So it's the second game in the Arland trilogy of the Atelier series. I played the DX version, but didn't know until I started playing that unlike Atelier Rorona, this game got very little in the way of updates or changes. Which means it is the roughest game to play in the Atelier series because absolutely none of the quality of life improvements that were apparently added into Rorona retroactively are in Totoria. Crafting is incredibly simplistic with lots of "useless" traits. Combat is incredibly simplistic with only a few attacks and not much in the way of strategy. The UI is ugly. And I even noticed that the audio might have been sampled at a very low quality because there was this sort of tinniness to the voice acting on the Japanese track (they seem to have fixed this on the English dub but the trade off is that most of the dialog is silent if you play on the English track.)
But I forced myself through all of it because I loved the protagonist, I loved the characters, and I wanted to see everything even if I sometimes had to fight the game to get there. And for that alone, I recommend this game but only to people that already got invested in this series starting with Rorona.
It's basic premise is that its protagonist Totooria Helmold is a newly fledged alchemist who wants to become an adventurer to finally solve the mystery of what happened to her mother. Totori is a little nervous ball of energy and she approaches everything with a child's gusto. I loved the crap out of her and her family and her friends, there's only one character I didn't gel with in this cast (Marc, for the record) and he wasn't so much as "bad" as he was... rather random. I cheered for her successes, I cried at a pivotal scene in her emotional journey, she is actually one of my favorite characters in this entire franchise now. A few characters came back from Atelier Rorona and their storylines even continue in this one. I loved seeing the grown-up Rorona being even more crazy and bumbling but just as talented and stubborn as she forges her own identity in the work. Sterk, my current Arland fav, has had a few big setbacks but he's still the good natured guy with the terrifying face. Atelier Totori is clearly a story about legacies and what we do with our own lives as well as what we give to the next generation. So the returning Rorona characters reinforce this along with the new characters like Totori herself. The writers still have a firm grasp on what makes fun and memorable people to watch which is a godsend because I would have dropped the game and moved on to the next one if they weren't. This game actually does have a final boss too, though the stakes are far more about Totori's personal journey than about saving the world.
Gone in Atelier Totori is the rigid assignment structure of Rorona - at the start you get your Adventurer's License and a broad goal of upgrading it to continue adventuring. Which is an out-of-universe way to ensure you're not just screwing off, though in-universe Totori losing her license doesn't seem like much of a consequence since plenty of other people do exactly what she does without a license. But no matter, it's a light attempt to structure the game that doesn't feel nearly as intrusive as Rorona's regular 3 month assignment blocks.
So naturally as a player you want to just run around and explore that huge world to the fullest, right? Wrong. Because the time limit in this game seems fine (you get a maximum of five years, wow!) but you chew up time constantly. Not enough to get a game over - the game is generous in that respect, getting points for your license isn't too difficult. But while in the last game your time is used mostly on travel and alchemy, Totori has changed this to every action you take on the field map taking time away as well - every gathering point, every combat, that's time lost. This game isn't even very nice on its new game plus - you get your money and gear to carry over, that's it. All of your items that you need to reduce the hits to travelling, gathering? Gone until you craft it again, meaning every playthrough is a rush to get your good time-saving gear again.
And this seems to go against the mission of the game - Totori doesn't really have an in-game reason for needing to complete her journey in a certain amount of time, so why shouldn't she just explore for as long as she needs until she finds the truth about her mom? Why give the player such a wide open goal and world, then demand they can only enjoy it in small doses? She's supposed to be the "adventurer" of Arland, it implies her going on a long expansive journey. The gathering areas are much expanded now as well compared to Rorona, but you can't really do repeat visits to the more far-flung locations because of all the time you lose if you didn't gather an item with the trait you needed the first time. So you're back to save scumming.
There's also a special hell for the player trying to unlike all the endings. Unlike Rorona (Plus), which just let you unlock all your endings in one playthrough and then choose which one to watch, in this game every ending is ranked in a priority, you can't choose between which one to watch when you reach the end of five years, and you can only see the ending with the highest priority in the list. If you want to play without a guide, you're probably going to need several playthroughs and just hope you don't screw up and unlock a different ending that you already saw with a higher priority ending than the one you wanted to see. Every recruitable character has an ending, plus several additional endings. And on top of that, the requirements to get them all are very obtuse meaning you could trigger certain ones by accident or accidentally lock yourself out of a different one without knowing about a missable event. But if you play with a guide to try and do this properly, you suck a lot of fun out of the game because you need such a perfect plan to accomplish the goal of seeing all the endings with as few playthroughs as possible that you lose the fun experimentation and exploration that these games usually have.
It's not all bad. Totori has a few improvements over Rorona, even given that it's technically older than Rorona DX. The settings are much larger and more expansive and feature a good variety of locations, and the world feels much more exciting overall. You get two major "hub" cities, one of which is Arland from the last game, giving you two big bases of operations from which to conduct your exploration missions. And while it's not necessarily as intuitive, I actually ended up preferring Totori's item duplication system with the Chims, even if they now need a consumable resource to power them. I was a bit sad to see Meruru just bringing back the Hom system unchanged from Rorona.
Atelier Totori is the time-limited Atelier game that makes the strongest argument against time-limited Atelier games. And while this may get me flayed by long time series fans, this game felt a lot like Atelier Firis but worse in almost every respect (aside from the characters, this one easily has that one beat). To the point that Firis now feels like a re-do of Totori with a similar ambition of having a large world to explore without the pointless time limit to force you to barely scratch the surface of it. And with all the issues that game has, it at least has a better idea of how to match its game systems to its stated theme. Atelier Totori is such a hard game to talk about because the things it does do well are things I love, but the things it fails at are nearly show stoppers. I probably wouldn't be as harsh on it if I'd apparently suffered through the originalAtelier Rorona or hadn't played any of the later games, but this one aged like milk.
This game is lucky I loved the characters
Oof. I have so many mixed feelings on this game.
So it's the second game in the Arland trilogy of the Atelier series. I played the DX version, but didn't know until I started playing that unlike Atelier Rorona, this game got very little in the way of updates or changes. Which means it is the roughest game to play in the Atelier series because absolutely none of the quality of life improvements that were apparently added into Rorona retroactively are in Totoria. Crafting is incredibly simplistic with lots of "useless" traits. Combat is incredibly simplistic with only a few attacks and not much in the way of strategy. The UI is ugly. And I even noticed that the audio might have been sampled at a very low quality because there was this sort of tinniness to the voice acting on the Japanese track (they seem to have fixed this on the English dub but the trade off is that most of the dialog is silent if you play on the English track.)
But I forced myself through all of it because I loved the protagonist, I loved the characters, and I wanted to see everything even if I sometimes had to fight the game to get there. And for that alone, I recommend this game but only to people that already got invested in this series starting with Rorona.
It's basic premise is that its protagonist Totooria Helmold is a newly fledged alchemist who wants to become an adventurer to finally solve the mystery of what happened to her mother. Totori is a little nervous ball of energy and she approaches everything with a child's gusto. I loved the crap out of her and her family and her friends, there's only one character I didn't gel with in this cast (Marc, for the record) and he wasn't so much as "bad" as he was... rather random. I cheered for her successes, I cried at a pivotal scene in her emotional journey, she is actually one of my favorite characters in this entire franchise now. A few characters came back from Atelier Rorona and their storylines even continue in this one. I loved seeing the grown-up Rorona being even more crazy and bumbling but just as talented and stubborn as she forges her own identity in the work. Sterk, my current Arland fav, has had a few big setbacks but he's still the good natured guy with the terrifying face. Atelier Totori is clearly a story about legacies and what we do with our own lives as well as what we give to the next generation. So the returning Rorona characters reinforce this along with the new characters like Totori herself. The writers still have a firm grasp on what makes fun and memorable people to watch which is a godsend because I would have dropped the game and moved on to the next one if they weren't. This game actually does have a final boss too, though the stakes are far more about Totori's personal journey than about saving the world.
Gone in Atelier Totori is the rigid assignment structure of Rorona - at the start you get your Adventurer's License and a broad goal of upgrading it to continue adventuring. Which is an out-of-universe way to ensure you're not just screwing off, though in-universe Totori losing her license doesn't seem like much of a consequence since plenty of other people do exactly what she does without a license. But no matter, it's a light attempt to structure the game that doesn't feel nearly as intrusive as Rorona's regular 3 month assignment blocks.
So naturally as a player you want to just run around and explore that huge world to the fullest, right? Wrong. Because the time limit in this game seems fine (you get a maximum of five years, wow!) but you chew up time constantly. Not enough to get a game over - the game is generous in that respect, getting points for your license isn't too difficult. But while in the last game your time is used mostly on travel and alchemy, Totori has changed this to every action you take on the field map taking time away as well - every gathering point, every combat, that's time lost. This game isn't even very nice on its new game plus - you get your money and gear to carry over, that's it. All of your items that you need to reduce the hits to travelling, gathering? Gone until you craft it again, meaning every playthrough is a rush to get your good time-saving gear again.
And this seems to go against the mission of the game - Totori doesn't really have an in-game reason for needing to complete her journey in a certain amount of time, so why shouldn't she just explore for as long as she needs until she finds the truth about her mom? Why give the player such a wide open goal and world, then demand they can only enjoy it in small doses? She's supposed to be the "adventurer" of Arland, it implies her going on a long expansive journey. The gathering areas are much expanded now as well compared to Rorona, but you can't really do repeat visits to the more far-flung locations because of all the time you lose if you didn't gather an item with the trait you needed the first time. So you're back to save scumming.
There's also a special hell for the player trying to unlike all the endings. Unlike Rorona (Plus), which just let you unlock all your endings in one playthrough and then choose which one to watch, in this game every ending is ranked in a priority, you can't choose between which one to watch when you reach the end of five years, and you can only see the ending with the highest priority in the list. If you want to play without a guide, you're probably going to need several playthroughs and just hope you don't screw up and unlock a different ending that you already saw with a higher priority ending than the one you wanted to see. Every recruitable character has an ending, plus several additional endings. And on top of that, the requirements to get them all are very obtuse meaning you could trigger certain ones by accident or accidentally lock yourself out of a different one without knowing about a missable event. But if you play with a guide to try and do this properly, you suck a lot of fun out of the game because you need such a perfect plan to accomplish the goal of seeing all the endings with as few playthroughs as possible that you lose the fun experimentation and exploration that these games usually have.
It's not all bad. Totori has a few improvements over Rorona, even given that it's technically older than Rorona DX. The settings are much larger and more expansive and feature a good variety of locations, and the world feels much more exciting overall. You get two major "hub" cities, one of which is Arland from the last game, giving you two big bases of operations from which to conduct your exploration missions. And while it's not necessarily as intuitive, I actually ended up preferring Totori's item duplication system with the Chims, even if they now need a consumable resource to power them. I was a bit sad to see Meruru just bringing back the Hom system unchanged from Rorona.
Atelier Totori is the time-limited Atelier game that makes the strongest argument against time-limited Atelier games. And while this may get me flayed by long time series fans, this game felt a lot like Atelier Firis but worse in almost every respect (aside from the characters, this one easily has that one beat). To the point that Firis now feels like a re-do of Totori with a similar ambition of having a large world to explore without the pointless time limit to force you to barely scratch the surface of it. And with all the issues that game has, it at least has a better idea of how to match its game systems to its stated theme. Atelier Totori is such a hard game to talk about because the things it does do well are things I love, but the things it fails at are nearly show stoppers. I probably wouldn't be as harsh on it if I'd apparently suffered through the original Atelier Rorona or hadn't played any of the later games, but this one aged like milk.