Video Game / Atelier Totori: The Adventurer of Arland

Let's keep on going far away, to an unknown place
We may not have a treasure map, but it'll surely still be wonderful

This nation has a job called "adventurers." It all happened before Arland became a republic. People wanted to explore, adventure, or develop the frontier. The knights of Arland were weak, so the citizens joined them and helped out. It happened gradually, but that system was later institutionalized.
Adventuring is now a real job. My mother was one of those adventurers. I hear she's actually famous, too, but we haven't heard from her in years. My father and sister both think she's already... but I don't think so.

Atelier Totori: The Adventurer of Arland is the twelfth mainline entry in Gust Corporation's Atelier series and the second in its "Arland" subseries, released in 2010 for the PlayStation 3. It is a direct sequel to Atelier Rorona: The Alchemist of Arland, taking place five years after Rorona's ending.

Totooria Helmold, known as "Totori" for short, is a Country Mouse from the backwater fishing village of Alanya whose mother Gisela had suddenly vanished several years ago. Being quite timid, Totori would normally be too intimidated to do anything about it... but one year ago, Totori had a chance encounter with Rorolina "Rorona" Frixell, who taught her alchemy and gave her a skill she could be confident about. Deciding that she really does want to find out what happened to her mother after all, she and her childhood friend Gino set off to become adventurers in the same way Gisela was, with Totori meeting friends both old and new on her journey and gradually coming to break out of her shell.

With Atelier Rorona proving to be a success in bringing the franchise back to its original Item Crafting Slice of Life roots, Gust followed up by making what would be the Elie to Rorona's Marie: a sequel with a slightly bigger focus on story drama and a more significant expansion of its subsystems. While it still works off the standard set by Rorona, its system revolves more around an expanding map for Totori to explore rather than centering everything around one central hub, and its plot progression uses a more flexible schedule.

An English localization was released by NIS America in 2011. An Updated Re-release for the PlayStation Vita titled Atelier Totori Plus was released in 2012, which was later repurposed as Atelier Totori DX in 2018 as part of the Atelier Arland Series Deluxe Pack for PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Steam. Both updates mostly leave the game untouched, with onboarded DLC, extra costumes, and some quality-of-life adjustments being the only differences of note.

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Atelier Totori contains examples of:

• Adventurous Irish Violins: This trope is invoked in the game's musical score to accentuate Totori's innocently enthusiastic idealism.
• All for Nothing: It's not completely "nothing" since finding out what happened to her mother at all is still very important to her, but when Totori makes it all the way to Frontier Village only to be shown her mother's grave, it's obvious she's feeling something akin to this because she'd gone through all of this and come this far only to be hit with the revelation that her mother was indeed Dead All Along.
• Anti-Frustration Features: Some of the most glaring flaws or obstructive inconveniences from the original version of Rorona were reworked here:
  • The player no longer has to pay anything to have party members help them (which is lampshaded by Rorona having a Petty Childhood Grudge over Sterk having charged her 300 cole per outing back when she was still struggling).
  • The player keeps all of their gear the characters were using in New Game Plus instead of just the money.
  • The player can skip the ending credits.
• Bag of Holding: Totori can carry all the components of a ship in her basket and still have room for puniballs!
• Bag of Sharing: Rorona managed to set up a way for Totori's containers in Alanya and Arland to be synchronized, so her inventory will be the same regardless of which atelier she's in. According to Rorona, she managed to do it by... "clamp".
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: Now that Rorona is an adult, she can banter with Sterk and talk back at him in ways she wouldn't as a kid, and since Sterk is working with her as a personal acquaintance instead of as part of his job, he can afford to banter back at her instead of trying to keep his composure. It's also the implied reason Sterk is starting to develop feelings for her in a different way, because she's treating him more like a friend and an equal instead of like a bodyguard.
• Big Damn Heroes: At the end of Melvia's character event chain, she and Ceci get swarmed by monsters in the field and are unable to get out... until Totori, the same person who'd been incredibly timid and afraid to fight at the beginning of the game, comes to bail them out.
• Call-Back:
  • Rorona tries to give Totori a Chim in a similar way to how Astrid gave her Hom in the previous game. Later, when Totori asks how Chims are made, Rorona dodges the subject and says "I'll tell you when you grow up!" for presumably the exact same reason Astrid had withheld that information about Hom from her.
  • When Cordelia sees Totori's Chim for the first time, after seeing how tiny it is, she (presumably remembering how Astrid had made Hom taller than her specifically for the purpose of pissing her off) invites Rorona to go out drinking on her treat.
• Cannot Spit It Out: In truth, everyone in Alanya knew full well that Gisela had been Lost at Sea, and Totori herself had known as well, only forgetting because she was so young she couldn't handle it. People had been keeping it from Totori and considering it to be a taboo topic because they were worried about her and what she would do in response, and it becomes very easy for the facade to fall apart once Totori gets enough information to investigate.
• Cooking Duel: Iksel fires up one with Totori just like the way he'd done with Rorona in the previous game. He almost makes the same mistake of devolving into a Sore Loser at the end, but Totori's victory gets him to catch himself.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Gino ends up having his first major moment of being taken down a peg when Sterk delivers one to him with his own Limit Break, getting Gino to realize he still has a long way to go.
• Downloadable Content: The PS3 version had Ceci, Iksel and Cordelia available as playable party members only through DLC. They're included by default in Plus and DX.
• Drowning My Sorrows: After Totori causes the game's opening explosion, Gerhard jokes about Totori potentially doing this (of course, Totori points out that she's a minor and shouldn't be doing such a thing).
• Evil Costume Switch: Subverted. Sterk as a mercenary now wears a black suit that makes him look like some kind of Anti-Hero... but he's still the same nice but misunderstood frowner from Rorona, at worst a little gloomier because he's now unemployed and not as young anymore. It's just that the getup and aura really don't help when he's considered to be so intimidating by default he makes children cry just by looking at them.
• Evil Tower of Ominousness: Liechtein Soehnle, which holds a monster that's more than willing to gobble up a village or two every time he breaks out.
• Final Boss: If you just want a decent ending at all, you need to at least finish off Flauschtraut, a sea monster that has blocked sea travel between Arland's continent and the rest of the world and was responsible for Gisela being Lost at Sea. Going any further than that will require you to fight the True Final Boss.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: The opening of the game involves a sequence in which Peter tries to put Totori and Gino over a barrel by telling them that it'll costs 100,000 cole to hire his carriage, an amount they won't possibly be able to raise in time before the next carriage rolls out. In New Game Plus, you can easily have this amount and more... but events will still play out exactly as if Totori and Gino don't have the money. Since there's an option to skip over this entire intro part of the game in New Game Plus, the player probably wasn't "intended" to run into this situation.
• Giver of Lame Names: Every time you make a Chim, you'll be given the opportunity to name them by picking one out of either three choices or "Surprise!" The choices are harmless, if a bit cutesy in a forced way, but if you pick "Surprise!", Totori will pick increasingly ridiculous (for male Chims) or ludicrously long and difficult-to-say names while a horrified Rorona looks on, not wanting to completely intervene but also not sure what to do about this. Lulua confirms that at least two of these are canon, since Chim Dragon and Chim Marudayu appear... and they're not very happy about their names.
• Guide Dang It!: Totori''s way of handling its ending priority is carried over from the original Rorona, which is already a Guide Dang It! in itself because it requires avoiding the requirements for one ending so it won't trigger over another, and maximizing efficiency for 100% Completion via Save Scumming requires a carefully tailored save that you probably wouldn't be able to make without a guide. The part that makes it even worse is that Gino's requirements, or more specifically avoiding them so his character event chain won't interfere with other things, are incredibly obtuse because they require keeping an eye on his adventurer level relative to Totori's.
• Grew a Spine: Overall, Totori's Character Development through the course of the game revolves around her breaking out of her timid shell and having more confidence in herself.
• Human Sacrifice: Frontier Village is made up of women who are meant to be this for Evil Face. If you have the bad luck of being born there, you'll just have to accept that it's your fate to die by being eaten by him in the end. Gisela decided to put an end to this because she couldn't stand this idea, and Totori eventually finishes the job.
• Humongous Mecha: Marc's dream is to make one, and he eventually gets his hands on an ancient giant robot that he modifies to be even bigger in his ending (he even considered adding a cockpit to it, buthe decided against it due to lacking the necessary technology).
• Immortal Life Is Cheap: To enter Liechtein Soehnle, you need a Human Sacrifice... but apparently, "extracting a ghost from her artificial body" works fine too, and there's no problem with just giving her the body back later. Totori was not informed about the "ghost" part beforehand, leaving her increasingly disturbed as Rorona and Pamela casually talk about "killing" her.
• Improbable Weapon User: Averted with the standard characters, all of whom use typical RPG weapons (Marc's Rocket Punch machine is a little strange, but it is undoubtedly a weapon). But the DLC will allow you to fight with Iksel, who uses a frying pan, and Ceci, who uses a broom.
• Irritation Is the Sincerest Form of Flattery: Rorona's doing her best to be like Astrid in mentoring Totori, even to the point of making clothes for her the same way Astrid made Rorona's. But she also ultimately isn't Astrid, and she's trying to do Astrid things with much less alchemy experience and with a much stronger Rorona flavor (her Chims aren't as capable as Astrid's Homs, and they work off pie). In the end, there's no doubt Rorona is still as good of a mentor as Totori can ask for, but it's specifically because Totori is also very different from how Rorona was as a student, and it's still easy to see why Rorona struggles with teaching most others.
• Item Caddy: Being alchemists, Totori and Rorona don't have particularly high stats, but they're also the only ones who can access the item inventory.
• I Will Find You: On top of Totori looking for her mother, Rorona is searching for Astrid while Sterk is on a hunt for Gio. Rorona ends up deciding to give up on actively searching for Astrid and join Totori, figuring she'll just pick up any leads on Astrid she finds along the way, and Sterk decides to tag along using Totori's search as "camouflage" since Gio will have an easier time avoiding Sterk if it's too obvious he's looking for him.
• Lady and Knight:
  • Gino believes that "men should be protecting women", so when Totori beats him in combat, he's demoralized because he believes this means he's weaker than the person he's supposed to be protecting. In the end, he and Rorona end up engineering a situation that makes Gino think he protected Totori as a Damsel in Distress from a huge monster (in actuality, she'd just been caught off guard) while Totori just lets him keep believing that, ending on the note that this obsession with who's stronger than whom is a little silly.
  • Sterk is revealed to have had a similar complex ever since Rorona beat him at the Royal Fair back during Rorona. In his case, it's less about chauvinism and more about the fact he identifies as a knight by nature and is Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life, so if the person he's responsible for protecting is stronger than him anyway, he won't be useful to them anymore.
• Lady Land: All of Frontier Village's inhabitants are girls and women who were abandoned at the base of Liechtein Soehnle as infants for the purpose of becoming human sacrifices for Evil Face. None of them know who their blood family members are, so they're entirely a Family of Choice, and all of them grow up there waiting to be eaten at some point. By finishing off Evil Face, Gisela and Totori basically set the whole village free.
• Missing Mom: The entire reason Totori goes on her quest is to find out what happened to her mother. Notably, it's not necessarily "rescuing" her mother, but at least finding out what exactly happened to make her disappear without a trace (although Totori refuses to believe her mother is dead and thus is certain those two are the same thing). In the True Ending, Gisela does indeed make it back to her family, although not because of anything Totori did.
• Multiple Endings: As with Rorona and previous Atelier games, there are multiple endings depending on what you accomplish in the game and what your relationships with the other characters are.
  • Bad Ending: There are a whopping three of them, one for running out of time before the tutorial is even over (which would require you to go out of your way to waste time in a way the game will call you out on), one for failing to reach Diamond Rank by the fourth year and thus getting Totori's adventurer license revoked, and one for completing the game without ever finding out what happened to Gisela. Failing at any of these will lock the player out of any of the other endings. In all three versions of the bad ending, Totori is condemned to an unfulfilling life without ever achieving much.
  • Normal Ending: Obtained by finding out the bare minimum about what happened to Gisela. Totori gets to keep her license, but she doesn't feel up to adventuring very far outside Alanya anymore, and she continues taking small jobs and hanging out with the townspeople without doing much else.
  • Wealth Ending: Obtained by completing Gerhard and Iksel's sidequests, as well as saving up more than 500,000 cole (something that'll probably require a New Game Plus run). Gerhard and Iksel recruit Totori into making an alchemy cooking restaurant, with Rorona and Ceci also hired as workers.
  • Chim Ending: Obtained by creating all five Chims and feeding them a total of 35 large pies. Totori becomes so obsessed with making Chims that she makes a whole factory's worth of them and trains them to take requests, to the point the adventurer system becomes useless since the Chims can all handle it anyway.
  • Character endings: The individual character endings are determined by whichever of Totori's party members is the first to have their event chain completed. Gino forms an adventurer duo with Totori for the next five years while Sterk and Rorona watch; Mel continues dragging Totori around and takes the Helmold family to visit Gisela's grave; Mimi takes Totori with her to the outer nations as the two make a name for themselves as adventurers; Marc gets a Humongous Mecha to carry him and Totori around as they look into Lost Technology; Rorona creates an alchemy school only to find out that nobody can understand her and Totori is a better teacher than her; Sterk finds himself caught between Rorona and Totori both needing him for their alchemy work.
  • True Ending: Obtained by flagging all of the requirements for the other endings. Gisela turns out to be alive, having been saved by Astrid and spending the last eight years recovering, and she returns home to her surprised family. Meruru and Lulua confirm this to be the canon ending.
• New Game Plus: Clearing any ending (including the bad ending) allows the player to create a clear game save that carries over all equipped gear and cole.
• Production Throwback: While the parallels aren't as tight as Rorona had with Marie, Totori has a similar relationship with Rorona as Elie has with Marie, featuring a more story about a protagonist following in the footsteps of her predecessor with a somewhat more dramatic story tone and an expanded system building off the first.
• Prolonged Prologue: There's a whole three months of a prologue where Totori has to get out of Alanya and into Arland to get her license before things really start taking off. New Game Plus allows you to skip it.
• Rock–Paper–Scissors: If you get Sterk's ending, Sterk suggests this as the method of choosing when Rorona and Totori have an argument over which of them should get to take him out for the day, so he ends up suggesting a compromise that works for both of them.
• Ship Tease:
  • This is the game where the Rorona and Sterk Ship Tease starts going up hard, since they're not professionally obligated to work together anymore yet still seem to want to hang out together anyway, and Rorona is making use of her position as an adult to tease him, talk things out with him, and banter with him as much as she wants. Sterk openly complains about how difficult she's become... but is also willing to do things like secretly train his pigeon to say Rorona's name just because she'd wanted it, even though he really does not want anyone to know about that.
  • Totori and Gino are framed as a parallel to Rorona and Sterk, with Sterk advising Gino about his relationship with Totori by invoking his own with Rorona.
  • Ceci and Melvia get some of this as well, since Mel's character event chain revolves heavily around both of them discussing their relationship and what they both want out of it.
• Side Quest: Up until the fourth year (when Totori's temporary license gets extended), the entire game is Totori doing nothing but sidequests and getting to know the members of her party. Totori doesn't get her first major clue about what happened to Gisela until then.
• Sins of Our Fathers: Totori finds out about Gisela's bad Destructive Savior reputation the hard way when Cordelia starts attacking her upon realizing she's Gisela's daughter, and Sterk advises Totori not to wave around information about her parentage lest other people hold a similar grudge.
• Sudden Soundtrack Stop: When Peter's called a pansy by Gino in the beginning, the soundtrack stops when Peter registers it:
  Peter: P-Pansy?!
  Gino: I don't really get what it means, but it rolls off the tongue. Pansy.
  I think I'll just call you Pansy from now on, like a nickname.
  Peter: ...
  Gino: Something the matter, Pansy?
  Totori: M-Maybe you should quit it...
  He looks like he's frozen in shock.
  Gino: Why? What's so shocking about me giving him a nickname?
  Totori: Geez. Come on, let's go, okay?
• Tentacle Rope: Totori is tasked with finding "the Guardian" to make some liquor, which, based on Gerhard's description, she takes to mean a giant fish. It turns out to actually be a giant... thing... that grabs Totori and Sterk and makes their job to hunt it down a very unpleasant experience. Both of them emerge with slime on them and a desire to never do that again.
• True Final Boss: To get certain character endings and the true face, Totori has to fight Evil Face, the man-eating demon who tormented Frontier Village and seemingly killed Gisela. If you're feeling up to fighting a superboss, there's a monster called the Rage Beast even further back there, which Lulua confirms to be the real one behind it all.
• Time Management Game: The game is split up over five years that can be spent in a more flexible way than the three years in Rorona were. Totori is initially given three years to upgrade her license to Diamond, at which point the game is extended for additional two years. In the field maps, days are divided up into segments, with those segments consumed by gathering and combat actions. While this gives the player much more control over how much time they use vs Rorona (where all field maps consumed a flat number of days regardless), it does mean Totori requires the player to be smarter about what they do, and it can be easy to burn too many days in the early game. That said, it's very hard to actually reach the Game Over ending without deliberately going out of your way for it, and the time limit is mostly there so you don't slack off and to serve as a challenge for reaching certain endings or having enough time to craft ultimate gear and items for clearing endgame dungeons.
• Updated Re-release: Plus and DX, which change very little from the base game compared to what other Atelier games would get; it's mostly in the realm of extras like costumes or onboarded DLC, as well as some minor quality of life additions in DX. Unfortunately, you'll still have to deal with the ending priority system.
• Vague Stat Values: Traits are listed in the Library, and while some have Percent-Based Values about their effects, others don't and just use adjectives. For comparison:

  Big: Effect: Slightly raises quality or enhances effects.

  Quality S: Effect: Increases item quality by 20%.

• Visual Initiative Queue: Totori was the first game to properly feature one of these in its battle system, although it's a very simple version compared to the improved one used in Meruru and Rorona Plus.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: For most of the game, you're probably not going to be facing off any combat bosses that are particularly difficult... until you hit the Flauschtraut. While it's not necessarily expecting you to have a top tier, min-maxed build, it can come out of nowhere for people who had been crafting items and gear relative to the difficulty level the game had before instead of putting a little more thought into their synths. It also happens to be the Final Boss and the minimum requirement to not get a bad ending, so if you're not ready, you'd better hope you have enough time left in your run to prepare.
• Warp Whistle: Totori eventually gains the ability to make a Warp Gate that can teleport her back to either alchemy shop.

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