My second Atelier, coming immediately after finishing Ayesha. In some areas better than Ayesha, in other ways worse. The crafting system takes everything from Ayesha but cleans up the interface and adds some new mechanics and depth, and the result was making the crafting so much more addictive. Combat similarly takes what worked in Ayesha, changes the assist mechanics a little, and polishes into something a lot more addicting. Playing on normal difficulty however, it was also much easier for the majority of the game. Early game when you only have a couple party members and like, two bomb uses before you have to return to town, similar to Ayesha opening stuggle, but as soon as you get a full party of 6 the combat becomes absolutely trivial until pretty late in the game when there's a spike in difficulty to bring it up to something fun with strategy again, but not overly difficult. The story is a lot slower to pick up, but once it does its alright, though I like the story and characters of Ayesha and Shallie both more. Much more upbeat and optimistic tone than the other games despite the same setting of a dying world. Time limit still exists, but has been made into something almost impossible to fail, to the point it almost doesn't exist save to keep you from progressing the main story immediately. The titular Dusk, the dying world, comes a little bit more into focus than Ayesha, but its not the main focus still, but the detailed world map from Ayesha is gone and instead the geography of the land is much more vague unfortunately, and a lot of the locales feel more generic compared to Ayesha's. Still a really fun game, the stress of the time is gone leaning much more into the relaxing, comfy side.