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cosmicspearOf all the Atelier games I've played, this is one of them. And it's pretty damn good at that.
My own personal history with the Atelier games goes back to 2007 when I heard about Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana and got myself a copy of it. I don't remember a lot about my first attempt to play it, but what I do remember is that I didn't get the hang of the item creation it expected me to do, played it without a whole lot of understanding of the underlying mechanics behind anything, and wiped to the first serious opposition the game throws at you.
I have become somewhat better at these games since then.
Anyway, background. The Atelier games are about alchemists and alchemy, and no matter what game in the series you're playing that'll be important. The earliest games in the series were almost entirely about alchemy with relatively light RPG elements, so naturally they got passed up for export out of Japan since executives didn't think "Item Crafting: The Video Game" would have legs in America. It was only after Gust started trying to go for wider audiences that any American publisher (namely NIS America, for whom Atelier Iris was one of their first releases) bothered to give them the time of day. Naturally, this led to the first English-released Atelier game having a fairly conventional globetrotting JRPG plot and having the dubious honour of being one of only two games in the entire series where the protagonist doesn't craft any items himself. Oh yeah, and it's also the first of exactly six Atelier games to ever have a male protagonist and the only one of those that doesn't pair him up with any female characters who do alchemy.
It's a bit of a sore spot for a particular variety of Atelier fan that that particular game was the first one in the series to get an international release is what I'm trying to say here.
After that Gust gradually went back to smaller narratives with more focus on alchemy itself, before going back to the well in spectacular fashion with Atelier Rorona which proved that older-style Atelier games could do well with a larger audience.
Now, fast forward to 2015. At this point Gust had been bought out by Koei Tecmo, who have generally treated them well and let them do their own thing. They've also found ways to reintroduce more conventional JRPG elements to the series in ways that are a lot more respectful of what it started as.
And so we arrive at Atelier Sophie. These games come in linked subseries of 2 or 3 games, and Sophie happens to be the start of its own. That means it has to establish the mood and themes of the new setting. The previous three games, the Dusk trilogy, were set in a world gradually succumbing to the effects of all manner of alchemy-related disasters and as such had a somewhat depressing mood, albeit with the hope that the current generation might have the will to fix things. The Mysterious trilogy is significantly more optimistic about things.
The story of Atelier Sophie in particular is about Sophie Neuenmuller, who learned alchemy from her deceased grandmother and hopes to use it to help people. As the story begins, she encounters a talking book named Plachta. Plachta doesn't have a lot of her memories, but she does know that she can regain her memories when alchemy recipes are written into her pages. She also knows about something she can use to convince Sophie to help her: the Cauldron of Knowledge, which is said to allow anyone to use alchemy as well as the greatest masters of the art. She doesn't remember where the Cauldron of Knowledge is, which means Sophie has a good reason to keep learning alchemy and writing down new recipes. Meanwhile, this also means Plachta has a good reason to teach Sophie alchemy, in order to restore her memories.
There's your premise, which leads into a very laid-back game. There's no time limits or anything to give you an incentive to rush through the plot, and it's set up so that you'll develop the recipes you need to unlock each memory just by playing through the game at whatever pace you want.
The lack of a time limit is pretty important, actually, since the majority of Atelier games in the past had them. During the PS2 era they fell by the wayside, but they returned for Rorona and stayed around up until Shallie (the game before this one) ditched them. After Sophie there's only one more Atelier game to have a time limit before they're gone for good. Whether that's a good thing or not is something that some Atelier fans will argue about for hours on end, but if you ask me it's perfectly fine. The time limits work fine, but I personally see no reason for the series to be permanently wedded to them—especially since they seriously complicate the pace of the games. Make the time limit too strict and you've got a game that practically demands multiple playthroughs just to get to a point where you can play as intended, but make it too generous and it might as well not be there at all (see also the very first game in the series, where you can completely remove the urgency of the time limit just by performing exactly two syntheses right out of the gate.)
But anyway, in this particular game you're not just under no pressure to rush through things, you're actively encouraged to take it easy. I could probably come up with a good argument for how Sophie manages to encourage you to engage with and master its alchemy system by removing all time pressure as opposed to older Atelier games that use that time pressure to accomplish essentially the same goal, but I don't have a coherent enough argument to say much more than that.
Now, I've been going on about the game's setup a lot, so let's get to the game itself.
First up, how alchemy works. After choosing what you want to make you choose your ingredients. Recipes can call for specific ingredients for a particular slot and they can also call for general categories, and individual instances of a particular item can have different stats on them so there's a reason to choose even when you're asked for one specific thing. You then get a grid of coloured squares to place your ingredients into, with the ingredients themselves taking up one or more squares. Some squares have sparkling bonus icons on them that increase the value of an ingredient that "claims" them for determining the final product's effects, and these are generated and enhanced in every square that borders an item you place, with their element (which gives you a bonus when claiming them with an ingredient that matches) being determined by the colour of the square they appear in. Putting ingredients on top of other ingredients removes them from the grid, and at the end whichever element has the most squares covered with ingredients that match it gets a bonus to every effect value that matches it based on how much of the grid it covers. Oh, and the value of the bonus icons, how many are on the board when you start, and the size of the board are all determined by the cauldron you're using, with all cauldrons also having their own special effects that change the rules.
Lastly, items can also have traits that you can transfer to things you make from them. Some traits can also combine with each other to create new, stronger traits that do more with the limited number of slots you get.
All that sounds complex, and it is, but after a while it just clicks. Reaching the point where you understand the systems well enough to really start thinking about the strategies involved is never not satisfying in any Atelier game, and this one's no exception. Figuring out how to fit unusually shaped ingredients together to get the most out of them—and when to overwrite something—is extremely fun, and once you start figuring out how to get traits like "Well Rounded Power" (generally good stat boosts that work with all equipment) and "One Hit Kill" (guess) on the items you want them on can be an interesting and engaging puzzle.
You get new recipes mostly through the inspiration system, making its return in massively expanded form from Atelier Iris 3. Basically, you get new recipes by doing things related to them. There's a lot of things this checks for—some recipes want you to get a particular item, some want you to kill a particular enemy, some want you to use or get hit with a particular skill, and so forth. The most interesting ones involve getting specific traits onto particular items—without exception this involves a chain synthesis puzzle to get something that only appears on a particular ingredient onto an item that can't accept that ingredient. There's a particular brilliance to the system, because it means that getting better at alchemy involves you, the player, getting better at alchemy.
Then there's the battle system, which I'm not nearly as fond of but it gets the job done. As is typical for the first game in a new Atelier subseries the complexity of the battle system is toned down significantly from the previous game, though not to the same degree as, say, Rorona when compared to Mana Khemia 2. Here you've got a system where you choose everyone's actions and then the turn begins, but you also have a visible indicator of when each ally and enemy will act. The way this works can be a bit confusing at first, because your characters start at one point in the order and then when you choose their actions their icons move to indicate the order they're actually going to do things in. Everything you can do has both a windup (determining how far down the initiative order you move when you choose it) and a cooldown (which affects where you start on your next turn.)
A lot of the problem with the battle system can be summed up as such: I have never seen any non-action RPG that so heavily overvalues basic physical attacks as this one. Skills generally don't do enough to be worth using over regular attacks outside of specific circumstances, and they almost invariably take so long to use that you'll be at the end of the action order anyway. Items, meanwhile, are the fastest things in the game but suffer from the traditional Atelier problem of having very limited uses—you get an option to automatically refill them for a reasonable price so you don't have to worry too much about breaking stuff that requires rare ingredients, but that doesn't change the fact that a lot of items have only 3 or 4 uses before you're out until you go back to town and you can only equip five items per character. So in the end you just wind up mostly hitting "Attack" over and over.
There's a bit more to the combat, though, because I haven't discussed Attack and Defense modes yet. You can freely swap characters between these every turn, and in addition to the expected effect on your stats they determine what kinds of support actions your characters do. Initially support actions are very basic things where characters just follow up each other's attacks and cover each other, and you need to fill up a meter to use them at all, but it gets more significant over the game as you unlock more tiers for the meter, with each tier of action involving more characters at once. Also, only the highest tier of support action you have actually spends the meter, and when you unlock the second tier the meter for the first one fills instantly after that—so after a certain point support actions happen almost all the time. Ultimately, though, the downsides of the system are that a) you can't manually determine when you do support actions, and b) to use the higher-tier actions you need more characters in the right mode, with the third and highest tier only happening when you have everyone in the same mode. It's just a bizarre combination of limits to put on this stuff.
At any rate, another interesting thing about the battle system is that your level caps out at 20. This isn't the lowest level cap I've seen for an RPG, but that's mostly because it exists in the same world as Ys I. After you reach level 20, though, things get interesting because you instead start getting skill points when you gain enough experience. This effectively switches the game from a level-based system to one where you buy stat improvements and new abilities. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but it's an interesting way of making sure you use the entire level range while still leaving plenty of room for characters to grow.
Aside from exploring, fighting, and synthesizing, a lot of your time will end up being spent doing character sidequests. All of your party members and almost every named NPC have their own character arcs that you go through, and there's enough to them that it's basically impossible to not do a significant part of all of them. The characters are all very well-defined, too, and even the silliest ones are treated with enough respect that you can take them seriously when you need to. A personal favourite of mine is Oskar, Sophie's very overweight friend with the obligatory wacky brass-heavy theme...who is actually extremely competent and never once treated as a joke. That's probably the most blatant example of Sophie's philosophy towards its cast, but you see this sort of pattern everywhere and it's honestly extremely refreshing.
One of the more amusing things in the character quests, though, is how thorough and obvious Atelier Sophie's attitude towards CERO's policy on underage drinking is. By which I mean there's an entire series of events that consist of Sophie going to the local tavern and griping about how she isn't old enough to drink yet while the bartender talks about how awesome and life-changing alcohol is. It's all framed in a way that makes it ludicrously clear exactly what the writers think about being forced to make their fantasy world inspired by Renaissance Germany adhere exactly to the drug laws of present-day Japan. I personally agree that it's ridiculous, but I'm hardly in any position to do anything about it.
I ought to talk about the game's aesthetics too, and this is probably the best time to get arount to that. Like a lot of pre-Ryza 3D Gust games the graphical fidelity could use some work but the quality of the art direction more than makes up for it. Character models are distinctive and do a good job of getting the point of the designs across. It helps that the designs are stylized enough to make that job easier, too. There's actually two character designers who worked on this game (and the entire Mysterious subseries, really): NOCO and Yuugen. Their styles mesh together very well while also being distinctive enough (particularly in terms of how they draw eyes) that you can easily tell who drew which characters if you know what to look for. In terms of the general art style Sophie goes for more stylized and over-the-top designs than the Dusk trilogy did, befitting the lighter tone of the new world.
The audio doesn't disappoint in the slightest. Nobody with any sense expects Gust soundtracks to be bad, but Sophie's music still stands out as one of their better offerings. I'm particularly fond of the town music, which has multiple different versions depending on the time of day. The standard battle music also has an interesting feature where there's four different themes that play based on your strength compared to the enemies', going from light and cheerful when you're facing enemies you shouldn't have trouble with to a dark and ominous piano piece when you're facing enemies significantly stronger than you. Basically all the character themes are good too, and I'd honestly say that the final boss theme, Liela Xea, is pretty damn close to the best in the series—the only ones that I'd say can entirely compare are MARIA from Atelier Ayesha and Stigmata from Mana Khemia. But there's no dethroning Stigmata.
(As an aside, Gust is also responsible for my absolute favourite final boss theme in anything, which is EXEC_over.METHOD_SUBLIMATION/. ~omness chs ciel sos infel from Ar tonelico 2. Not that that's relevant to this game, I just wanted to bring that song up because I love it.)
Anyway, the plot mostly gets out of the way until a particular point where Plachta stops remembering things. This leads into Sophie concluding that, since by that point they know that Plachta used to be human and was turned into a book, the way to keep helping her is to find a way to turn her back into a human, inspired by how it's easier to remember what you wanted to read when you're standing by your bookshelf than when you're, say, cooking. Unusual logic, but finding a way to make Plachta more human does turn out to be exactly what Sophie needs to do. Except that since making humans with alchemy is in the "damn near impossible" range the stopgap solution is to move her soul into an extremely lifelike doll. A pretty large amount of the cast gets involved in this, too—a big part of this sequence is about how everyone cares about Plachta and is willing to go the distance to help her. Naturally it works, which should come as a surprise to absolutely nobody since Plachta's doll body is shown in the opening and an extremely large amount of the promotional material for the game.
Plachta ends up being the final party member, naturally, and she also gets her own unique mechanic where you can enhance her body with certain types of items. This of course involves changing her costume. There's a lot of options you can get based on what items you use and four values that only exist for the purpose of this system, all of which are some variety of outlandish, skimpy, or outlandishly skimpy. It's more than a little ridiculous, honestly, though considering what her default outfit looks like it should not surprise anyone.
I will stress at this point that Sophie's the one making all those outfits for Plachta. No reason in particular why I'm stressing this. None at all.
More seriously, though, it's worth discussing Sophie and Plachta's relationship in at least a little detail because it's such a big part of the plot. The development here feels extremely natural, and by the time the subject of returning Plachta to human form comes up Sophie's primary motive for wanting to do so is about helping her and becoming closer to her. By the end of the story the Cauldron of Knowledge is more of a secondary goal for Sophie and her main reason for restoring Plachta's memories has become helping her. Plachta mostly keeps her own emotions a bit more guarded, but it's still obvious enough what she thinks of Sophie. They don't outright say what's going on and I'm sure people much smarter than me can write a lot of words about that, but, well, how else am I supposed to interpret, for instance, the sequence where Plachta says she'd be happy to eat anything Sophie cooks and this leads to Sophie being sad about how Plachta's artificial body means she can't actually taste it?
At any rate, the most important theme Atelier Sophie's plot presents is that your reasons for doing something can be just as important as what you're doing. It's regularly stressed that Sophie's motivation for becoming an alchemist is to make people happy with her alchemy, and Plachta cites this as the entire reason she's willing to trust her with the Cauldron of Knowledge. They actively draw a contrast between Sophie's motive and that of the antagonist who eventually emerges, Luard. Luard's story is that he once studied alchemy alongside Plachta with the goal of saving their town from a famine, but ultimately ended up losing sight of any desire to help others in favour of just improving his alchemy for the sake of improving it. That in turn led him to practice a dark form of the art that while powerful drains the power of nature in an extremely noticable way—to the point where within days of his appearance you start getting scenes about how something is blatantly wrong with the environment. Plachta, upon defeating him in the past, split his soul in two and placed each fragment in an artificial body so he wouldn't be able to use alchemy (which also touches on something I haven't mentioned yet—in the Mysterious series, only certain people have the potential to use alchemy, and artificial bodies can't use it at all. Guess how the Cauldron of Knowledge's ability to let anyone use alchemy factors into this.)
Naturally, Sophie's exactly the kind of RPG protagonist who hears a story like that, realizes that the seemingly heartless villain has some good in him, and sets out to reawaken it. In this case that means recreating the fertilizer Plachta and Luard made to save their town in order to remind Luard of where he came from and what he originally wanted to do.
Plachta, as a contrast, doesn't believe there's anything that can be done for Luard and just thinks killing him is all that can be done. A line of thinking Sophie actively rejects, of course, because she realizes having to kill him is hurting Plachta and do you remember what her main goal is?
Of course you still need to fight Luard, because he's not about to just magically come to his senses. But Sophie turns out to be right, and while Luard's soul is split again (and the Cauldron of Knowledge is destroyed so it's not like he can change that again) she still manages to start him back on the right path.
In the end, my thoughts on Atelier Sophie are pretty simple despite all the words I just spent analyzing it. It's a good game whose flaws don't get in the way of its good points. Its alchemy system is super fun, its characters are memorable, and its themes are well-presented and reasonably effective. Its graphics are firmly good enough, and its music is excellent. It's also pretty easy to get sucked into it once you really start focusing on it.
Everything an Atelier game ought to be, really.
My own personal history with the Atelier games goes back to 2007 when I heard about Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana and got myself a copy of it. I don't remember a lot about my first attempt to play it, but what I do remember is that I didn't get the hang of the item creation it expected me to do, played it without a whole lot of understanding of the underlying mechanics behind anything, and wiped to the first serious opposition the game throws at you.
I have become somewhat better at these games since then.
Anyway, background. The Atelier games are about alchemists and alchemy, and no matter what game in the series you're playing that'll be important. The earliest games in the series were almost entirely about alchemy with relatively light RPG elements, so naturally they got passed up for export out of Japan since executives didn't think "Item Crafting: The Video Game" would have legs in America. It was only after Gust started trying to go for wider audiences that any American publisher (namely NIS America, for whom Atelier Iris was one of their first releases) bothered to give them the time of day. Naturally, this led to the first English-released Atelier game having a fairly conventional globetrotting JRPG plot and having the dubious honour of being one of only two games in the entire series where the protagonist doesn't craft any items himself. Oh yeah, and it's also the first of exactly six Atelier games to ever have a male protagonist and the only one of those that doesn't pair him up with any female characters who do alchemy.
It's a bit of a sore spot for a particular variety of Atelier fan that that particular game was the first one in the series to get an international release is what I'm trying to say here.
After that Gust gradually went back to smaller narratives with more focus on alchemy itself, before going back to the well in spectacular fashion with Atelier Rorona which proved that older-style Atelier games could do well with a larger audience.
Now, fast forward to 2015. At this point Gust had been bought out by Koei Tecmo, who have generally treated them well and let them do their own thing. They've also found ways to reintroduce more conventional JRPG elements to the series in ways that are a lot more respectful of what it started as.
And so we arrive at Atelier Sophie. These games come in linked subseries of 2 or 3 games, and Sophie happens to be the start of its own. That means it has to establish the mood and themes of the new setting. The previous three games, the Dusk trilogy, were set in a world gradually succumbing to the effects of all manner of alchemy-related disasters and as such had a somewhat depressing mood, albeit with the hope that the current generation might have the will to fix things. The Mysterious trilogy is significantly more optimistic about things.
The story of Atelier Sophie in particular is about Sophie Neuenmuller, who learned alchemy from her deceased grandmother and hopes to use it to help people. As the story begins, she encounters a talking book named Plachta. Plachta doesn't have a lot of her memories, but she does know that she can regain her memories when alchemy recipes are written into her pages. She also knows about something she can use to convince Sophie to help her: the Cauldron of Knowledge, which is said to allow anyone to use alchemy as well as the greatest masters of the art. She doesn't remember where the Cauldron of Knowledge is, which means Sophie has a good reason to keep learning alchemy and writing down new recipes. Meanwhile, this also means Plachta has a good reason to teach Sophie alchemy, in order to restore her memories.
There's your premise, which leads into a very laid-back game. There's no time limits or anything to give you an incentive to rush through the plot, and it's set up so that you'll develop the recipes you need to unlock each memory just by playing through the game at whatever pace you want.
The lack of a time limit is pretty important, actually, since the majority of Atelier games in the past had them. During the PS2 era they fell by the wayside, but they returned for Rorona and stayed around up until Shallie (the game before this one) ditched them. After Sophie there's only one more Atelier game to have a time limit before they're gone for good. Whether that's a good thing or not is something that some Atelier fans will argue about for hours on end, but if you ask me it's perfectly fine. The time limits work fine, but I personally see no reason for the series to be permanently wedded to them—especially since they seriously complicate the pace of the games. Make the time limit too strict and you've got a game that practically demands multiple playthroughs just to get to a point where you can play as intended, but make it too generous and it might as well not be there at all (see also the very first game in the series, where you can completely remove the urgency of the time limit just by performing exactly two syntheses right out of the gate.)
But anyway, in this particular game you're not just under no pressure to rush through things, you're actively encouraged to take it easy. I could probably come up with a good argument for how Sophie manages to encourage you to engage with and master its alchemy system by removing all time pressure as opposed to older Atelier games that use that time pressure to accomplish essentially the same goal, but I don't have a coherent enough argument to say much more than that.
Now, I've been going on about the game's setup a lot, so let's get to the game itself.
First up, how alchemy works. After choosing what you want to make you choose your ingredients. Recipes can call for specific ingredients for a particular slot and they can also call for general categories, and individual instances of a particular item can have different stats on them so there's a reason to choose even when you're asked for one specific thing. You then get a grid of coloured squares to place your ingredients into, with the ingredients themselves taking up one or more squares. Some squares have sparkling bonus icons on them that increase the value of an ingredient that "claims" them for determining the final product's effects, and these are generated and enhanced in every square that borders an item you place, with their element (which gives you a bonus when claiming them with an ingredient that matches) being determined by the colour of the square they appear in. Putting ingredients on top of other ingredients removes them from the grid, and at the end whichever element has the most squares covered with ingredients that match it gets a bonus to every effect value that matches it based on how much of the grid it covers. Oh, and the value of the bonus icons, how many are on the board when you start, and the size of the board are all determined by the cauldron you're using, with all cauldrons also having their own special effects that change the rules.
Lastly, items can also have traits that you can transfer to things you make from them. Some traits can also combine with each other to create new, stronger traits that do more with the limited number of slots you get.
All that sounds complex, and it is, but after a while it just clicks. Reaching the point where you understand the systems well enough to really start thinking about the strategies involved is never not satisfying in any Atelier game, and this one's no exception. Figuring out how to fit unusually shaped ingredients together to get the most out of them—and when to overwrite something—is extremely fun, and once you start figuring out how to get traits like "Well Rounded Power" (generally good stat boosts that work with all equipment) and "One Hit Kill" (guess) on the items you want them on can be an interesting and engaging puzzle.
You get new recipes mostly through the inspiration system, making its return in massively expanded form from Atelier Iris 3. Basically, you get new recipes by doing things related to them. There's a lot of things this checks for—some recipes want you to get a particular item, some want you to kill a particular enemy, some want you to use or get hit with a particular skill, and so forth. The most interesting ones involve getting specific traits onto particular items—without exception this involves a chain synthesis puzzle to get something that only appears on a particular ingredient onto an item that can't accept that ingredient. There's a particular brilliance to the system, because it means that getting better at alchemy involves you, the player, getting better at alchemy.
Then there's the battle system, which I'm not nearly as fond of but it gets the job done. As is typical for the first game in a new Atelier subseries the complexity of the battle system is toned down significantly from the previous game, though not to the same degree as, say, Rorona when compared to Mana Khemia 2. Here you've got a system where you choose everyone's actions and then the turn begins, but you also have a visible indicator of when each ally and enemy will act. The way this works can be a bit confusing at first, because your characters start at one point in the order and then when you choose their actions their icons move to indicate the order they're actually going to do things in. Everything you can do has both a windup (determining how far down the initiative order you move when you choose it) and a cooldown (which affects where you start on your next turn.)
A lot of the problem with the battle system can be summed up as such: I have never seen any non-action RPG that so heavily overvalues basic physical attacks as this one. Skills generally don't do enough to be worth using over regular attacks outside of specific circumstances, and they almost invariably take so long to use that you'll be at the end of the action order anyway. Items, meanwhile, are the fastest things in the game but suffer from the traditional Atelier problem of having very limited uses—you get an option to automatically refill them for a reasonable price so you don't have to worry too much about breaking stuff that requires rare ingredients, but that doesn't change the fact that a lot of items have only 3 or 4 uses before you're out until you go back to town and you can only equip five items per character. So in the end you just wind up mostly hitting "Attack" over and over.
There's a bit more to the combat, though, because I haven't discussed Attack and Defense modes yet. You can freely swap characters between these every turn, and in addition to the expected effect on your stats they determine what kinds of support actions your characters do. Initially support actions are very basic things where characters just follow up each other's attacks and cover each other, and you need to fill up a meter to use them at all, but it gets more significant over the game as you unlock more tiers for the meter, with each tier of action involving more characters at once. Also, only the highest tier of support action you have actually spends the meter, and when you unlock the second tier the meter for the first one fills instantly after that—so after a certain point support actions happen almost all the time. Ultimately, though, the downsides of the system are that a) you can't manually determine when you do support actions, and b) to use the higher-tier actions you need more characters in the right mode, with the third and highest tier only happening when you have everyone in the same mode. It's just a bizarre combination of limits to put on this stuff.
At any rate, another interesting thing about the battle system is that your level caps out at 20. This isn't the lowest level cap I've seen for an RPG, but that's mostly because it exists in the same world as Ys I. After you reach level 20, though, things get interesting because you instead start getting skill points when you gain enough experience. This effectively switches the game from a level-based system to one where you buy stat improvements and new abilities. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but it's an interesting way of making sure you use the entire level range while still leaving plenty of room for characters to grow.
Aside from exploring, fighting, and synthesizing, a lot of your time will end up being spent doing character sidequests. All of your party members and almost every named NPC have their own character arcs that you go through, and there's enough to them that it's basically impossible to not do a significant part of all of them. The characters are all very well-defined, too, and even the silliest ones are treated with enough respect that you can take them seriously when you need to. A personal favourite of mine is Oskar, Sophie's very overweight friend with the obligatory wacky brass-heavy theme...who is actually extremely competent and never once treated as a joke. That's probably the most blatant example of Sophie's philosophy towards its cast, but you see this sort of pattern everywhere and it's honestly extremely refreshing.
One of the more amusing things in the character quests, though, is how thorough and obvious Atelier Sophie's attitude towards CERO's policy on underage drinking is. By which I mean there's an entire series of events that consist of Sophie going to the local tavern and griping about how she isn't old enough to drink yet while the bartender talks about how awesome and life-changing alcohol is. It's all framed in a way that makes it ludicrously clear exactly what the writers think about being forced to make their fantasy world inspired by Renaissance Germany adhere exactly to the drug laws of present-day Japan. I personally agree that it's ridiculous, but I'm hardly in any position to do anything about it.
I ought to talk about the game's aesthetics too, and this is probably the best time to get arount to that. Like a lot of pre-Ryza 3D Gust games the graphical fidelity could use some work but the quality of the art direction more than makes up for it. Character models are distinctive and do a good job of getting the point of the designs across. It helps that the designs are stylized enough to make that job easier, too. There's actually two character designers who worked on this game (and the entire Mysterious subseries, really): NOCO and Yuugen. Their styles mesh together very well while also being distinctive enough (particularly in terms of how they draw eyes) that you can easily tell who drew which characters if you know what to look for. In terms of the general art style Sophie goes for more stylized and over-the-top designs than the Dusk trilogy did, befitting the lighter tone of the new world.
The audio doesn't disappoint in the slightest. Nobody with any sense expects Gust soundtracks to be bad, but Sophie's music still stands out as one of their better offerings. I'm particularly fond of the town music, which has multiple different versions depending on the time of day. The standard battle music also has an interesting feature where there's four different themes that play based on your strength compared to the enemies', going from light and cheerful when you're facing enemies you shouldn't have trouble with to a dark and ominous piano piece when you're facing enemies significantly stronger than you. Basically all the character themes are good too, and I'd honestly say that the final boss theme, Liela Xea, is pretty damn close to the best in the series—the only ones that I'd say can entirely compare are MARIA from Atelier Ayesha and Stigmata from Mana Khemia. But there's no dethroning Stigmata.
(As an aside, Gust is also responsible for my absolute favourite final boss theme in anything, which is EXEC_over.METHOD_SUBLIMATION/. ~omness chs ciel sos infel from Ar tonelico 2. Not that that's relevant to this game, I just wanted to bring that song up because I love it.)
Anyway, the plot mostly gets out of the way until a particular point where Plachta stops remembering things. This leads into Sophie concluding that, since by that point they know that Plachta used to be human and was turned into a book, the way to keep helping her is to find a way to turn her back into a human, inspired by how it's easier to remember what you wanted to read when you're standing by your bookshelf than when you're, say, cooking. Unusual logic, but finding a way to make Plachta more human does turn out to be exactly what Sophie needs to do. Except that since making humans with alchemy is in the "damn near impossible" range the stopgap solution is to move her soul into an extremely lifelike doll. A pretty large amount of the cast gets involved in this, too—a big part of this sequence is about how everyone cares about Plachta and is willing to go the distance to help her. Naturally it works, which should come as a surprise to absolutely nobody since Plachta's doll body is shown in the opening and an extremely large amount of the promotional material for the game.
Plachta ends up being the final party member, naturally, and she also gets her own unique mechanic where you can enhance her body with certain types of items. This of course involves changing her costume. There's a lot of options you can get based on what items you use and four values that only exist for the purpose of this system, all of which are some variety of outlandish, skimpy, or outlandishly skimpy. It's more than a little ridiculous, honestly, though considering what her default outfit looks like it should not surprise anyone.
I will stress at this point that Sophie's the one making all those outfits for Plachta. No reason in particular why I'm stressing this. None at all.
More seriously, though, it's worth discussing Sophie and Plachta's relationship in at least a little detail because it's such a big part of the plot. The development here feels extremely natural, and by the time the subject of returning Plachta to human form comes up Sophie's primary motive for wanting to do so is about helping her and becoming closer to her. By the end of the story the Cauldron of Knowledge is more of a secondary goal for Sophie and her main reason for restoring Plachta's memories has become helping her. Plachta mostly keeps her own emotions a bit more guarded, but it's still obvious enough what she thinks of Sophie. They don't outright say what's going on and I'm sure people much smarter than me can write a lot of words about that, but, well, how else am I supposed to interpret, for instance, the sequence where Plachta says she'd be happy to eat anything Sophie cooks and this leads to Sophie being sad about how Plachta's artificial body means she can't actually taste it?
At any rate, the most important theme Atelier Sophie's plot presents is that your reasons for doing something can be just as important as what you're doing. It's regularly stressed that Sophie's motivation for becoming an alchemist is to make people happy with her alchemy, and Plachta cites this as the entire reason she's willing to trust her with the Cauldron of Knowledge. They actively draw a contrast between Sophie's motive and that of the antagonist who eventually emerges, Luard. Luard's story is that he once studied alchemy alongside Plachta with the goal of saving their town from a famine, but ultimately ended up losing sight of any desire to help others in favour of just improving his alchemy for the sake of improving it. That in turn led him to practice a dark form of the art that while powerful drains the power of nature in an extremely noticable way—to the point where within days of his appearance you start getting scenes about how something is blatantly wrong with the environment. Plachta, upon defeating him in the past, split his soul in two and placed each fragment in an artificial body so he wouldn't be able to use alchemy (which also touches on something I haven't mentioned yet—in the Mysterious series, only certain people have the potential to use alchemy, and artificial bodies can't use it at all. Guess how the Cauldron of Knowledge's ability to let anyone use alchemy factors into this.)
Naturally, Sophie's exactly the kind of RPG protagonist who hears a story like that, realizes that the seemingly heartless villain has some good in him, and sets out to reawaken it. In this case that means recreating the fertilizer Plachta and Luard made to save their town in order to remind Luard of where he came from and what he originally wanted to do.
Plachta, as a contrast, doesn't believe there's anything that can be done for Luard and just thinks killing him is all that can be done. A line of thinking Sophie actively rejects, of course, because she realizes having to kill him is hurting Plachta and do you remember what her main goal is?
Of course you still need to fight Luard, because he's not about to just magically come to his senses. But Sophie turns out to be right, and while Luard's soul is split again (and the Cauldron of Knowledge is destroyed so it's not like he can change that again) she still manages to start him back on the right path.
In the end, my thoughts on Atelier Sophie are pretty simple despite all the words I just spent analyzing it. It's a good game whose flaws don't get in the way of its good points. Its alchemy system is super fun, its characters are memorable, and its themes are well-presented and reasonably effective. Its graphics are firmly good enough, and its music is excellent. It's also pretty easy to get sucked into it once you really start focusing on it.
Everything an Atelier game ought to be, really.
