Tag Archives: Atelier Iris

Podcast

The MoeGamer Podcast: Episode 38 – ATTACK MAGIC ITEM BURST

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As my house gradually returns to normal from the building site it has been turned into, we find some time between the noise of sanding and angle grinding to record a new episode of the podcast — as always, featuring both myself and Chris Caskie of MrGilderPixels!

The MoeGamer Podcast is available in several places. You can subscribe to my channel on YouTube to stay up to date with both the video versions of the podcast and my weekly videos (including the Atari A to Z retro gaming series); you can follow on Soundcloud for the audio-only version of the podcast; you can subscribe via RSS to get the audio-only version of the podcast in your favourite podcast app; or you can subscribe via iTunes and listen on Spotify. Please do at least one of these if you can; it really helps us out!

Or you can just hit the jump to watch or listen to today’s episode right here on MoeGamer.

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MoeGamer Music

The Music of Atelier, Vol. 1: Atelier Iris – Eternal Mana

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The Atelier series has some wonderful music, and provides many examples of Gust’s sound team producing some of the most distinctive, immediately recognisable soundtracks in the business.

As the Atelier MegaFeature progresses, we’ll stop off every so often to take in some of these classic tunes — and where better to start than with the game we’ve just finished looking at in depth?

Let’s admire some of the lovely themes from the first Atelier game to come West, Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana!

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Atelier

Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana – Narrative, Themes and Characterisation

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Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana is something of an outlier in the Atelier series as a whole, as we’ve already talked about.

Rather than adopting the established structure of “struggling alchemist works in a workshop to craft items, also there are adventures” it inverts this format to “struggling adventurer explores to discover mysteries of alchemy, also there is crafting”.

This change of structural focus gives the narrative scope to be a much more epic affair than many of the other games in the series — but at the same time it doesn’t abandon one of the series’ core principles. Let’s take a closer look.

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Waifu Wednesday

Waifu Wednesday: Veola

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One of my favourite characters in Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana is Veola, the seemingly rather standoffish owner of the magic shop in Kavoc.

Veola’s sidequest is technically optional, but like most of the “shopkeeper quests” throughout Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana, it’s hard not to get swept along in the soap opera of her life — and how she relates to the other people around her, including protagonist Klein, his party members, bartender Norman and numerous others.

So let’s take a closer look at this rather closed-off young woman and figure her out a bit. Some spoilers ahead!

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Atelier

Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana – Life at 45 Degrees

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Last time, we talked a bit about how Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana is a lot more of a “traditional RPG” than many of its stablemates in the rest of the series as a whole.

We looked in particular at how the game’s combat and progression mechanics are based on the conventions of turn-based, menu-driven console RPGs, but how it adds a few twists onto that formula — with an appropriate emphasis on item usage and alchemy.

Today we’re going to explore the overall game structure and presentation a bit further, with a particular eye on how protagonist Klein and his companions can explore their world over the course of their adventure as a whole. Let’s jump in!

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Waifu Wednesday

Waifu Wednesday: Lita Blanchimont

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With the Atelier MegaFeature well under way, it’s probably about time we took a look at some of the wonderful female characters in the series for Waifu Wednesday, isn’t it?

And where better to begin than with Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana’s main female protagonist, Lita Blanchimont? While Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana eschews the series’ traditional focus on a playable female protagonist, Lita nonetheless plays a very important role in the game’s main narrative, and is one of several ways we come to understand some of the broader lore of the Atelier Iris series.

Let’s take a closer look, then. There may be some mild spoilers ahead!

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Atelier

Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana – The Craft of Combat

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Now we’ve explored how Atelier Iris handles the series’ core concept of using alchemy and other crafting techniques to create items, it’s time to look at the other aspects of the game.

While all of the previous Atelier games featured strong RPG-style elements such as combat and exploration, for the most part — fourth game Atelier Judie was an exception to a certain extent — these were expressed in the abstract, with the emphasis being placed firmly on the main character and their workshop. That’s where the name came from, after all.

Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana seemingly saw the series take a bit of a sidestep into more traditional RPG territory. But there are a lot of things about it that make it stand out from what you might traditionally think of as a turn-based, menu-driven console RPG. So that’s what we’re going to look at in the next couple of articles.

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Atelier

Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana – It’s an Alchemy Thing

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Despite being the sixth game in the series, Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana was the first to come West.

The exact reasoning behind this isn’t entirely clear, but it may be something to do with the fact that the early Atelier games were primarily abstract management simulations with RPG elements, while Atelier Iris unfolds in a manner much more like what the Western audience would have understood “an RPG” to be in 2005.

Perhaps it was assumed the West wasn’t ready for that sort of thing. Perhaps the amount of text in the earlier games made them impractical to localise at the time. Or perhaps they just sort of fell through the cracks. Whatever the reasoning, Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana was the West’s first Atelier game, so that’s where we begin our journey.

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Atelier Arland Trilogy, Cover Games

Atelier Arland: Introduction and History

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Atelier is one of the more long-running, prolific series in the canon of Japanese gaming.

First launching in 1997, the franchise has seen 19 mainline releases since its inception (with a 20th on the way at the time of writing), plus a variety of spin-offs, side stories, ports, expanded adaptations and guest appearances from its characters in various other games over the years. Although we didn’t see our first Western localisation of the series until its sixth mainline game (Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana for PlayStation 2) in 2005, it is, by this point, firmly established as a mainstay of Japanese role-playing games — and, in the nicest possible way, developer Gust’s cash cow.

With that in mind, before we delve into the Arland trilogy in detail, let’s take a look at the history of the series as a whole up until Atelier Rorona’s initial release in 2009. Join me on a trip into totally-not-Renaissance-Germany, and let’s get crafting!

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