I wrote Rorona review in Thai for about a week ago but I’m very busy and lazy to write it in English. Now I have some time to write it. Sorry for late.

After I finished playing Rorona and I’m playing chapter 2 of the second time now. I decided to review this game so you will know why I like this game very much enough to revived my old Twitter account and tweeted about this game.

Introduction

Rorona no Atelier is the 11th of GUST’s Atelier game series. This is the first Atelier game I played. Before I bought this game, I only know that a player will take a role of alchemist in this game. He also go to find materials and ingredients in dungeons for making item.  The story of Rorona no Atelier is about the alchemist girl named Rororyna or Rorona in short. Her master alchemy shop will be inspected by the kingdom. Unlucky. Her master give her this shop and in 3 years if Rorona fails to complete the kingdom commitment, the shop will be shut down.

Now the fate of Rorona and her shop are in your hands.

Game Play

The game system is very easy to understand. (Sure. If you know Japanese a little.) There are tutorials in each systems so if you’re new to Atelier series, you should see them especially the things that are in a red circle. You will never get lost if you pay attention for tutorials.

There’re 4 thing you will usually do in this game: kingdom commitments, collecting materials, alchemy and side quests.

Kingdom commitments are the main quests in this game. They aren’t too easy and too hard to complete them. You have 3 months (in game.) to complete each quests. The quests are sending the item or hunting the monsters they wanted. There is no reward for complete each kingdom commitments but if you don’t do them, the game’s over.

After you got the quest, you must collect the materials or ingredients for sending to the kingdom or using them to make the item you want. So you must go to the place outside town. At first the places you can go is limited. After you know more friends, you got the specific quest or the right time is coming. You can go to collect materials in the newer places. Collecting item isn’t easy because  there are monsters in the places you go too.

Battle system in this game isn’t complex. The power gauge you has is HP gauge only. You can attack, use item, use skill (which cost you the character HP.), guard and flee. When the characters use the element skill. The element gauge will increase or decrease depend on the elemental of the skill. When the gauges is full you can use advanced skill which can make more damage.

When the time passed, your companions will get the points for assisted you in the battle. Fighting monsters in this game is easy but fighting bosses is very hard.

Making item is the main part of playing. To make something, you must find the recipe book of the item you want to make. You cant get recipes from shops, quests, events or the places outside of the town. If you know the item recipe and you have all ingredients, you can make that item. The ingredients you collected has different quality point and special property so you must choose them wisely.

The only items you can’t make are weapon and armor which you must prepare ingot or cloth and bring it to the blacksmith to make it.

Other than kingdom commitment quest. There are the side quests from NPC and Rorona friends. The most important side quests is front quests. You can take front quests from the castle. It’s one of the ways to make money in this game. You also gain reputation point which is necessary to end the game. The friend quests give you money and friendship point. If you have NPC’s friendship point enough, the NPC event will be unlocked or you can ask him/her to be your companion when you go out the town. NPC don’t frequently give quests to you so you should ask them if they have available quests for you.

Game System

Graphic in Rorona is just plain cell shaded 3D compared to others but the good point is there is no aliasing. The art is great especially the large dungeon maps that are looked vast. The event CG is very beautiful and charming.

Sound effect is OK but surround sound is bad with the default setting. Because environment sounds are covered by BGM and character voice. You may want to adjust volume to balance the sound mix in config menu. BGM is quite good. The character voices are lively. You maybe hear the familiar voice from your favorite anime. With Blu-Ray disc’s high capacity, all event in this game are full voice.

There are bugs in this game. Some bugs are fatal enough to make your PS3 crashed and must be restarted. Luckily. GUST knew about these bugs and plan to solved them.

For trophy hunter. Trophies in this game is easy to achieve but it will take you a long time to collect all of them. Some trophies are required good timing to achieve them.

Conclusion

If you are finding a good JRPG that has good story and easy to understand. I recommended Rorona no Atelier for you. If you can’t read Japanese, you may wait for the English version.

More info

Official site: http://atelier-ps3.jp/rorona/

You can get this game from Play-Asia.