"“This is a review of Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana.” “That’s nice.” reminds me of the conversations from this game."

Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana

Overall, this game is not terrible, but not that great. But I suppose you'd actually want reasons why, so here we go!

Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana (AI:EM from here on) is pretty much a standard JRPG, plus alchemy. You have a party of characters, who run around the world, fight random battles and gain experience. A lot of JRPGs do this, so if AI:EM wants to stand out, it needs to do it in an interesting way, or really really well. But in the end, it doesn't. It doesn't do anything horribly bad, but the entire experience ends up with me thinking “I could spend my time/money playing something better and more fun.”

The presentation of the game is pretty good. You have anime characters that are hand-drawn and in general look cute. But nothing about them design-wise really stands out compared to anything else you'd find out there, so what we have are nice-looking characters. The backgrounds are done in a similar manner, and like the characters, generally brightly coloured, making it easy to find your way around.

The soundtrack is good. Actually, it might be the thing I think they did best in this game. None of the sound effects or voice acting are bad, and you can set the voices to English or Japanese as you like. The voices do get a bit repetitive in battle though.

The alchemy system is this game's standout point. In and out of battle, the lead character can mix elements into various pre-set combinations based on spells he's learnt. These all require various amounts of “elements”, which is basically a fancy way of giving you a lot of different things to keep track of (I'm not trying to sound negative here, the game has made it pretty easy to collect and manage these elements). His abilities in battle (almost) all are based around using his alchemy abilities in various ways.

The rest of the characters, however, are pretty much just “pick a skill and use it”, none of them really have the inventory management that the main character has, so they just decide the best move for the situation (which won't be hard to choose in a system like this) and use it. And that's it. Naturally, you can do all the normal things that JRPGs have as well (defend, run away, use items, blah blah. Oh, and swap characters in battle even when they're dead is probably something that most of them don't have), but it's not particularly interesting. Especially as the game is pretty easy overall. A couple of abilities are a bit irritating at times (dodging your own healing?!), but like everything else, not fatally detrimental.

The battle system is a normal speed based system with the game pausing as you decide what to do on your turn. The game doesn't have any sort of indicator telling you want order the characters are going to in up next, making it harder/more annoying to plan a strategy around it. There are certain moves used by you and the enemies that have charge time and can be interrupted, but nothing you haven't seen before. There's also some strategy regarding positioning placement, but the effect on your decision making is rather minor, most of the time you can ignore it.

Outside of battles, you run around small towns and short dungeons. They're not much to look at on the most part, and feel cramped, particularly the towns. They're just really small. With the dungeons, they're mostly on the small side as well, and since you'll be backtracking into a few of them for story and sidequest purposes, this is probably a good thing. The encounter rate isn't too high, but it gets annoying at times, especially during the previously mentioned backtracking, since you end up fighting enemies that are way too weak for you and it just feels irritating to get into an encounter.

Other things to do out of battle are manage your “mana” (spirits that your recruit in order to mix stuff for you, and give you movement options in dungeons). They get tired and miserable when you work them too hard (which makes sense), but since you can fob them off with nearly any old junk you find lying around (and you will find a lot of junk lying around), it's ends up feeling a bit of a chore.

Probably the most important thing (as well as the part of AI:EM I found most entertaining) to do out of battle is inventing stuff. There's quite a fair bit to do here, and you mix various items that you find into new ones. The quality of the results is dependent on the quality of what you put in, and you can get some interesting things out by experimenting with unusual ingredients. It's not perfect (you can only carry 9 of a particular item at any one time, which means running back and forth at times to get more ingredients), but it is fairly interesting and fun to create things this way. You can also customise a few of your weapons and accessories. But you can beat the game easily enough without it, so you probably won't care until the end and for the bonus dungeon.

The plot is not great at all really. No amazing twists, amazing plot points, amazing character development, or amazing anything really. The thing that strikes me odd the most is the character interaction. It doesn't feel serious when it seems it should. Characters have a tendency to say two lines to each other, then run off, and somehow this represents a meaningful conversation. Obviously, it's not always that bad, but it does happen, and the characters that join your party seem to do so with hardly any prompting. “Wanna join the party?” “Okay.” The end. The story progression feels the same way, things happen quite fast, so it won't take you long to get to the end of the game. You just go out doing straightforward tasks until you reach the end. None of the characters are hateable or anything (not even in a hateable in a good way for the bad guy, which isn't good), but I can't see much reason to care about them. The conversations do become humorous at times (most often when you invent stuff), which is entertaining, the rest of the time I didn't care that much.

There's a glitch that means you have to turn the in-game sound off when you fight the last battle, or you (probably) can't save your clear file. You'd have thought they'd notice something like that.

Oh, and there's no 60 Hz mode in the PAL version, nor has the game been speed up to its original speed to compensate as far as I can tell. Black borders at the top and bottom do exist in the PAL version.

I wouldn't consider it wrong to buy it for someone new to JRPGs, but I can't really see any reason to buy AI:EM over the other JRPGs that exist for those that are already fans of the genre (unless you played everything else out I suppose). It might be okay if you can find it cheap, as it's certainly not a horrible game, and doesn't suffer from any absolutely fatal flaws, but that's about it really. I can't recommend someone buying it full price.

Score 6/10

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 05/14/07