I tried Atelier Resleriana for a week, and I uninstalled it today (rant incoming).

 

r/Atelier

•

9 mo. ago

SaberManiac

I tried Atelier Resleriana for a week, and I uninstalled it today (rant incoming).

Atelier Resleriana

(There are no story spoilers here, not that there was anything to spoil in the first place).

It's no surprise the reception towards the game has been very mixed (and "mixed" is an understatement). It really irked me that one of my favourite gaming franchises of all time was selling out to the gacha market, but I thought I should at least give it a try. It was advertised as a mainline Atelier game so how bad could it be? I play other gachas too like Fate/Grand Order, Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, Epic Seven, and a couple of others here and there, so it shouldn't be anything new to me.

Oh, how wrong I was. Atelier Resleriana, if it wasn't a gacha game, would have been a terribly average Atelier game at best. Not good, not terrible, just exactly what you expect from an Atelier game. Cute girls doing cute things? Check. Slightly improved graphics from Ryza? Check. Mundane dialogue with even more mundane chores? Check.

But that last part was what struck out to me. As tedious as gathering and synthesizing materials were in a normal Atelier game, there was an incredible sense of progression as you interact with the alchemy system, and one day, it just clicks, and you wind up experimenting and spend hours to craft the best, or weirdest, or most interesting items you could at the time. This is completely absent in Resleriana.

To bring this back a step, in Resleriana, you don't combine traits. You don't even get traits from items, they are locked based on which character you pull from the gacha. To make things worse, the trait levels (they can go from 1 to 5) are completely random. Because each trait is specific to one character, each character has their own success rate for level 4 and 5 traits. There's also this ridiculous colour-matching system that, to put it simply, means you cannot combine any two traits. You need to match your character with another character with a linking colour so you can get high level traits, otherwise, the traits are basically useless. Traits in this game are completely useless at levels 1-3; most of them give you 2% more effect - useless!

That's not even the worst of it. The game doesn't let you carry over traits! The literal backbone of the Atelier alchemy system is figuring out how to transfer traits from an ingredient to an item that doesn't use said ingredient. All alchemy is based purely on your character roster, and gathering items (which don't have quality or traits or elements or anything). It's so simplified that I can't even call it alchemy. It's just crafting but with LAYERS and LAYERS of RNG.

Oh, and you can only synthesize a few times a day. You can replenish mana but it's all random, and the game is telling you, "Oh you didn't get the traits you want? Too bad! Try again tomorrow!"

And, that's just the alchemy system. Combat? Terrible. It's basically a carbon copy of Honkai Star Rail's system but worse. There's a normal attack (Skill 1), your "skill" (Skill 2) and your "Burst" (ultimate). There's even a Toughness bar you need to break to delay enemy turns, wow how original!!!! (this is sarcasm).

However, you have a pure random-based timeline which determines if your attacks actually do damage or you get to use your Burst. If you're unlucky, enemies can end up doing tons of damage and using their Bursts back-to-back, and you need to restart the fight all over again.

Speaking of fights, every fight in the game takes such a long time to complete. This shitty mobile gacha game with simplified mechanics takes LONGER than random enemy fight in a console Atelier game. A simple fight can last 5-8 minutes. There's a Skip button but that's only convenient for dailies. Every new quest and fight that comes along takes so long that you end up switching to Auto and making tea to pass the time.

There's also the other issues with the game that I'll summarize:

Tons and tons of loading screens. It's 2024 and games 10 years older than this have less loading screens that Resleriana. There are so many menus in this game and navigation is a chore in itself

Absurd difficulty spikes in Story Mode. Starting from Chapter 3, your enemies are vastly stronger than you and you completely run out of gems to pull for new characters. You are STUCK with your current roster of ~10 characters and your only hope of progressing is to wait days to farm for EXP and orbs and shit to level them up.

Story quests are gated by your account progression (basically, how powerful your characters are). So many other gacha games NO LONGER DO THIS because it absolutely kills the new player experience, since it grinds out progress to a halt.

The pull economy absolutely sucks. You earn at most less than half a pull PER DAY, and you need to watch crappy mobile game ads to earn the tiniest amount of pull currency. THIS is the straw that broke the camel's back for me.

"Exploration" is you walking from left to right. I'm not kidding. They wanted to replicate the feeling of exploring towns and dungeons in this game, but why do this lame crap? Just let us explore the towns and stuff - clearly they've been rendered in the cutscenes.

Items are mostly irrelevant in combat. You can't use items at any time, you need to build up a separate item gauge, which takes forever, so you can end up dying before using an item to heal.

I could go on but I'll spare you my suffering. The game's only saving grace is that you get to interact with past Atelier characters in the story, but this could have absolutely been a TRUE console Atelier game and would have felt like a true celebration of the series' legacy. Instead, you get this jumbled mess of a cashgrab, and it's very clear it's not doing well because it hasn't been getting any attention, online or otherwise. This game gets less than 1K views on YouTube a day and I'm willing to bet the player count is not particularly high either (likely in the low thousands, at best).

So, take it from me, don't waste your time with this game. If you truly like the story and characters, just watch the cutscenes on YouTube. If you have an itch to spend money, buy the Atelier Dusk Trilogy. It's a far better spend than this terrible game.

Unless you like jiggly oppai. Go nuts if that's your thing.