", but the "Cost" for these is significantly higher, meaning it can only be attached to more complex items.

The Success trait increases the base chance of success when crafting an item by a certain amount. You might well see where this is going! Yes, indeed, you basically forget all about the MP prerequisite and instead boost your chances of success as much as possible. By combining the Success lv 1 and lv 2 Traits, I formed the Beginner trait, which increased the base chance of success by 50. A 1 in 2 chance to make the correct item is better than a 0 in 1 chance… and you can, of course, always save and reload if you mess up, because those ingredients are hard and time-consuming to come by.

Unfortunately, the game trolls you a bit at this point by helpfully informing you that the Dragon Hourglass you made wasn't quite good enough. So you have to make another one, this time using an Ancient Dragon Horn instead of just a regular old Dragon Horn. And where, pray tell, is an Ancient Dragon? Right at the bottom of the big mysterious dungeon right outside of town, of course. And beyond one of the toughest superbosses in the game… although on my playthrough I somehow managed to skip past this fight without having to take him on.

Does the new "True Dragon Hourglass" work? Well, you'll have to finish the game for yourself to see… suffice to say, this whole quest was a lot of fun and kept me glued to the damn game for pretty much all of today. I adore Atelier Rorona and I'm looking forward to finally checking out Totori and Meruru for the first time after literally years of saying "I should really play those games sometime…"

Watch out for the full features on these games on MoeGamer in January. Now I'd better sleep!