PixlBit

Hi...

 So, Atelier Ayesha is out this week.  Hooray!  For those not playing along at home, the Atelier series is about item management and silly things and often stars girls in frilly dresses making weird innuendo laced passes at each other while remaining absurdly chaste.

Welcome to the world of Atelier.  

Up until now NISA was the company releasing the titles in English, often with elaborate packaging and doodads.  That came to an end with Ayesha, and with GUST (the Japanese developer of the series)’s purchase by Tecmo-Koei.  

Tecmo-Koei has the amazing reputation of having a non-existent PR presence in the US.  Literally non-existent.  To the point where Tecmo-Koei Europe often has no idea what the fuck the US office is up to.  I’m convinced that Tecmo-Koei US consists of a giant self-aware server and a janitor.  Anywho... the result of the purchase was that the fancy packaging and Japanese voice track disappeared into the aether.  (Amusingly, T-K hired NISA to handle the translation of the game, because they couldn’t hire Bang Zoom themselves because a self-aware server has NO ARMS.)

Once again, T-K Europe was utterly confused at the lack of a Japanese voice track, and pissed.  The decission to not spend the space bucks must have been made late in the game considering the seiyu (japanese for ‘voice actor,’ I’m defeating the purpose of using the shorter word by now explaining it to everyone) are still credited in the opening sequence.

I’ve sunk about 6 hours into Ayesha and here are my impressions:

The Good!:

•  The new artist does lovely work.
•  The pace is a lot more leisurely than the previous titles.  
•  I like the new focus on exploration.
•  I also like the new positional attacking in battle.
•  The new setting is cool.

The Not-So-Good:

•  Ayesha’s voice is obnoxious.  (Everyone else is fine.)
•  For some reason they didn’t bother making actually lip flaps for characters, which... looks off.
•  Yes, no Japanese voice track.
•  There’s no tracker for citizen requests, luckily they’re regulated to the cities so you can always teleport around and back to the shop to make stuff when you see them.  Still, pen and paper time.
• No more ‘BARREL!’
•  I spent a huge chunk of the afternoon playing and didn’t want to stop.  This is a good and bad thing.

The changes from the Arland Trilogy:

•  New artist, new setting, new enemy designs.
•  Items don’t degrade in quality anymore!  
•  Items have elemental qualities.
•  Field movement in battle.
•  Still portraits during cutscenes are gone, all in engine now.

 

Wait, are you seriously not going to say anything about moving over here with the rest of the 1UP refugees?  IT PAINS ME SO TO LEAVE BEHIND 8 YEARS OF BLOG POSTS... or it did until I started reading them.  This is a fresh start, away from my early years of whining and such.  Look, I got to make new topic icons and retire my old ones.  Woohoo!