Cooking/Shop Synthesis List

I’m a pretty big Nippon Ichi fan, so when I found out that he made a more traditional RPG (as opposed to his oft-ported tactics games) I bought it immediately. Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana looked interesting enough, you play as a (male) Alchemist named Klein who is soon joined by Lita, Delsus, Norn, and Arlin. The basic plot is that Mana (both a substance and cute fuzzy magical pals) is pretty rare in this world that was once packed to the very brim with it. Alchemists, who are the only people whom the magical pal form of Mana will befriend, are equally scarce. Your grandmother was a great alchemist and so you carry on in her footsteps, but not surprisingly, it’s not long before you are forced to save the world from evil Alchemist Mull, who wants to enslave Mana to serve humankind. Everyone in your party joins you for their own reasons and various surprises are revealed, with varying degrees of success. Late in the game you are joined by Marietta, the rather powerful warrior, who is more than worth training if you hope to beat the final boss.

The game itself starts strong and I had a lot of fun through most of it, the character design is great and the voice acting for all of the characters is wonderful (”Norn wins! Norn wins!”). You are also introduced to shop synthesis very early on, which was my favorite part of the game throughout. There are various shops in your world and, as you bring in new items, new recipes are unlocked. It’s the only way to unlock quite a few items and the deeper you get into unlocking each shop, the better the items you get to create. Additionally, the shop becomes more popular because of your efforts, and you are rewarded with scads of adorable cut scenes and amusing dialog. I focused on shop synthesis for the majority of the game and, before I got bored with fighting, had a great time wandering around and unlocking new things. Once the cut scenes dry up and almost everything is unlocked, you really have no choice but to fight around and finish things up, which is where I got bored.

The problem is with the battle system, really. At maximum you have five characters in your party with three on the field, and each character will unlock eight moves, some of which are always defensive/auto abilities. In other words, you get really sick of seeing your attacks really quickly. The enemies aren’t much better, they seem to have three to four moves each, so by the time you reach level fifty (about where I was when I beat the final boss) you are sick to death of every move in the game and, because of that, the entire battle structure becomes tedious. Because of the way moves are set up, each character can only have one type of weapon, and there isn’t much variety. The game tries to address this lack of options with mana fusion, wherein you fuse chunks of mana to weapons to make them more powerful, but the flaw in this system is that it’s completely and totally unnecessary to beat the game. I never fused mana to any weapon and I had no problems beating the last boss though, admittedly, it could have gone a lot faster.

One good thing about the game is that the characters are all fairly well developed, you get a lot of dialog and little scenes that set up characters of everyone from Lita to the shopkeepers. As long as you’re getting cut scenes the game is actually very fun, I have to admit, it’s just that the battle structure really works against long-term playability. When I beat the game I had played for 63 hours, which really isn’t that long considering, and I was completely tired of it. Bored with the battle structure and having unlocked almost everything that I could, I was ready for the game to be over, and that’s never really a good thing. The major flaw with the game is actually the map system, which is hideous. As you leave a town the map zooms out and mini-Klein runs around a map screen, encountering obscenely weak enemies as he travels. This gets old quickly. Add this on top of the fact that you never get a mini map to look at (that’s right, you have to navigate a fairly large map from memory) means this game has the worst map system that I’ve ever encountered. If you don’t have a great memory for maps (I know I don’t) or you plan on taking a break from the game at any point, I strongly suggest you draw yourself a map as you go, otherwise you’ll be pulling out your hair near the end.

Nippon Ichi, I think, either hates endings or just can’t write them. Maybe he thinks it’s more about the journey than the destination, but Phantom Brave and Disgaea both had hideously bad endings. Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana demanded a happy ending, which Ichi was forced to deliver, so it’s about a minute long, answers no questions, clears up no plot holes, resolves issues with no explanation (as in, “How did that person come back from the dead?”) and is prefaced by dialog such as “This is it! The final battle!” I almost boo’d out loud but I was too bored to because the final boss battle took over an hour. Sick! I worked an hour for a minute long ending that sucked? You’re joking, right?! Oh wait, there’s a bonus that’s been saved, let’s see … oh, it’s either nothing or I can’t find it because my new game is just a new game, and my old game is still pre-final boss. Great. I hear there is a “Secret Dungeon” that is unlocked once you’ve beaten the boss, but whether it’s in your old game or not, I don’t know. If I find out I’ll add something about it, but if it’s in a new game I’ll never know because there’s no way I’m starting over from scratch. One really odd thing about the game is that my best character, Norn, was useless for the final battle whereas Klein, my least favorite/weakest character, was essential.

Gender issues? There are some, the main character is a man, I’m not thrilled with that, and two of the female characters fight over him. In the end several couples suddenly get together, a la Shakespeare’s comedies, but it seems really forced. There are three female and three male playable characters though, so it’s not so bad, in the end. Almost all of the mana are female though, which I find very odd, especially since there’s only one female “Mana Chief” which seems disproportionate. Mana glass ceiling, anyone? In the end the game is pretty fun, not great, but a good RPG. I would rent it, but I’m not convinced that it’s worth $50 since the replay value, for me, is nil. That being said, I’m certainly happy that I played, but that’s mostly because of shop synthesis, which is the most fun since cooking in Harvest Moon (or way more fun, really). If that doesn’t appeal to you in the least I’m not sure how much you would enjoy this game, since you really have to get into it to unlock any descent items.

Reviewed on 10/04/05