| Atelier Annie: Alchemists of Sera Island | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Gust |
| Publisher(s) | |
| Platform(s) | Nintendo DS |
| Release date(s) | |
| Genre(s) | Role-playing simulation game |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
| Rating(s) | |
Atelier Annie: Alchemists of Sera Island (アニーのアトリエ ～セラ島の錬金術士～ Anī no Atorie ~Sera Tō no Renkinjutsushi~) is a role-playing video game developed by Japanese developer Gust for the Nintendo DS.
The game was released in Japan on March 12, 2009 and in North America on October 27, 2009.[1] It is the first to be released in North America to have the gameplay and structure of the "main" Atelier series, having less emphasis on RPG elements and more focus on item creation and resource management.
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Annie was just a simple girl who lived in a town located within the mainland. However, all she did was sleep and fantasize about becoming rich and famous someday by marrying up. Worried about their daughter, her parents consulted Annie's grandfather, a great alchemist, for advice on what to do. After a moment of thought, he decides to send her to Sera Island to take part in a large resort project in order to teach her to overcome her laziness. Thus, in the middle of the night, his homunculi steal Annie away to Sera Island; across land, across river, and across sea.
She gets a rude awakening in the form of a fierce whack to the head and Annie wakes up to meet Pepe, a fairy who gives her a letter from her grandfather and tells her that he'll be the one to instruct her in alchemy, which will be used to facilitate the resort's construction. A disoriented and confused Annie refuses his request until a mysterious man bursts into the room and drags Annie away to a ceremony celebrating the resort project. Later along in the ceremony, the man introduces himself as Hans, the resort supervisor and in extension, Annie's superior, and she also discovers that one of the possible rewards to winning the competition will be marriage to the Prince of Orde along with the title of Meister. True to her dream of marrying up, Annie resolves to become a great alchemist and win the competition.
Along the way, she learns the value of hard work as she manages her own shop and the resort attractions, meets new friends, rivals, and comrades, and through the course of three years, she soon begins to forge her own dream through her newfound strength and will.
The gameplay is similar to both a strategy RPG and a simulator game. As the game focuses much more heavily on quests and character interaction rather than battling, the battle system is simplistic at best with basic turn-based combat featuring front-and-back positions that not only affect offense and defense, but changes a character's special ability - usually from offensive to supportive, respectively. Enemies have elements assigned to them which can be exploited using synthesized colored weapons, but it is not at all necessary. Battles occur at random as Annie wanders around gathering materials outside town. Materials at first are basic, with no hidden quality, but in later areas, a player can get variations of the same material possessing, for example, a 'big' trait or a 'blue' trait among many other possibilities. These become significant as the latter part of the game tends to home in on what specific qualities are required in a synthesized item.
Synthesis itself is rather simple. Annie chooses items to mix and out comes a new creation. However, Annie starts off with a low Alchemy level and can actually mess up on synthesizing at times until she starts to synthesize more and become better. As the game progresses, Annie learns how to dye items and give them a certain trait, such as fire affinity in the form of being dyed red. These can be used to easier kill certain enemies or boost one's defense against an element. She also learns how to assign other traits to items, which will prove useful in the Alchemy contest along with the quests she takes up.
Every half year, an Alchemy contest takes place and Annie automatically receives the quest each time from Hans. While the goal of each contest is to make a certain item, the player must not just make the requested item in haste. What matters most is the desired quality of the synthesized item and most of the time, Annie must understand alchemy better to also understand what would be the best quality and trait to synthesize in her alchemic creations. The player can get either place first, second, third, or not win at all; the outcome depends on the aforementioned information. The prize money is a considerable sum which increases over the course of the game and is allocated exclusively to helping build the resort. There are five spots on Sera Island that Annie can build on with ten different selections of resort facilities, requiring at the least two playthroughs to enjoy them all.
Annie owns a shop of her own; the Atelier Annie. However, the game does not focus on shop-simulation. Rather, it lets you choose a character to take care of the shop and each character has a certain way of managing said shop. When players build a resort facility, they will be able to assign characters to take care of them as well. For example, Hans would be more suited towards managing a museum than he would an amusement park. While characters are handling a shop, they cannot be put in the party. Each resort facility has a popularity rating which rises every time Annie fulfills a request from the head caretaker of the facility and decreases over time if the player neglects it. For Annie's own shop, she must complete quests offered by the Adventurer's Guild in order to garner attention[2]. A quest usually involves Annie searching for materials, synthesizing a requested item, and turning it in; however, in later quests, the item has specific requirements that the player must fulfill. Every month, an assessment is given on how much each facility had earned in that month. With the money, players can choose to build another resort facility or expand an existing one. The latter cannot take place until the facility has earned enough popularity.
There are seven endings in total, with different accomplishments (or lack thereof) determining which ending a player will get.[3]
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