Finished off Atelier Sophie this evening. It looks like there's a fair amount of postgame to explore, but I haven't decided if I'm going to delve into that too much — I feel like I'm lagging behind a bit where I want to be on the Atelier MegaFeature as a whole, and so I'm keen to move on to Atelier Firis. Atelier Firis is also one of the games I've been most curious about, so I'm looking forward to that one in general.
I looked up a walkthrough just to figure out how much I had left to do in Atelier Sophie, and found myself thinking that the way I'd played the game sounded much more fun than just following this rather unnecessarily detailed guide. I have no doubt that some people would have probably played through the whole game with that guide by their side the whole time, but one of my greatest pleasures with Atelier Sophie as a whole is how "organic" it all felt — and the lack of time limit allows you to truly enjoy that aspect of the game.
If you play the game to work through a checklist of things to do before you get a Platinum trophy, you're kind of playing it wrong. It's a game about enjoying the world, about enjoying hanging out with the characters and about experimenting with the mechanics. Were I not writing about the series as a whole, I'd be spending a lot more time in the company of Sophie and company after those end credits rolled — it really is a very likeable cast, and the mechanics have enough intriguing complexity about them to reward continued exploration.
But I'm happy with what I achieved. I put myself in a good position for the game's final encounters, and took down some of the optional bosses on the way to the finale. I didn't make all the available items, but I made a decent number of them — and spending a bit of time in the postgame would doubtless let me nail the others pretty easily. And all without looking at a guide once.
GameFAQs is a wonderful thing and an amazing resource that I'm astonished still exists in its mostly original form after Gamespot took it over. But the more I play and appreciate games as I get older, the more I enjoy exploring them for myself, rather than following a step-by-step guide that offers just one possible way to play — and, in the case of games like this, that is far from the only way to play.
Anyway. Journeys continue! Getting closer and closer to the end… just as I start to hear some rumblings that a new Atelier might be on the way at some point. I mean, obviously it's Ryza 3, we all knew that — it's just a matter of whether that arrives before or after I've finished the feature in its original form!
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