#oneaday Day 394: Doing This

I'm yet to polish off LAMUNATION! but that's going pretty well, so out of curiosity I made a start on the first Atelier Iris game for PlayStation 2.

I absolutely love it already, and this trilogy is definitely going to be part of the upcoming Atelier MegaFeature. At this point I may as well just go the whole hog and throw Mana Khemia in there as well… we'll see how things go!

I'm appreciating how much of the "modern Atelier" it feels like there is in Atelier Iris, though it simultaneously very much feels like its own thing. Unlike the Arland games onwards, which are as much strategic time management games as they are RPGs, Atelier Iris is a relatively traditional RPG at its heart — though with a few interesting twists here and there.

These twists mostly relate to its relatively small, "local" scale. There's a lot of action centring around a small community that the protagonist arrives at early in the game, and a bunch of optional mechanics involving providing shop owners with ingredients to synthesise new items to add to their menus. And like its (rough) contemporaries in the Ar Tonelico series, synthesis isn't a purely mechanical thing — there's some fun characterisation, particularly when it comes to the grumpy magic shop owner Veola.

It's good to see Pamela early on, too, and she's still very much the Pamela we've come to know and love in later installments.

So yeah. We're doing this. And I already have fun plans in mind for interesting ways to present the MegaFeature on the site. And conveniently, I have a week off the week after this coming one, so I can start getting some things ready! How about that?

Anyway. Before that happens, I do have a week at the day job, so I probably better get some sleep before the early starts to pay the bills and all that shit. Hope you all had a great weekend!