Atelier Rorona: The Alchemist of Arland for PlayStation 3 Reviews by Gamers

Atelier Rorona is the 11 Atelier game in the franchise and the fifth to make it over seas (not counting the two Mana Khemia spin offs). If you played Atelier Annie on the DS then your already know how this game works, Your given a task every few months that you have to complete to progress the thin story all while fighting a restrictive time setting, so what's good what's bad lets have a look

Good

There is a sense of accomplishment for getting the assignments done.

The characters do have a certain charm about them, in a cliche anime character sorta way.

One playthrough will generally last only about 15 hours, so by RPG standards is relativity short

Cons

The charm isn't enough to detract you from how one dimensional the characters are.

While the grachics are greatly improved over the PS2 Atelier games, there still at best PS2 quality

Tutorials could be more descriptive. For example the tutorial for weapon creation never makes clear that you only need on Ingot or Cloth to make something, So one might make two ingots with two different effects in preparations to make a stronger weapon only to find out that they only needed one.

Non compelling story, The story is that with recent technological advances in the society of Arland a lot of decided a Factory would be more helpful then an Atelier, But since the kingdom is in the depth of the founder of the Atelier they decide to give the owner of the atelier a test, complete twelve assignments, keep the workshop. The owner then gives the workshop to her pupil, Rorona.

Several elements that made other Atelier games compelling games have been removed.

Dull repetitive combat.

In closing
Atelier Rorona is just plain dull, there is nothing compelling here to make people want to play through it once, let alone the multiple play throughs to get all the trophies. If your interested in this game out of curiosity then get a game in the Atelier Iris or Mana Khemia series, but don't waste your time with Rorona.