The first role playing game I ever came across was the old text based Adventure back in about 1980.  I had great fun playing that in computer lab back in high school (via an acoustically coupled modem!) when the teacher wasn’t looking.  In college I discovered Zork and that hooked me on RPGs.  I’ve played them on and off ever since.

Being a fan of RPGs, I was looking forward to Atelier Iris 3.  I had managed to miss the earlier entries in the series, and was interested to see how the game would play.  Would the battle system be exciting?  Was the background story engaging?  Would it be one of those games that I’d sneak off to whenever I got the chance so that I could advance just a little bit farther?  Unfortunately the answer to all those questions is “No.”  While this game does have new ideas when it comes to exploring new areas and combat, most of these innovations don’t work very well.  In addition, the linear play of the game ia arranged so that the story takes a long time to emerge, and the gameplay is very repetitive.  It’s one of those “find item A and give it to person B who will tell you to take it to place C” games where the running around takes more time than the actual combat.

Gameplay:

In this game players take on the role of Edge, a young fighter and his friend Iris, a budding alchemist.  They are both Raiders, arms for hire who take on assignments for money (Cole) and experience.  When they want to find a job they travel from their home (the only place that you can save the game and perform alchemist experiments) across town to the Guild Hall.  On the bulletin board inside the Hall are ads for different quests; finding a lost cat, ridding an area of a particularly nasty creature, or helping a local citizen.  Sometimes the quest is for an item that Iris can synthesis in her lab.  In that case you’re out looking for the ingredients rather than the completed object.  You select the quests that you are suited for and head off to accomplish them.

Before you start on the quest itself, you have to find the person who submitted it in order to get any additional information that you may need.  Then it’s off to the Alterworlds, mysterious alternate realities that function as dungeons in this game.  There are five all together, and they each have a different appearance though in actual play they are all identical except for the difficulty of the wandering monsters.

Once you enter an Alterworld you have to be on your toes.  You can only stay in the area for a certain amount of time. When the times up, you are whisked back to your house.  There are treasures that will extend your stay, but they are fairly rare.  Luckily the thing that you’re looking for is often marked on the Alterworld map, accessible by pressing the ‘start’ button.  It’s just a matter of avoiding monsters (you can see them marching around.  As long as you don’t touch them they’ll leave you alone) getting to the object and taking it back to the person who requested it.

The turn based combat system has some new twists in it, but they only serve to make a simple system needlessly complex and obtuse.  At its core, this game has a very typical battle engine.  When combat starts, player characters and monsters take turns attacking each other.  A PC can choose to cast a spell (if they have enough spell points), attack with their weapon, run away, or use an item.  This is a tried and true system that has been used in countless games, but Atelier Iris 3 adds a few things.

First off is there is the card system.  At the top of the battle screen is a line of ‘cards’ some of which represent the various combatants.  When Edge’s card comes up, it is time for him to attack, and the speed of his attack determines how long you have to wait until his next time to fight.  Some attacks take longer than others, and if a monster is near death you may choose to perform a quick, weak attack if it means that your character will get another attack before the monster does.  While this sounds pretty neat, in reality it doesn’t change the game too much.  It’s rare that a difference in attack speeds change the battle order significantly, and while it is nice to be able to see who is going to attack your party next, this innovation didn’t make the game any more enjoyable.

Next is the “Burst Chain”.  Each time you do damage to a creature the “Burst Gauge” increases and every time a member of your party is damaged it goes down.  When it reaches maximum the party is thrown into “Burst Chain Mode” where the monsters are weakened and your attacks do more damage.  The more consecutive hits you achieve while in this mode, the more experience and money you get at the end of the battle.  This doesn’t do much more than make the bosses easier to kill however since you’ll hardly ever fill the Burst Gauge with random monster battles.  The problem with this idea (aside from the fact that it doesn’t make any sense….what is this supposed to mimic in a real fight?) is that it doesn’t really add much to the strategy of the game.  The gauge is filled by maximizing the damage that you do while minimizing the damage a creatures inflicts, which is exactly what you want to do in any case.  If it had been reversed, so that when you took damage the gauge filled, it might have made things a little more interesting.  Should you let character get hit so that you can Burst?  Alas this isn’t the case, and it just makes the game easier, and it wasn’t that difficult to begin with.

While these innovations don’t help the combat system they really don’t hurt it.  What does hurt the game is the pacing and plot (or lack there of.)  Though there is an opening animation that describes a powerful spell that was broken into seven parts and hidden, the search for the spell doesn’t get underway for a while, and for most of the game it takes a back seat to the completing of quests.  These quests are mindless for the most part, and basically entail going from one place to another, and few of them represent much of a challenge.  Added to this is the fact that there are only five Alterworlds to explore.  Players soon become acquainted with them, and walking through the first screens to get deep into the world becomes monotonous.  Really monotonous.  The fact that you have limited time adds a sense of urgency to the missions once you enter a specific Alterworld,  but that’s not enough to really make the game exciting.

Graphics:

The graphics would be really impressive… if the game was released 15 years ago.  As it is the designers went for too much of a retro look and only succeeded in giving the game the feel of something that was intended for a SNES system.  The sprites that represent the characters move with fluidity, but they never seem to mesh with the background, rather they just float on top of it.

The character designs, while not bad, are things we’ve all seen before.  The main character is a strapping young lad with a big sword and his partner is a waif thin tall beauty.  Eventually they are joined by another fan-service inspired hottie who has enormous breasts falling out of her idiotic looking costume.

The one strongpoint to the game are the painted backgrounds that appear each time you enter an Alterworld.  These are well rendered and creative, especially the one for the castle.  Unfortunately it’s a case of too little too late.  Having five impressive scenes out of the entire game just isn’t sufficient.

Audio:

The soundtrack is uninspiring too.  The background music doesn’t really have any catchy tunes, which is too bad because it gets rather monotonous after an hour or two of play time.  That’s something that is easy to live with though.  Much harder to stomach are the cheesy voice actors.  They are really bad.  They overact to a sickening extent, sounding like someone reading a kid’s book to a three year old.  The actual dialog is horrible too, not to mention verbose, and so you’ll find yourself pushing the X button a lot to skip past it.

Conclusion:

This is a fairly monotonous game, and this is coming from someone who enjoys RPGs.  While it is fun at first, it soon looses its luster.  At its heart, this is little more than traveling through the same five worlds again and again to complete quests which, more times than not, have nothing to do with the overall story.  This would make a perfect rental.  By the time the newness wears off and the game starts to drag, it’ll be time to return it anyway.  You’ll get all the fun, without having to actually crawl through the whole thing.