Atelier Meruru ~The Apprentice of Arland~ DX

Atelier Meruru - 8/10 - who knew the overly done flowery cover of this title would be my favorite in the Arland saga? With a great idea of building up your kingdom by assignments on top of regular alchemy learning and the best band of characters yet, Meruru proves that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover. A little hard at points, and a new game plus is a must to really get the true ending, but overall a ton of fun.

Another entry in the long running Atelier series, this is a revised version of the 2011 finale to the Arland trilogy (which now has a fourth entry in Lulua which plays very differently). This is one of the time limit titles, and is structured like Totori and Ayesha, where you have a long term goal and it's not broken up into 3-4 month periods like Marie, Escha & Logy, or Rorona. This can leave you a bit unstructured, especially if you are unable to beat a certain boss to actually make progress. If you do well enough in your first 3 years, you'll get an extension to go out to a full 5 years to work on the endings you desire. Not making the somewhat unstated third year goal will give you a bad ending.

Combat is the best of the Arland games, and introduces some of the aspects that would be very familiar to Dusk or Mysterious players. Each action has a particular amount of wait time afterwards, with more powerful skills or items tending to have longer wait times than others. There's the typical Atelier action block, and also chain attacks. The chain attacks only fire off when Meruru uses an attack or debuff item however, it doesn't trigger off other user's uses of skills or items (as you have a few alchemist allies). Meruru also doesn't have skills like Rorona did, so you have to use an item to fire it off. These chains are powerful, and being able to get dual attacks with your allies (some of which give very powerful debuffs) and boosted item use feels really good. That said, pulling off chains will burn through attack items quickly.

Crafting is good, it follows the Arland system where it consumes MP, when your MP runs out you need to use an item to refill it or rest. Items take anywhere from 1/5th of a day to 12 days to make, you can make multiple at a time. If something takes a partial day, you can stack up multiples to get to a full day, otherwise you'll end up wasting time and still consume a whole day. It's therefore good to make 5 supplements at once rather than one at a time, as both crafts will take a full day. Up to 5 traits can be put onto the crafted item, with a capacity determined by the level and quality of the items you toss in. Traits have costs, so the most powerful traits may be hard to put onto lower grade items like Supplements. You will get access to two support characters that can either gather or craft for you, and you eventually unlock duplication. You also have a set of "development equipment" that can be equipped on Meruru, these give pretty useful boosts and are vital for an NG+ run to get the more difficult endings (the equipped items and development equipment carry over).

Story is decent, especially considering many Atelier games are pretty light on overall story and are more focused on the character bonding and slice of life aspects. There's some humor too, but like with the other Arland games (and to a lesser extent Ayesha) it's pretty derogatory and pervy. Pretty common in Japanese games directed toward girls unfortunately. Also, Astrid exists, and is even worse than her appearance in Rorona. She never suffers any consequences for her actions, and I dread every cutscene she appears in. Whoever thought Astrid was a good idea for a character should never be allowed to touch another video game script again.

Sound and music are good, it's Atelier and excellent music is a standard of the series. The game looks pretty good considering it was a mid-era PS3 title. It's more detailed than Rorona DX and way more than Totori. I'd personally consider it better looking than Sophie, which came out several years later and is one of the biggest disappointments of the series. Camera angles are fixed as was the case up to Escha & Logy (Shallie was the first with a free camera). This is usually fine, but some angles are a bit awkward to move around in and see your path.

The difficulty isn't too bad, but on a first playthrough you will struggle on some of the bosses. The main storyline boss took me several retries to get through, and it was mostly by abusing Totori's Duplicate ability to copy a Pinwheel to knock the boss back and keep him from attacking as much as possible. Buffs and debuffs also become incredibly important. The final storyline boss isn't actually required to beat, but doing so gives you a better ending. The final population goal 100,000 also isn't required if you trigger one of the better endings, but is if you don't in order to avoid a bad ending. This I managed to get less than two weeks before the end of time so it's pretty tough on a first playthrough.

Endings also are in a priority, you can't choose which ending to see that you unlocked, only the "best ranked" one that you unlocked. Getting all of them will require multiple playthroughs and careful planning.

Overall, this is definitely the best Arland title and one of the better games in the series. This is probably my second favorite of the time limit titles (after Escha & Logy), and overall ranks as one I really liked. If you don't mind time limits, give it a try!

Meruru is so cute and funny, she's such a great heroine!!
I had a relaxing time playing this game. The slice-of-life story was cozy and I have seen the true ending.
You get to develop a kingdom and see the land change over time which is amazing.
Also, Totori is here my beloved!

Beware of the Heaven's Dragon, that fight is no joke...

Just like the other Arland games it takes a while to get interesting, but once it opens up the world, it starts to get even better than Rorona and Totori. Having missions impact the world around you in a meaningful way was a great idea to differentiate it from the games prior.
It uses the same time management design as Totori. Combat is a mixture between Rorona and Totori.
If you played and liked the other Arland games, you might as well play this one. It isnt a good place to start with the Atelier or the Arland series tho.
Get it on a sale :)

Probably the best of the Arland trilogy. I really enjoyed my time with Meruru and its staggering number of characters you can play with. Meruru is incredibly cute and I liked all her endings, especially the NG+ ones. The time limit is definitely more lenient, and the combat system is great compared to the previous ones, though Machina Domain absolutely destroyed me. :)

My second atelier game to finish. I wasn't really keen on Meruru from the cover and what seems to be I assumed to be playing a Princess but I also assumed the girl I was playing as to be the typical spoiled bratty princess type which really turned me off, as well as the shift to fujoshi pandering character designs of Mel Kishida but in the end it turns out that I'd love and immerse more into the game more and more.

That same love would be based immediately on the improvements from Atelier Totori which is plagued with so many problems. For instance, Areas seems smaller to run now compared to Totori, which had large amount of space to run between gathering point to gathering point, setting environment is sound on the head but as player you'd have to agree it makes the tasks to do more time consuming than it has to be. Whereas Meruru would make the area smaller to run on but add more designs on the given space. Gathering from point a to point b easier here.

Like Totori, Endings here are based on the prioritization of tasks accomplish to get to desired goal but here is much more easier with DX to have. Although, you'd have to research more in the web for the "DX true ending".

Scheduling here is less strict than Totori and is much more forgiving. This is also the first time you'd have multiple Alchemists in your party, so the dynamic of battle here is different than previous Arland games.

Character designs are off putting at first but it grows on you, The coolest character for me here would be Sterk. Battle wise most dissapointing would be Rufus. Most suprise here would be Rorona.

After base game, we'd have to post game dungeon, Machina Domain, is probably the hardest of the bunch for me much more than Totori by a small margin (without Gio). You'd have to break the meta of the game with the overpowered equipment and items and most of the time it's not enough. You'd have to go through a gauntlet of boss battles to finish the area. You have a boss who'd summon a fricking boss once and another later but two of them is just crazy. I can't even explain the frustrations with the last boss but what I can say is that the last two boss in this dungeon are definitely the hardest of them all.

Story wise there isn't much drama here compared to Meruru, considering she is already a princess but a humble princess of backwater country is what would gravitate me more and more to her character. Probably the most genki character in the whole arland series.

I'd play again just to run my very good save for quick run on the Machina dungeon sometime in the future, as frustrating it may be to run the boss gauntlet, it sure is fun to play breaking the battle meta between me as a player and the boss battles

One of the best Atelier titles out there. A grand culmination 3 games in the making, full of fun characters and enjoyable events. The crafting system, the time management and the city improvement elements blends in well together to support a robust advance system that keep pace with the player's skill level. The dungeons are varied and the battles are balanced well to keep the game challenging at all time.

Though the game is not perfect. It would be great to see the changes implemented to the towns be reflected on the traversible town map rather than be limited to the world map. New buildings, new NPCs, or different colour tiles and grander flags would have add to the immersion that the player is actually making a difference. And with all the endings that are available in this game, an option to choose the ending at the end of the game would have been greatly appreciated.