I've been unable to work the day job today for reasons I won't go into for now, so I've been able to do a bit of catching up on Mana Khemia 2: Fall of Alchemy. If things are still tits-up tomorrow morning, I'll hopefully be able to finish off my Ulrika playthrough and be able to write about it. Then Raze's playthrough should go a whole lot faster with all the New Game+ carry-overs. Hopefully!
I'm really loving this one. Ulrika is one of my favourite Atelier protagonists to date because she just captures that teenage spirit perfectly. She flipflops between being aggressively rebellious and full of determination — and it's interesting watching her personal journey over the course of the year in which the story unfolds. She definitely enjoys some personal growth along the way, and it's been a real pleasure to stand alongside her while it's been happening.
This sort of experience is why I love the games I do — be they RPGs, strange hybrids like the later Atelier games or pure visual novels. There's just something about the level of intimacy you feel with characters in these games that I rarely find in cinematic-style Western games. I'm not entirely sure of the exact reason for this — art style is definitely a part of it, but there's definitely something about the writing, too. Perhaps it's the fact that dialogue in RPGs and VNs is, unsurprisingly, written more like text in a book, whereas cinematic-style games are, equally unsurprisingly, composed like a movie.
There's probably something to ponder a little deeper there at some point. Suffice to say for now that with the end of Ulrika's route looming ahead of me, I'm starting to get that feeling I get with games I really love — a feeling that I don't want to leave these characters behind, because they've become "friends".
All the Atelier games I've played so far have been very good for this, but I feel like the two Mana Khemia games have been particularly special in this regard. It's probably the more intimate, constant setting of the school that helps; there's a sense that you really are living a life alongside these characters, rather than going on a journey with them. You get to admire them at their most mundane as well as their most ridiculous, and that allows you to develop a feeling of attachment to their more relatable qualities.
Anyway, I'm rambling now. It's twenty past one in the morning and I should probably sleep. It'd be a bad idea to read a chapter or two of Nurse Love Addiction before I sleep, wouldn't it…?
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