Recent reviews by lordhongorama

Decent port of arguably the best main Final Fantasy game (queue arguments for either 6 and 9...). Cutscenes take forever to load, but the story and combat are some of the tightest of all FF games.

Very decent Metroidvania. Interesting spin on the combat (bullet hell shooter) makes this refreshing. Well worth the money.

Cute little game. Well executed, decent graphics, pretty tight controls. Worth it when on special, a little bit short for full price.

In the current state, no, but it's EA so there is a lot of time to fix stuff. I'll change my rating as this evolves most probably.

First, the difficulty of the "tutorial / prologue" is not in line with the rest of the game. I understand they want to get the feel of the combat across, but the only thing they will get from that are refunds within the time window. The game is much easier after the first boss, but many people will not get to that point. Also make the tutorial less "dark". Can't see ♥♥♥♥ - and no reason that again, after prologue, the game looks more brighter and colorful.

Camera is terrible. Again, WIP. I don't mind fixed camera, zoom it out a little. Too many times something that is way off screen will shoot you and you'll just be scrambling trying to figure out where it was. Simply not fun. (Is this design a result of trying to limit stuff on screen for the GPU?)

Combat is... sluggish? not fluid? Something feels off. The mechanics, skills ideas are there, it just seems not to all come together very well.

A lot of smaller issues. Controls and key bindings need some rework. If playing offline, make a pause button. People have lives. Buggy interface in dailies/challenges (button presses not registering).

Terrible AI (more work to be done):

Second boss does exactly nothing but run around in circles after you, I didn't land a single hit beside shield bashing / stunning him and let the allied NPC take care of him.

Regular enemies are leashed. Very easy to exploit them by bringing them to the end of their leash and again, just stunning / hit / hit them, move away, repeat combo.

Art is gorgeous, the mechanics are pretty good. Like others have said a mini-map could have helped but I don't think it's a game breaker, neither is the teleport system. The areas are huge, monster density is pretty good. Combat is a little on the easy side, think I died once. Well worth the price however. My only beef is that the skill tree could use a design overhaul (navigating and finding skills is not efficient, so I ended up just buying whatever there was I could buy) and the story is... well, I don't know what the story is honestly, I ended up just going from A to B to C and fight monsters.

Highly recommend. Good story, well written, well paced. Great graphics if you like the style. Great experience all around.

Nostalgia only. Not exactly the best platforming experience, but the voice acting is worth the (sales) price in itself.

Pretty well executed retro side scrolling action rpg. A bit simplistic for the combat, but the style, gear management and story / side quests make up for it.

Great graphic, decent (yet simple) puzzles. Story is nothing new but overall an enjoyable time spent playing this.

The actual note I'd give is 5-6/10. Entertaining, worth playing, but with a lot of caveats especially if you played other Atelier games.

Yes, it's a casual homely RPG. But where other Atelier games would subtly point you towards events, Sophie is mostly done as a repetitive cycle: farm materials (fine), farm exp (not so fine, as the line is very small between stuff that will wipe you and stuff that gives no exp) then go back to Atelier to synthesise items and finally visit every town location and talk to everyone to see if there is any new lines of dialogue.

The crafting (and the encyclopedia) is much more... raw? unfinished? than previous games. While the crafting is simpler, it's also much less intuitive, with less tools to classify materials and more ambiguous info. The gathering system feels incomplete, and the encyclopedia lacks detailed information.

Combat is overly simplistic. Not that Atelier games ever had the most advanced fight systems, but this one is really basic.

Am I enjoying it? Yeah. But if someone asks me if they should play, I'd recommend other Atelier first and this one after they have completed them.