Atelier Resleriana - This ain't a 'game', it's a goddamn cash sink!

Issue #5 - Volume 5

As I write this piece, I am playing the game. The game has a full auto mode because it's a mobile game. It has a skip dialogue button because it's a mobile game. It has a premium currency where the currency you get in-game is separated from the paid premium currency, so you can't pay for the battle pass by playing the game because it's a mobile game.

Despite not being a big fan of the Atelier series - I've played a few, with my personal favourite being Ryza - I went into this game with an open mind. I saw many people bashing the game online, and I thought they couldn't be that bad.

I was wrong.

Absolutely nothing about this game is redeeming. It's a gigantic slot machine with no real discernable input. It has poor currency practices, and to top it up, despite it being a fairly well-optimized game, it has more loading screens than a game about loading screens.

The game has you manage many items, many of which are incredibly easy to forget about completely. Each item is tied to some variation of 'thing'. Some quests allow you to 'train', as once you complete it the first time, you can spend your stamina points to skip the battle and simply get the rewards. Which can range from items you'll need to craft new items to pieces you'll need to rank up your characters, experience, and coins.

While the art is nice, the voice actresses did a bang-up job; the bones of the gameplay loop are monotonous, with battles taking forever, even at 3X speed and with auto-battle enabled, despite the continued support with new events and the lure of new characters. The fact remains that the characters, abilities, and stat levels are all locked behind arbitrary tokens, where each needs a different set of tokens or items to unlock, making the process of even levelling up characters tedious and not fun.

Honestly, I played this game for five days and dropped it after. It's been over a month since I started this review, and it isn't worth it.

Honestly, it was so grindy and overstimulating, with little to no reward for completing anything. The game's not worth it for anybody who is just a casual fan of the Atelier series. I'll continue to look forward to the mainline games, but this cash-grab mobile game is a hard pass for me.