Our Man in Japan -- Mana in Japan
DeanRaker - Columns - Comments - 09/09/04
Earlier Atelier games used anime and manga conventions just to develop character. Their characters often lacked that feeling that the developer created them by thinking up a bunch of personality traits, inserting them into an illustration, and randomly deciding how they'd be related to the game by rolling dice on a plot board. They well and truly seemed to live in the decidedly Nordic/Germanic worlds the game was set in (another thing the series seems to have lost in Eternal Mana's less specifically realized fantasy world).
The real travesty is that it's part of this long-running series of Gust's headliners. It's either a spin-off or a trend of the series future. Gust was probably trying to court a megahit in sales rather than the traditional Atelier games mere "hit" status. In my mind, their experiment failed.
The Atelier games, to put it simply, rock. It started way back on the PSX and Saturn with Atelier Marie. Critics noticed not only that Gust chose female characters as the protagonists, but that their premise was original for an RPG: you simply run an alchemy shop. You don't have to defeat the foozle or go on a quest or anything like that (though you can eventually help the people who ARE doing these things, if you so choose). But it's more complex than you might think to run a shop. You have take orders, hire bodyguards to go out to find ingredients, and you ultimately have some sort of goal. All of this is quite involved, along with a system of reliability, trust, and reputation. Then there's finding a way to "pay the bills", so to speak, making the game quite addictive.
As the series has progressed, its sophistication did as well. By the fifth game, you had to take into account things like not being too violent during a battle in an ancient ruin, or else you might cause it to collapse and you could no longer collect ingredients there. Gust added Zelda-like puzzle solving tools to deepen the process of collecting more rare ingredients. Eventually, if your fame and reputation increased enough, you could start affecting trade with other towns, or you could affect the development of your town so it grew differently. (For instance, you could influence the town to emphasize an agricultural direction or weapons and armor for wandering heroes.) Depending on which bodyguards you hired and how much you got to know them, the content of the game would change, as would local news and events you followed as the years went by. Several wildly different endings would result from separate goals. And after the games ended, they didn't really end: a huge amount of after-completion content made for a nice, long denouement when you finished the climax of your main goal.
The graphics were warm, the dialogue was always fully voice-acted, there was a calendar with events and seasons with different kinds of weather, and the game would end after a set amount of time. Eternal Mana, on the other hand, is your average defeat-the-ancient-evil, battle-heavy RPG. Although the combat system is more fleshed out than the earlier games, it isn't integrated as well. A bit sad when Mana focuses on it and the previous Atelier games made battle one small part of a complex role-playing whole. The earlier games are, in fact, a great deal more vast than what Eternal Mana achieves.
I'm not trying to discourage you from buying Eternal Mana. I can certainly imagine some will enjoy it more than I did. I'm just one person, and the reaction to Eternal Mana was mixed. And I suppose it raises the odds that one of the better Atelier games, like Atelier Viorate or Atelier Judie, will get translated. For some reason, I don't think Nippon Ichi or Gust has confidence that a girl-as-main-character shop RPG will be embraced. But I think it was a breath of fresh air and exactly the type of thing overseas RPG fans would like to see. Either way, you should know that Nippon Ichi's translation of Eternal Mana is unlikely to please the same people who look for depth and innovation in their RPGs.
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