DS User Reviews

Atelier Annie is a great game with a slow, rocky start if you're a new player. However, once you get past that there is a very fun game hidden underneath and this is coming from someone who isn't deeply into JRPGs outside of pop culture icons like Pokemon. So the just of the story is that you are brought to Sera Island to participate in an alchemy contest. Your ancestors were and apparently you are as well. Of course, you've grown up not knowing this your whole life, so you are trusted into this competition while still trying to learn the ropes. The story is about as cheesy as that. The entry requirement for the competition is a shop... sign..? Which you make and get a gold medal letting you in... Nice. The story is basically that cheeky. I didn't care much for the dialogue after the first few hours of playing. The story didn't really seem superb enough, nor as funny as others made it seem for me to spend much more time focusing on it so instead I moved my focus towards the gameplay. When talking about gameplay I must say it is excellent. After you get past the insanely long tutorial that is the beginning of the game, the rest of it comes forth and you get a decent JRPG with some city-building-esque and crafting elements built into it. The game itself revolves around the contest and the shop. If you do well in the contest (Which is fairly easy) you get awarded medals and based on your placement you get more or less money you can use towards building new attractions on the island. To perform alchemy you need to go around the island to collect materials. This can be done by searching key areas, or fighting and killing monsters and collecting the loot. You can perform alchemy on collected items to create other necessary items for more advanced recipes. You can also augment purchased items like weapons and armor to help yourself out and your party members, which you can have up to 2 accompanying you by the way. You can hand the items in at the locations you build or the adventurers guild which helps out the fame of your shop or those locations. More fame means more customers which means you get more money each month. With the monthly income, you can use that towards building new locations or renovating your existing ones. A basic system, but one that feels rewarding and is fun to play through. There are also some mini-games to play at your built locations which reward you with some adventuring goodies. I suppose if you keep playing these you can increase the difficulty to your desire, but I didn't find these engaging or necessary enough to do so. Overall the gameplay feels very rewarding. You feel like you are progressing and it's earned as you play through the game. The story I think is the weakest part of the game. Annie is a character I just dislike and I opted to skip through most of the dialogue once I got a basic understanding of the plot. Thank goodness this game has a 'skip' option. It's like they know how tedious the dialogue is. I found the music to be a bit charming, but it felt repetitive after a while so I ended up muting it a few hours in. Overall, I think there's a great game here for the DS. If you're already familiar with the gameplay mechanics or the series you can probably pick it up much quicker than someone like me. I think newer players would easily be turned off by the intr, get past that and there's some fun to be had.

I hate this game a **** I'm a big fan of the Atelier Series and Gust games in general. But this game is so wrong in many ways, and one of it it's the main character: Annie is basically a girl who, right at the start, says that she wishes to marry a man and always be **** this is our heroine people! However, what's worse is that she barely changes and ALWAYS complains that she has to work (honestly, in almost all her dialogue lines, she complains she has to work or something that implies moving). The reason why I'm still torturing the main character is because she literally destroys any sort of enjoyment from the game (seriously, I'm much more lazy than she is, but I don't complain as much as she does...), and during dialogues with other characters...which are great! I loved all of the seconday charactters because they were fun, they had particular behaviours, flaws, dislikes and even (mediocre) voice acting to give them more personality! They were enjoyable and likeable but whenever our main character came in, she would literally ruin the dialogue with her rambling and her lazyness of the work to no end! And again, it's sad considering that the Atelier Series usually has strong heroines and even if simple and sometimes weak, they were at least likeable, but Annie is probably the worst of all. Second, the game has still the alchemy features that is always present in every Gust games, including also a sort of managing game since you're also supposed to build parts in the island by winning the challenges at the best rank: it's not a bad feature but the alchemy feature could have used some more tweaks, since it can be tricky to understand how to work at times. But it's a good feature and the managing part works ok, nothing really big to complain, while the combat **** simple and unless you're going for the best endings, you'll won't even need to fight that much either. The story on the other hand is really mediocre: it's a very short game and while I haven't finished it yet, my sister finished in one day...without much rushing or much work: just a normal session of gaming and she was done with it, while I basically played 90% of the game before quitting; it has at least multiple endings and there are many ways to play it and such, which will help you replaying the game (and hey, in some of them, Annie starts to become much less annoying too!). I'm truely sorry to give this game a zero, as being a very big fan of the Atelier Series and a big fan of their RPGs in general, but this game lacks too much: even if you could avoid the nuisance of the main character, there isn't just enough content to make it worth, with basically non-existant combat (unless you're going for some specific endings), an alchemy system which could have used some more tweaks, a manager system that's not very deep, and basically an extremely short story that can be completed in a day (or two). If you can pass over the flaws maybe you might find a game to enjoy for a day. But personally, I'd say to skip it.