Nelke & the Legendary Alchemists: Ateliers of the New World (PS4)

This is a fun city management game filled with characters from pretty much every Atelier game ever.There's a lot of micro-management involved, but there are also tools to reduce that, albeit at a cost to efficiency. You don't need to be particularly efficient to beat the game, however.Essentially, you have to build farms - and send people on dispatch - to gather materials, assign alchemists to synthesise products from those materials, and merchants to shops to sell them, making a profit you can then use to develop further. The story is largely in the deadlines, side and main events, and research.Gathering is largely automatic and combat is fairly simple, with all actual synthesis performed by the alchemists, so if you're expecting a typical Atelier experience you will be disppointed.

A nice lighthearted economic management game. Full of references for other Atelier games; this is really for dedicated fans of the series only. If you're not playing this to see your old favourite Atelier characters interact in humerous ways; this probably isnt the game for you.

If u expect another Atelier game dont cause is totally diffrent game spin off no main series,i love Atelier series but with one exeptions Nelke

Tried to do fairly full overview of different gameplay for people who know the series, tl:dr at endIt’s quite different to usual Atelier titles (as expected from the description) but most matches Atelier Meruru for gameplay; you spend the Weekdays turn in an overview of your town, assigning build orders, alchemy requests, sales plans, growing of crops etc, then the Holiday (read:weekends) in a menu choosing research plans (requires friendship with relevant alchemists + a few items) to open new battle items, synthesis recipes, and story events - and occasionally avert random crises, although they’re always pretty easy to solve quickly. You also have the option to either investigate an area or visit people from past Atelier games who live in your town.Visits cost 2 action points, and you have 12 each holiday; if you have 6 visits you can’t investigate, but any leftover time can be used for this - the less time you have left, the less items you can scavenge.Investigating involves picking 5 characters, who then auto-walk down a path, occasionally finding items; you have the option to press R1 / R to start running to the goal faster, but you can’t pick up items and are more likely to encounter enemies. The paths are all about 30secs long, and end with either a chest of generic items or a battle (generic or boss, dictated by where you are).Reach the end of a path to unlock the next one, complete 5 or so of an area to unlock the next area; every 2nd-last path is enemies from that area only with no items, every final path is items without encounters.I think there’s 7 or 8 areas, all roughly the same ^^’ there’s maybe 8 enemy types recoloured for the different areas.In weekdays your main goals are to increase the towns level of growth & population by placing shops / ateliers to both make and sell items, while balancing growing sales amongst 5 categories: grocery, general, weapons, clothing, drugs. If one doesn’t rise as fast as the others distribution will “bottleneck” and people will lose morale. You make one of 4 types of farmland to produce either flowers, crops, woodland drops or animal produce - these don’t require Named characters to produce, but produce more when manned; shops and ateliers require characters to be placed and ordered, and level up as they do well based on what quality of facility they’re in (basic, large or deluxe). Building requires specific building items you synthesise (most of which you need to research first), money, and a construction action - you start with two each turn, but with research can get up to 5. This means 2 new facilities a week, so it can be handy to spam farms; as you fill squares in an area, you advance the development level of it, eventually increasing the quality of housing around it (increasing max population available), and unlock new areas to build in - up to 8 blocks of about 250 squares - facilities range from 2x3 to about 7x8, with decorations available to make small boosts as well. Each can house one character (who each have strengths and weaknesses for certain buildings) and advanced buildings can add fairies for a salary, who increase production without costing materials.There’s the main characters from every game in the series, and a selection of side characters from most; 5 side characters get full-body portraits and events, the rest are bubble windows of heads, and a small blurb before they remain forever quiet. Alchemists from 3D games are usable in battle, but not controllable, and you have 4 original characters you can control to add to the party. The battles don’t have much to say about them, an active time system where you can switch between Manual (each time a character’s turn arrives who isn’t an alchemist you can choose their action), Semi-Auto (you can enter actions for a character before their turn if you wish), or Auto (it plays itself.) Characters learn a total of 4 moves, alchemists already knowing all theirs; controlled characters each have item command, which costs 1 or 2 action points to use, and alchemists each have a 4 action point move you can select when ready, to be automatically used regardless of turn order. Attacking normally adds an action point, so you can save them up for a known boss - except you at most fight 3 battles before finishing an investigation, so it’s a bit redundant. There’s a burst meter that fills as well, press Triangle or X to activate - everyone immediately gains 1 action point & has raised stats for a spell.On weekdays you can also dispatch characters to any path you’ve cleared, where they gather items; this is required for almost all synthesis to function without major distribution problems, and is handy if you get a lot of characters at once & cant build facilities for all of them.The story is adequate enough, fits fairly well with the universe’s usual tales ^^’ sometimes translation issues cause a bit of bother in major scenes, causing raised eyebrows where there might previously have been emotion.This is the main fault of the game, the translation issues - it is very clearly a low-budget rushed job, as grammar is frequently wrong, descriptions can be vague or missing entirely, character names suddenly change, characters speak dialogue clearly meant for someone else etc ad infinitum. It’s likely tolerable for most, but as an English tutor it has been driving me insane - one of the prominent final scenes has a character suddenly yelling at themselves then apologising, completely out of their usual tone. This would normally be acceptable with an English voice cast included to mitigate some of the impact, but with only text to emote the story and characters, it makes a lot of the events a bit of a mess, and as you play it becomes easy to just mash the button to get it over with. This is a shame, as the conversations are a large part of any atelier game and would have been especially fulfilling in a crossover title such as this. It’s understandable from a business perspective when faced with funding another ensemble cast, but it leads to less value being found in the overseas experience of the game. Again it’s not world-ending, but if little slips annoy you a bit this game will put you over the edge.TL DREnjoyable enough management-style JRPG let down by translation issues; maybe not worth £40 unless a die-hard fan of the series.

Not a bad game for a spin off same disappointment again Gust and KT getting lazy it's Japanese with English subtitles big disappointment again

To add to previous review, I am a long term fan of the series from PS2 days and I was really looking forward to this "20th Anniversary" release. So much so that I replayed all games on PS3 and PS4, hundreds of hours of gaming in order to lead up to a new game.Unfortunately I then started this. Awful gameplay, no involvement at all. You basically get a bunch of 4 people marching through a screen, you have no choice of monster to fight or gather points. At the end of the screen there is a fight then you get random stuff.I didn't have a problem with the idea of being basically a building sim but this was just incredibly dull!! After being such a fan for 20(ish) years, all this left me with was a sense of complete disappointment!Koei/KT/Gust, you should all be ashamed of this travesty of a game!Do yourself a favour, skip this and go straight for Atelier Lulua! Much better!!If you need more evidence, look how the price has fallen compared to other games in the series!

This game is different than all the other atelier games but I really enjoyed it.

Una de mis sagas favoritas de vídeojuegos

Llegó enseguida el pedido, muchas gracias, otro juego de Atelier para la colección :)

Changement de style mais pour un jeu anniversaire c est vraiment bien. Offert a ma femme pour sa collection des Atelier.

Attention, j'ai acheté le jeu vendu " par Amazon " et non un vendeur tiers, et j'ai reçu le jeu avec une boîte anglaise, aucunement mentionné sur la fiche produit.Sympa pour ceux qui collectionnent....