#which kinda makes this fucker look even goofier. in my opinion

[front-facing-pokemon]

[crystalelemental]

Atelier Shallie Plus Opinions

Anyone paying attention to the overall rankings, and more importantly paid attention to each of the other run-downs, has noticed I am a Dusk Trilogy fanboy in the extreme.  The series has had such a wonderful shift in art direction, and the emphasis on the environmental impact and history for the setting has been nothing short of divine.  The series also boasts some of the best casts of characters, and have changed the battle and alchemy systems to be far more engaging.  And yet, Shallie is among my least-favorites in the series.  It's still an excellent game, like all Atelier games, but it ranks near the bottom for a single reason: disappointment.  For all the excellent buildup of this trilogy has to offer, boy is the conclusion just...among the worst this trilogy could've had.

CHARACTERS On the whole, I think the characters of Shallie are good.  I wouldn't necessarily say that they're on par with the previous Dusk games, but they're still solid, and the returning characters are, once again, some of the best possible picks.

Shallistera - The better Shallie, I say.  She's your more down-to-earth character, whose village is suffering from the water drying up.  She comes to Stellard to find a way to save her village.  She's definitely the more serious of the two, but she has some charming quirks as well.

Shallotte - Shallotte is the goofier of the two, and is high energy and kind of a dunce.  I'm reminded slightly of Rorona, just in terms of those qualities.  She works out as a character, and has her own thing going on with her sick mother.  I just have a preference for mostly serious with quirks over quirk master supreme only calm in certain situations.

Kortes - I was on board for Kortes initially.  But he's an idiot.  His general stance is that, after being in the city and learning other customs, some of the things the village does seem odd or unnecessary to him.   It's fine as a character, but the reason I don't like him is one scene with Wilbell, in which she mentions spirits, and he's like "Yeah, too bad those aren't real."  Like...Kortes, buddy...we have fought spirits. Constantly.  What are you talking about?  I just hate that character in high-fantasy that's "science-minded" but rejects easily observable facts because they wouldn't exist in our reality.  That's not how science works, asshole.

Jurie - Jurie is a treasure hunter who is out to make a lot of money, mostly for her younger sister.  Jurie is also quite the writer, apparently, and uses her adventures to create stories for others about them.

Miruca - Miruca is Jurie's younger sister, and the best girl of this game.   Miruca is flat-affect and very direct with her thoughts, particularly in regards to Central. She hated it there.  Education in Central seems to be based largely on connection and conformity rather than development of new ideas or creativity, and as a result she never really fit in and was bullied by many in the program. Central itself is thus something she hates for their philosophy on how things should work, and with good reason.  Miruca's storyline is also one of the reasons I came away not liking Shallotte that much.  Miruca clearly disdains Central and what it's like there, and Shallotte spends most scenes with her talking about how great Central is and how Miruca's dream was once to go there to become a great alchemist.  I know Shallotte's all about quirk and being gung-ho, but she kinda comes across as the type who is energetic to the point she's oblivious to the feelings of others, and that is something I really don't like.  Not to mention, it’s one thing to support your friend’s dreams, and entirely another to ignore their very clear current stance and change in life goals to keep prattling on about what they wanted to do in the past.

Wilbell - Return of the best witch.  Wilbell gets a lot in this.  She has a vulnerable moment with her attempts at contracting with the Lord of Water, takes on Shallotte as an apprentice to help in what way she can, and is finally accepted as a proper witch by her great grandmother.  It's a nice resolution for her character all-around.

Homura - Homura is a homunculus.  Homura, unlike the other homunculi, has a taste for adventure and a desire to be a great treasure hunter, instead of being...more of a follower.  When it comes to his attention that homunculi are all man-made, the little guy has a crisis of identity, and has a really striking scene with Solle and the Shallies about whether his quirks are because he was made that way, or if there's something unique to him as an individual.  Honestly, he's the most emotionally significant character in the crew, I feel.  I guess the name "Homura" is one just destined to be associated with emotional devastation.

Solle - Solle comes back, and continues to be his deadpan snarker self.  I love this guy.  He's actually playable this time, and apparently his attacks are based on using the Homunculi.  Which is neat.  Most of his best moments are in him becoming more like Marion with his disdain for protocol, and his interactions with Homura which are really sweet.

Escha - Alchemist return #1.  Escha continues to be bubbly and fun, and is just great to have around.  There isn't a whole lot of development for her character, unfortunately.  She's just here to help out Solle as he establishes the new branch in this town, and to bring the seed entrusted to her by Flameu, as Flameu has stated this is where the seed should go.  Mysterious.

Logy - Similarly, he doesn't get a lot of development, he's just around to help out Solle.  I really have nothing significant to comment on, though I hear he's really good in combat.

Ayesha - BEST ALCHEMIST RETURNS!  Ayesha comes back, and is as delightful as ever.  My only real complaint is that, given her actions before she's officially added and the fact that her ultimate attack is effectively summoning the Yggdrasil monster she defeated, I had hoped this meant she took over the powers of Yggdrasil as sort of a manager of the cradle of life.  She did not. She's just eccentric.  Which still works, but you know.  Mild letdown.

Keithgriff - He's not as critical as he was in Ayesha, unfortunately, and is part of the reason the ending is so dull.  He really just doesn't shine like in Ayesha, where his role was more solidified and significant.  Here, they kinda just use his character in the same role, but with no real deviations.  He just shows the Shallies the dark past of alchemy and already seems to know everything, even though the emphasis on finding a solution to the Dusk should mean he’s roughly as clueless as the others.  It was nice to see the scenes of how he's responding to traveling with Ayesha, and how he's changing the things he smokes to maintain good health like Ayesha wants.  The game kinda implies a romance thing at one point, which I'm not a fan of, but the scenes are sweet.

Odelia - Actual best girl.  She's back, and as wonderful as ever.  She's just not playable, which is a sin.  She gets one scene with Homura that's pretty good, as both of them have a moment about being man-made entities.  But really, Odelia stands out in comedy.  Her role in the sweets-eating contest as the eater of the sweets is great, and her shooting down Albert is just about the best thing.

Raoul - This guy is the head of the organization that manages the lower classes, essentially.  He's a bit rough around the edges, but cares deeply for the town, and feels the government is only looking out for the wealthy while the poor immigrants from villages where water is disappearing are left to fend for themselves.  He attempts to create order by establishing a system where people can find work through him to manage their needs.  He's pretty swell, and works with Solle and Central to ensure things are going well in the city.

Perriend - By comparison, the guy in charge of the government cares significantly for the city's autonomy, and refuses to cooperate with Central.  He's not a bad person, he just feels very strongly that sacrifices need to be made for the common good, and sometimes those sacrifices mean that not everyone is happy.  He can come off as really abrasive, way more so than Raoul, but he does care for the city itself.  I'm not a fan of his.

Linca - A different one this time.  We meet Linca Seven, whereas the one with Marion is Linca Eight.  This Linca works as a secretary for Perriend, and in terms of personality, is fairly similar to Linca 8, if a bit more serious and better at paperwork.

Nady - Shallotte's mom.  She's apparently the former secretary of Perriend, and generally sweet.  She's just also apparently really bad with money.  She spends a virtual fuckton on literal garbage that Katla sells, making Katla look awful and Nady look like an idiot.  She's cute, but eh.

Albert - This guy is a robot-fucker with excellent taste.  He gets a look at Odelia, is instantly smitten, and starts collecting automatons to figure out how they work. He's a complete doofus who doesn't do his job, but gets away with things by being the rich son of Perriend.  As a result, I am not the biggest fan of this guy, but boy does he have good taste in robots.

Teo - The older one from Shallistera's village.  He's an occasionally helpful source of knowledge for some of the major events around town when you're looking for alchemy information, but otherwise doesn't do a whole lot.  He does call Kortes out on being a know-it-all who doesn't know anything at one point, which I adored.  But otherwise, kinda forgettable.

Rosemia - If ever there were a time I was disappointed in not having DLC for a new playable shopkeep character, it is now.  Rosemia is awesome.  She’s a former witch who was shunned largely by society, but found love with a man who cared for her despite her status as a witch.  Unfortunately, he was a sea-faring man and wound up dying at sea, leaving her alone.  She continues to travel, scavenging items from the dead to sell off.  I really wish she was a playable character...

Katla - Oh, and Katla’s here.  Hooray.

STORY Let's first review the past two games.  In Ayesha, the background setting is all about the Dusk, and how humans used alchemy for bad purposes that messed up the world really badly.  The devastation was so significant that oceans dried up, and the beings that were created with alchemy were let loose in the collapse of civilization, with the slags running haywire more as weapons than entities for work.  The devastation was so extreme that locations like the Zweiteturm and the Cradle of Life were established to re-build the entirety of society and the world's ecosystem if they couldn't turn things around.  It establishes the problem of the Dusk as something that has a global impact, and introduces the idea that there's a cyclic problem that people just have to endure.

In Escha and Logy, the problem is further explored as we learn that humans banded together to confront the threat, but ultimately came up short-handed. Even with the establishment of Geosis and its centuries-long study of the environmental impact the Dusk had, they still came up with little more than a single seed that offers a presumably temporary solution to an environmental problem.  We're also given more indication that the Dusk may have been a human-created problem, and that the suggestion for certain farming techniques from Flameu may have caused problems for the soil's ability to sustain production until it all collapsed.  It introduces a somewhat alternative theory for how humans responded to the crisis, but even with the implication that civilizations worked together, they still all died out and were unable to sufficiently fix the problem the world faced.

In Atelier Shallie, the basic plot concept was bringing in a resolution and solution to the problem of the Dusk.  Already, I hope what you see wrong.  "Solution." This should have been a band-aid at best; something that allows humans to consistently survive the Dusk, but not fix it.   But it's super fixable in ways it should not be.  You see, apparently the cause of the Dusk here is that a machine made ages ago for water purification broke down, and is now taking in a bunch of drinking water, failing to purify it, and instead spitting out contaminated water, which removes the water supply from the world.  This is the Dusk.  Now, it fits with "humans did this to themselves," but if it's a broken down machine, how exactly is this a re-occurring cycle?  But to make matters worse, when you defeat the administrator of this facility, the machine turns off then back on again, and Keith just adjusts the intake a bit and the problem is immediately solved. They talk about "oh, not everything will go back to normal right away," but there's drinking water in the smaller villages again, so problem is literally solved entirely, with no adverse effects.  It's too clean, and conflicts with so much we know about the Dusk.  You really mean to tell me the ancient civilization was so incapable of figuring out the most basic of technology rules to turn it off and on again that they all died from it?  You really mean to tell me that a machine breaking down was the cause of them building an entire facility to store all knowledge, another to preserve all life, and a third to study the phenomenon and develop countermeasures?  No one saw the water drying up and went "Hey, maybe we should check the machine that monitors this stuff?"  None of it fits with the elements that have come before, and considering we've spent so much time expressing that the ancient civilization was far more technologically advanced than the current era, there's no excuse for the problem to just be a faulty machine.

Then there's the issue of the Lord of Water, whose memories showcase that humans were in fact at war with each other as part of the reason she's so pissed about things.  But that directly conflicts with Threia's findings, so either war happened prior to the Dusk and humans banded together to confront a larger problem after their own conflicts, or this game just forgot about that tidbit and did whatever it wanted.  Personally, I kinda wonder if it's the latter, though I'm accepting the former.  There are just pieces that do not tie together well, and considering how well Escha & Logy fit together with Ayesha despite having almost no connections in geography or characters, this is a little sad.

SETTING I feel like the discussion above is sufficient.  The locations in this area are all drying up from the Dusk, and it all feels very connected to the rest of the trilogy up until they make the reveal of the answer.   It really just knocks both the story and the setting components flat on their ass, and turns something with an incredible amount of potential into a massive disappointment.

ALCHEMY SYSTEM There have been changes.  Many changes.  For instance, quality goes up to 999.  There's also a chaining process, where you can put skills on materials. Some skills are one slot, some are two, and materials all have different amounts of slots, up to 4 at a time.  Your goal now is to improve materials to apply traits, and if you use the same element skills in a row on items that share that elemental trait, your chain bonus goes up, and this is entirely irrelevant barring Chain Attribute and Chain Effect, both of which are Earth skills.  Earth and Wind skills are the only ones that can chain up to 9999 chain value, and if this is done, Chain Effect will bring your final product up to effect 999.   It's honestly a little roundabout, and while I don't inherently dislike it, it doesn't feel as organic as Escha & Logy's system did.  This game also does a super cool thing where a lot of optimal effects exist as the middle value, rather than the highest, so a lot of times your attribute-increasing skills aren't that necessary, so Fire and Water are barely ever used late-game.  It just feels like an incredibly wasted aspect of the game when half your skills are never used, and the remainder are used almost exclusively to build up the Chain gauge without any regard to their effect.

Synthesis level has also been upgraded to 99, which is way higher than 50.  So high that it's honestly hard to reach.  You definitely want to, as you get more Cost involved for being higher level, which reduces the number of needed Water skills, which is great because now you can get back to just spamming Earth or Wind skills like you ought to be.  The best way is to just gather a ton of Clay and Junk, and just synthesize 200 Brother Call items.  It's a little slow, but manageable.

Ultimately though, I think it's an interesting idea that didn't play out too well. Synthesis is fun for most of the game, as it always is, but the conclusion kinda falls flat as everything becomes about optimizing quality by chaining skills. Because skills don't matter anymore beyond just keeping the same element going and ending with Chain Effect, your skills just feel irrelevant and the whole system becomes less complex.   It would have made chaining to maximum easier, but I almost wish chain just built solely through matching an element skill to an element the material had.  That way, you can apply a bunch of different traits as needed, while still getting a good chain together.  Instead, it spends a majority of the game allowing for a bunch of traits as needed, but ends with "Just chain what you need and be done with it."

BATTLE SYSTEM Damage is really high in this game.  HP values are also really high.  Moreso than any other game, I think.  I really don't know how I feel about it. The result is that you spend a lot of time just trying to implement a system where your characters will instantly get to do follow up attacks, because that's the basis of all damage.  Equipment is significant, and you maintain the equip items from Escha and Logy, though items are apparently very nerfed from Escha & Logy, and the alchemists play a support and healing role more than anything.  Which is odd.   Shallistera's ability lets her duplicate items, which is completely worthless in this kind of setup where you equip items and they re-stock when you return to town.  Shallotte's ability is to mix two items together to have effects, and I hear it's really good, but the damage options I worked with don't seem to be even remotely on par with the damage output of follow-up attacks.  The combat isn't bad.  It is a lot more difficult in the early-game, I feel, but very simple with late-game equipment, considering I beat the DLC boss on accident.

Fortunately, equipment continues the way it did in Escha & Logy, allowing you to use previous phases of equipment to transfer up.  The difference is, you may want to use smaller items at some point, because a weaker item may get more skill slots, which is way more vital than anything else.   Nothing matters like the ability to chain skills.  Sadly.

In actual combat, there's a new Break mechanic.  If you keep up the offense, enemies will reach a "Break" state, where they lose their turn and cannot act. This is a valuable mechanic, in that relentless offense can cause enemies to lose turns, but your characters also suffer from it.  It's not a bad inclusion, I just am not its biggest fan.  I'd rather we play combat as simple as possible, and this extra layer feels wholly unnecessary.

Then there's your Burst Gauge.   Not gonna lie, I don't even understand all the mechanics of this.  When you attack or use skills, your burst gauge goes up. When it reaches 100% or more, you enter the burst state.  During this time, you can gain a boost to damage output, and even more depending on the skills on your weapon.  The damage can be as significant as like 5-10x damage from the non-burst state.  It also allows you to perform consistent chain attacks.  Outside of burst, you can get one follow-up.  In Burst, you can get all three reserve characters, but I guess you need all three of your front-line fighters alive to use all three back-row members?  Which is honestly a stupid limitation.  If you activate the burst under certain, very mysterious conditions, you can activate field effects based on your back row units.  Some will allow for HP regen, some increase damage output, etc.  They all have different effects, and it can be really helpful, I just have no idea what the rules are for activation, if I'm being entirely honest.  Sometimes I can enter burst state right away in a match and get three field effects automatically, and other times it takes the entire match to get there and I only get one.  I couldn't find an indication of where on the battle screen this information was, either.  Some may say I should've paid more attention during the tutorial piece.  I, however, say that this is an unnecessary layer of complexity.

OTHER MECHANICS When I started this game, I was convinced it would be the best, because there was no time limit anymore.  This is fantastic, and definitely great to make sure you have time to make all the items and catch all events, even in one playthrough.  However, this game attempts to keep some sort of fire lit by introducing motivation.  When you complete life tasks (which is your indirect way of having ideas of what to work on), your motivation goes up, which in turns allows you to move faster on the map and gather more materials.  However, if you putz around and don't accomplish things, motivation goes down, and you move slower and get fewer materials at gathering points.  It's...honestly just a frustrating and irrelevant system, I think.  I have all the time in the world and can gather as much as I want, you're just slowing down the process for the sake of trying to keep things moving.  It's not a terrible idea, but I don't think it was implemented very effectively.

There's also the weather patterns.  Certain environmental conditions will result in more or less of enemies or materials in certain areas.  Again, it's an interesting idea, but it ultimately doesn't really change a whole lot.  Reduced material gathering just becomes frustrating, while increased gathering is just great to unlock a lot of extra life tasks.   More or less enemies is also irrelevant because...well...

Experience gained in this game is meaningless from battle.  You will almost always be gaining shit for XP, and the real benefit is from the bonuses for completed life events.  When you complete most of the goals around synthesizing specific items, you can get around 2500 XP.  This can happen incredibly early in the game, resulting in a weird difficulty curve where the game is incredibly hard at the outset due to low XP, then incredibly easy mid-game when you can make better equipment and are like 25 levels above the enemies in the areas, followed by it getting really difficult again late-game as levels even out and you struggle to get the best equipment traits.  I really am not a big fan of how the experience system works in this game at all.  I guess the idea is, again, to keep that fire lit under your ass so you work hard at accomplishing tasks, but it's just a really awkward way to handle combat.

There is, however, one mechanic that I absolutely adore: skill points.  When you hit level 40, you start gaining one skill point every level.  Points are allocated to different skills for your character, such as improving their special attacks, or increasing stats.  I am all about skill points, so I absolutely adore this system's inclusion...I just don't think it's all that interesting in how it's handled.  Every character is essentially a carbon copy.  You have the skill to increase attack, defense, speed, all stats, crit rate, crit damage, and the few to improve attacks to different forms.   There isn't a whole ton of variance between them.  I think one character (Escha, I think?) got two copies of boost all stats, which is great, and Ayesha got something to reduce the amount of break gauge damage you take. There's just not enough differentiation for my taste.  I know that's kind of asking a lot, but that's the entire point of a skill point system; hyper-customization of characters.  Having everything be so similar feels like it invalidates a lot of the purpose of such a system.  The increase in stat points especially could just as easily be done through increasing the amount you gain at level ups.  It's also hard to truly appreciate when you carry over accumulated skill points to NG+, so at the end of your second playthrough getting to level 99 (which is really easy), you can max out all skills instantly upon reaching level 40, so there's nothing left to work for.  I do like the inclusion, and I hope they keep a similar system in upcoming games, but I would really like more specialization for characters, and for skill points to not carry over in NG+ so there's still something to work for.

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS Okay, remember in Escha and Logy, how the ultimate traits were found pretty much through luck in relic searches with a boost Relic rarity effect on and the Dowsing Rod improving traits?  Their solution to this was to instead make them based on random drops from boss enemies.  I hope you see the issue.  While Escha and Logy is a little stressful in that it's hard to actually know where to find things without incredible luck or fore-knowledge, Shallie's method is WAY more obnoxious to farm for.  Relics have all the properties, and with a quick building of the gauge and use of Dowsing rod, you get three searches in like 15 seconds. It's incredibly quick to get what you need.  When getting traits off of drops, though, it's completely random, there are like ten billion traits in the pool to choose from, and they seem to only show up consistently on higher difficulties. Add to it, the base game has the optimal farming option through the Silver Dragon, while in Shallie Plus there was a minor change that makes it so Silver Dragon doesn't drop anything of value, and you have to wait for it to transform into a way stronger version to drop anything worthwhile.  This creates a system where the best farming method for non-weapon traits (the first DLC boss drops two weapons, generally with excellent traits) takes a solid 5 minutes per run, with low trait drop chance, on a difficulty that may result in your death when you start out.  It's the first time that I've looked at what was happening in an Atelier game and said it wasn't fun, which was devastating.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS If I had to think of a word to describe the entirety of this game, it would be "Experimental."  Atelier Shallie introduces a ton of new mechanics, and while some are interesting in theory, very little feels like it's handled well in practice. I've cleared the game in its entirety, and I'm still not sure how some of the battle mechanics work. Alchemy, while different from previous games, seems to invalidate a lot of the creative process when all you ever do late-game is spam Wind or Earth skills to get chain effect maxed to then maximize the effect meter of your item, making it feel very mechanical and, honestly, not particularly fun. The story is a mess, and actively harms the setup from the previous two games that made this trilogy stand out so significantly from Arland's games.  The characters can be engaging and fun, and for the majority of the game things are generally great, but it really feels like the ending of the game dropped the ball for both itself and for the trilogy as a whole.

I made a mention back in the review of Rorona, that a game doesn't necessarily need a good, complex plot.  Something simple yet serviceable can be just as effective, if played correctly.  However, if you go for a plot, you really have to make it count, because nothing will hinder the impact of a game quite like having a plot that's either nonsense or just poorly constructed.  Atelier Shallie is the perfect example of this.  Between the poor conclusion for the trilogy and the game mechanics that are interesting but not implemented particularly well...it's hard to say Shallie shouldn't be the least favorite.  The only thing really saving it from being at the bottom is that Totori's problems feel so much more significant, and the fact that, until the last chapter, Shallie was doing extremely well.  By virtue of a strong and engaging beginning and middle, and the fact that I think there's a flat 0 in terms of really uncomfortable scenes, Shallie manages to barely outrank Totori on personal preference alone.

If you enjoyed this (for some reason), consider checking out the write-ups for the other games in the series as well!

Atelier Rorona Plus Atelier Totori Plus Atelier Meruru Plus Atelier Ayesha Plus Atelier Escha and Logy Plus Atelier Shallie Plus Atelier Sophie Atelier Firis