| Platform: PlayStation 3 | Publisher: NIS America | Price: $39.99 |
| Genre: RPG | Developer: GUST | Rating: T |
It starts with someone Narrating the story where it talks about some guy wanting to open an alchemy workshop in this town and the two people that work in this workshop is Rorona and her Master Astrid and the whole story begins when the king wants to shut down the workshop for reasons you will find out. Astrid so lazy that anything that pops she will put all the pressure on Rorona. Once you can start you will go through the tutorials and you can skip them if you want to. I love when you go back to the workshop and Cory thinks tackling someone would cheer Rorona up. That would hurt more than anything really. Well the prologue was fair. It had problems like why is Rorona being friends with Cory when she is always mean to her? They also made Rorona a bit too whiny. It is all my fault is practically her line or near it. It could have been better than it was.
The amount of time to complete this game is decent which it took me about 20 hours to complete (i believe) but it also feels like forever at some points of the game because the assignments get repetitive after a while. Like make this item and turn it in and make this other item and turn it in for every assignment in the game which makes the game overall a bit stale. If you play with the first five assignments you will know what to come from the others because of it being the same thing. In this game Rorona is a bit annoying and partially I just couldn’t stand it. It is fine to be a bit annoying that is fine but they made Rorona way past fine and went full blast annoying but she does get better in the last 1.5 years of the game but can you last that long? Well let’s just continue on with the review and not get caught up with Rorona being annoying. There is a new game+ to this game but isn’t really that good. It may keep the record of your money and whatever item/monster you found but I find one problem and that is your level not getting carried over to the new game. When I think of New Game+ I would believe it would carry over the level with the other stuff getting carried over but who cares and let’s just continue on.
There are different endings to this game and it depends on your town popularity and assignment stars and which person you did the most friend requests for so it slightly depends on your choices. Your choices shape the ending but nothing major or have any meaning but it is still good that there are still different endings. The only negative here with the different endings is that this game is not replayable. When I finished the game I tried my best but I just couldn’t play it again after I finished it so at this point it is pointless having different endings when you can’t replay it.
Overall it was not good at all as it can get repetitive and boring.
The controls are easy to understand so once you pick it up and play and you will know the controls almost instantly. You can gather stuff around forests which it gives you stuff to synthesize so it is important to gather the stuff around the forests. Also synthesizing is very easy to do. Just gather the ingredients have the recipe and go to cauldron and choose the ingredients to use than you will be done synthesizing after a day or more goes by so it is very simple to understand how to do it. To get Cole (this games currency) you have to do quests or sell items but doing quests is the better option. The problem is the camera being fixed. When I walk around without me even knowing because I can’t turn the camera to look ahead may encounter an enemy I can’t just kill yet because he is more powerful than me so that means I will die and lose Cole because of the camera being fixed. If I can look around that could have been avoided. It is pointless on jumping in this game because there is nothing needed to use the jump. In this game they could have just forgotten about it altogether since this game didn’t need it. To pause the game is kind of odd because Triangle is the pause button which I would never expect because when I want to pause the game I always go for the start button and not triangle. The start button is used to look at quests if you have it but I think that should have used triangle. Anything you do makes the days go by pretty quickly which can be annoying at times like if you are at the end of an assignment and you don’t have enough stuff for it so you would have to go gather ingredients and make the item which both of them takes days to do so you may fail an assignment because of it. In this game you have to make sure you do the assignment and not hold off on it since if you do hold off you could fail it.
Overall it may be short but you don’t need it to be long to know the positives and negatives of the gameplay. It is fair overall and needed some work done.
You can change the audio from English to Japanese so if you don’t like it being English you can change it to the original format except for the text that will stay in English. The music is good and I like it especially the intro song but the problem is there is very little amount of a variety of music to enjoy. Once you start the game you will hear the same song over and over again with no change. At some points it was annoying me so I had to mute my TV for I can stop listening to it for a while because it is boring hearing the same song repeat. The voice acting in this game is ok but not the best. It probably is because the English dubs is not that good but the Japanese dub is better even though I couldn’t even understand the language but it is ok overall. Navigating through the menu is very easy because there isn’t much on the menu. Everything is where you would expect them like new game, load game, extras which hold your encyclopedia of the items & monsters you found & game art, and the last thing is settings where you can the audio from English to Japanese if you wanted. Very simple to understand but the menu background is bland which can also mean boring. I like seeing game art of some kind as the menu background but it just had what you saw on the disk as the background which to me makes me not want to stare at the menu long. This game looks kind of like a PS2 game which I know Japan doesn’t really like to make graphics the top of their priority but they pay most attention to the art style to their games but this game looks like it was made for PS2 and not PS3. This game’s art style was little to none existent so that is a bummer. The areas outside of the town look like it was done cheaply. It barely had anything to remember the areas by. It just looks as bland as the menu background and it didn’t give the impression, “wow this area looks beautiful” but it gave more of this impression, “this area looks boring and doesn’t look it had any effort put into it” which to me is shocking because I like Japan games because of their art style but this game didn’t have that.
Overall it was not good at all and it did not feel like it came from Japan at all.
You can make weapons if you have the ingredients for it and to find the ingredients for it is very simple is go to an area that has ore and gather as much as you can but also make sure you find many types of ores since each ore has a different effect on the weapon you make. One ore can make it weaker and a different ore can make it stronger so it depends on the ore you gathered. Each and every item can have a different trait/effect or have none at all so it is pure random on it and there is never a way to know what it will choose for each item. You will have a lot of luck if you get all the greater traits/effects on one weapon. If you synthesized an item that had a trait and synthesized it with another item that had a different trait and it would combine the two which is great if you know what you are doing. You can interact with a good amount of people but not with everyone. You can’t really choose what to say though. All you can choose is to invite to your party to help on the outside of town or get friend requests from them. I like the amount of people you can interact with but I hate little amount of interaction you can do with them. There is a good selection of items to get or gather and a lot those items can be used to make different and better items for you to use like to use in battles. Now let’s go onto the bad things like XP distribution is bad. When I fought two Blue Puni’s I got two experience points but when I fought three of them and it only gave me one experience point which is wrong since it should have given me more than one point. There is also problem with the turn based battle system because it needs work. Sometimes your enemy can take two turns at the same time or vice versa. It should one turn per character/enemy because that is the better system in my eyes so there is a problem with XP distribution and the battle system and I think they should have tooken more time with it to make it better. Each of the areas that you explore can’t actually be explored because you can only go down a straight path and can’t go anywhere else. I kind of wished you could explore the whole area to gather items but you can’t.
Overall they do an okay job but not the best of one but it will do.
Conclusion:
I may not have said as much in this review but as you can tell it is worth a one playthrough but there is that person that may love this game but overall when I played this game it just didn’t really click for me and I gave it my all but this game is worth a rent.
| Positives | Negatives | |
| Story: 5/10 | ||
| +Decent amount of playtime | -New Game+ | |
| +Different Endings | -Rorona is annoying | |
| - Not Replayable | ||
| -Assignments get repetitive | ||
| -The story kind of stale | ||
| Gameplay: 6/10 | ||
| +Doing quests for the town | -Fixed Camera | |
| +Gathering | -Days go by quickly | |
| +Controls are easy to understand | -Jumping is pointless | |
| +Synthesizing is easy | -Triangle to pause the game | |
| Presentation: 6/10 | ||
| +Change audio from English or Japanese | -very little amount of variety music | |
| +Music is good | -Menu background is bland | |
| +Menu is very easy to navigate | -Looks like a PS2 game | |
| +Voice acting is ok | -The areas design looks cheap | |
| RPG Genre Mastery: 7/10 | ||
| +Making Weapons | -Turn Based battles needed work | |
| +Each item has a different Effect/Trait | -XP distribution is bad | |
| +A good amount of people to interact with | -Can’t explore the area | |
| +A good selection of items to get | -Little amount of interaction between characters | |
| Overall: 6/10 |
