A fun Visual Novel / Dungeon Crawler, the concept is neat enough for the novelty to propel you forward as you get to know some hot weapons, and by the the time you've acclimated there is probably at least one person who intrigues you enough to keep going and figure them out.

I was surprised how much the focus on dating and flirting rather than romance enabled me to make more on-the-fly roleplaying decisions than I usually would in a visual novel where I might normally be tempted to try and steer towards a 'route'. Even the strictly platonic paths had a lot of playful energy to them, for example I had no interest in dating K-pop boy but he was fun for friendly snuggles.

Gameplay is perfectly serviceable, you can pretty clearly see the DNA of games like Bastian here, lacks the polish that later exemplars of the style like Hades would show but its fun and engaging (though I wish enemies had clear wind-up frames so combat was less memorizing how long enemies had between attacks and could instead be more reactive and fluid)

Be warned that a major, unavoidable part of this game is dealing with a creep who stalks you, kidnaps people, and is just in general the Worst kind of guy. I actually liked that the game went there, and found myself first trying to politely turn him down, then defuse him, and then just try and shoot him down outright at every opportunity, it felt really natural, even if he gets a little cartoonishly jerky.

Also, cannot be overstated how good the music is, phenomenal.

Generally, this game has excellent presentation, the mechs stomp across the battlefield and your view bobs up and down accordingly. Mechs are lovingly rendered and while they are not 1 to 1 with their original look, I tend to appreciate the redesigns.

However, what cannot be avoided is years or bizzare design decisions that have made the game cycle through various absurd weapon imbalances. Also, general changes like increasing matches from 8v8 to 12v12 have made it so a game that once excelled at drawn-out brawls with tactic usage of torso twisting to spread damage, to longer range sniping and skirmishing where the increased gun count on either side punishes not staying in a large deathball of mechs.

Worse has been the absurd monetary model the game has followed, selling mechs at absurd prices and jumping on whatever trend of the day to try and bleed the playerbase dry.

However since I have come back these practices have calmed down considerably and there are events running frequently to give out mechs and other goodies to active players. The base model of free-to-play and all the predatory aspects of it remain, but there is legitimately a fun game here about giant stompy robots here.

Gameplay

First time with an Atelier game, was pleasantly surprised. The core loop of gathering and crafting is very satisfying, as is making upgrades to your gear. Each new tool in your arsenal feels like you just broke the difficulty of the game in half, which can be very satisfying, but I wish they let you play the harder difficulties before clearing the game. Even on Hard the game never really challenged me except when I accidentally stumbled into a post-game boss.

Story

The story was very charming, and it struck me how grounded it stayed. Sure, you are eventually saving thousands of people with your actions, but the focus is squarely on the personal growth of your characters and a well crafted coming-of-age story.

Anime Bullshit:

The game is thankfully light on typical nonsense, baring some over-sized and gravity defying boobs, as well as the main character's absurd outfit. Outside of the visual presentation, the story does not overly sexualize it's women and lets them be full people, even sidestepping what I thought was surely going an out-of-nowhere romantic development.

In Conclusion

A nice, warm, and ultimately bitter-sweet coming-of-age story with a compelling crafting system, main thing holding it back is an ok combat system and an aversion to doing anything too terribly different or out there. It is an excellent "one of those" but there are a lot of them out there.