YMMV / Atelier Shallie: Alchemists of the Dusk Sea

• Awesome Music:
  • "Stella, part 3", which plays late in the game on Shallistera's route. It's the normal battle theme, but sounds epic enough to be a final boss theme!
  • "Soaring Clouds, Drifting Haze", the track that plays when fighting the Sand Dragon, is a grandiose orchestral rock piece.
  • "Luto - The Controller", a vocal rock song which starts during the final phase of the final boss fight, encapsulates that you're finally on the verge of accomplishing your goals.
• Broken Base: With Shallie being the first Atelier game since the return of the classic format to drop the time limit system, there were many fights between long-time fans over whether this was necessary, seeing the time management element as needed for the difficulty and to give the games structure. However many new fans jumped onto the series either here or with the following game as the time-limits were seen by many as a serious hurdle to truly enjoying a game that centers its core mechanics around lots of experimentation and exploration. These arguments haven't ended to this day although at this point the time limits have yet to return so they've been slowly fading away as the new status quo asserted itself.
• Contested Sequel: Atelier Shallie was seen by many as a poor conclusion to the Dusk series, leaving many of its mysteries and open arcs unresolved. The Plus version cleaned this up to some extent by adding a great deal more content centered around the previous Dusk protagonists, but that in itself upset fans further for needing buy the game again on a different console where it runs at a much lower framerate. The changes for the Plus version were extensive enough that many players felt the original PS3 version of the game was essentially unfinished. The later DX version is based on the Plus version and has the same content, but its at least optimized to run on modern hardware so the performance issues are at least mitigated.
• Difficulty Spike: The areas where major Life Tasks are done in Chapter 8 have a sudden increase in difficulty. In fact, one area has a mandatory fight that requires as much planning and preparation as a boss fight, even though it's against a bunch of mooks.
• Obvious Beta:
  • Save for the Game-Breaking Bug that was patched within a week, the game doesn't have anything that would render it unplayable or have a serious gaffe, but it's very rough around the edges. Examples are the seemingly inopportune times when the load screen appears (though the load times are very short), multiple times where what's spoken doesn't match what's written (but can still be understood), and some incomplete voice overs.
  • There is at least one line of dialog in the English dub that is spoken by the wrong character on screen. In one scene, Shallistera is unambiguously speaking - with her name on the dialog box and the camera panned to her face after several lines speaking with her correct voice - when suddenly Shallotte's voice actress speaks the last line of her monologue, for some reason.
• Older Than They Think: Players of the Atelier series since the classic format revival that began with Atelier Rorona would think that this title was the first of the main series games to take it out. In actuality, the Japan only Atelier Judie was the first game to remove the time limit system... though the time limits returned for its sequel Atelier Viorate before the series shifted to a traditional JRPG franchise for the next five games.
• Porting Disaster: While the Plus version has a great deal of content, it comes with a big hit to performance due to running on the Vita.
• Special Effects Failure: Unlike past games, the final hit of a Finishing Move's animation doesn't actually show the enemy dying. The game tries to mask this by having some of them end with a big flashy explosion that hides the enemy's model, followed by a victory pose, but some of them (such as Shallistera's, Miruca's, and Homura's) have a small enough effect to leave the enemy clearly visible, and enough of a delay between the attack's final hit and the cut to the victory pose for you to be able to see the enemy recovering from the supposedly fatal hit and getting back into their idle stance even though they're supposed to be dead, making it much less impactful than they could be. This issue could easily have been fixed by making the enemy actually go through their death animation and vanish at the end, like in other games.