What's a Rorona?
It's a girl, silly, and she's the star of Atelier Rorona, courtesy of Gust and NIS America.
Published: July 16, 2010
Take a wild guess as to how many Atelier games Japanese developer Gust has made. We'll give you a few hints: the series started in 1997 and has had a couple PSP, DS and GBA spin-offs. Six? Seven? Nine? Atelier Rorona is the eleventh game to carry the Atelier moniker. That's nearly one game for every year since the series debuted, and while one could be forgiven for thinking this a kind of sports game-style milking of the brand, there's one very important distinction that must be made: despite sharing the basic mechanic of item crafting (sorry, alchemy) even successive games can be surprisingly different.
Until now, though, the series has been something of a staple on the PS2; though NIS America has stepped up and started localizing them with surprising regularity in recent years, there at least four games (counting a spin-off) that graced Sony's Japanese black brick before the games started getting published Stateside. With Rorona, the dev team has finally decided to tackle the PS3, and the results as we found out when we went hands-on for a sizeable chunk of time at NIS America's recent hoedown, the small-ish JP dev house is refreshingly up to the task of embracing proper 3D graphics.
For those that haven't followed the series (and we're sure there's a few of you), things have been fairly charmingly sprite-based. That's not a bad thing, as we've often commented in our reviews of the series, since Gust was all too eager to maintain some semblance of quality when almost nobody on the PS2 was actually hand-animated characters. Though things weren't always ulra-fluid, they were most definitely detailed and gave the game a kind of retro-charm that belied its more current design choices.
The shortest way to describe the series is that it's a fairly 50/50 mix of traditional combat with elaborate turn-based mechanics and using recipes divined from making base ingredients to craft everything from story items to new equipment and weapons to take into the field. Despite the cutesy appearance, the games were ridiculously deep, and we haven't seen item crafting with the kind of hook that Gust's efforts consistently deliver... well, possibly ever. Given that they're a core part of things, though, alchemy had damn well better be good.
Until now, though, the series has been something of a staple on the PS2; though NIS America has stepped up and started localizing them with surprising regularity in recent years, there at least four games (counting a spin-off) that graced Sony's Japanese black brick before the games started getting published Stateside. With Rorona, the dev team has finally decided to tackle the PS3, and the results as we found out when we went hands-on for a sizeable chunk of time at NIS America's recent hoedown, the small-ish JP dev house is refreshingly up to the task of embracing proper 3D graphics.
For those that haven't followed the series (and we're sure there's a few of you), things have been fairly charmingly sprite-based. That's not a bad thing, as we've often commented in our reviews of the series, since Gust was all too eager to maintain some semblance of quality when almost nobody on the PS2 was actually hand-animated characters. Though things weren't always ulra-fluid, they were most definitely detailed and gave the game a kind of retro-charm that belied its more current design choices.
The shortest way to describe the series is that it's a fairly 50/50 mix of traditional combat with elaborate turn-based mechanics and using recipes divined from making base ingredients to craft everything from story items to new equipment and weapons to take into the field. Despite the cutesy appearance, the games were ridiculously deep, and we haven't seen item crafting with the kind of hook that Gust's efforts consistently deliver... well, possibly ever. Given that they're a core part of things, though, alchemy had damn well better be good.
