Continuing my playthrough of PS2 Atelier series games, I have now at last completed Mana Khemia 2 (the 10th mainline Atelier game). With this game completed, that finally bridges the gap between the older and newer ones I've played, so that's Ateliers 1~13 all finished~ :D. After enjoying Mana Khemia 1 so much, I had very high hopes for the sequel. Those hopes ended up being misplaced in many ways, but in many ways my expectations were met regardless, thankfully. The game has two routes, and doing both of them gets you a little extra final dungeon & story bits. I played through the boy protagonist's route and then the girl protagonist's, the first one taking me 51 hours, and the latter taking me 46. All in all, it took me 102 hours to finish both routes and the extra stuff at the end for the big extra ending, and I did it in Japanese on real hardware.
The titular "fall of alchemy" is in fact literal, as a decline in the power of Mana (the elemental spirits of this game, not like magic points) during the time since the end of the last game has caused the magic that allowed the academy of Al-Revis to float has failed, causing it to fall to the ground. They've since restructured significantly, now instituting a one-year degree system instead of a three-year one as well as opening up their course options to those significantly beyond just alchemy. Roze (the boytagonist) as well as Ulrika (the girltagonist) are both enrolled there, but they don't really get along. In fact, much to my surprise, their routes only actually ever intermingle if you complete both routes completely and go through to the extra mode at the end, so each protagonist has an almost entirely separate story detailing the events of their year at the academy.
The writing in those routes, extra mode or no, leaves a LOT to be desired, however. Given the amount of the main scenario writer's work that I've played outside of this game, this is a remarkably poor showing for him, and I can only really assume that the production timeline of this game must've been absolute hell for it to end up in this state. Roze's route is overall alright. This game does a far poorer job than the first in tying the side content to the main story content, and that combined with generally quite filler-y feeling character quests gives the game quite bad pacing overall. However, Roze's route still manages to stick the landing. The comedy therein has some PROBLEMS in where it draws its comedy from (though, surprisingly for '08, not homophobic ones. I was kinda blown away at how genuinely good and positive the gay humor is in this ^^;), but there are still a lot of good jokes and gags beyond that, and they stick their landings well enough most of the time. Roze's route is certainly disappointing and a bit too filler-y to really hold a candle to this scenario writer's other games for Gust, but it's ultimately pretty good.
Ulrika's, on the other hand, is fucking atrocious. Ulrika herself is easily one of the worst main characters I've ever seen in an RPG, and her completely illogical selfishness, stupidity, and impulsiveness makes her a very difficult character to like very much. Add on top of that that, unlike most of the side characters or even the other protagonist, she lacks a character arc of any kind (she ends the narrative exactly as she starts it), and you have a character who routinely ruins every scene she's in as a matter of course. I have my other hypotheses as to why her route is so inferior to the other one, but regardless of the why, her route is what it is and there's nothing changing that. If her route were at least similarly good to Roze's, I could recommend playing either or both, but as things stand, I can really only recommend Roze's route at all. This is the first game in a long, long time that I can remember genuinely making me outright angry with how it ended because the writing was so awful and despicable in its handling and messaging of certain things, and if that isn't damning enough of her route's writing, I don't know what is XD
The actual gameplay of Mana Khemia 2 is, thankfully, an all around enhancement on its predecessor in most ways. You still have an overall school/project system that works very much like the first game. You have big story events at the start and end of terms, and in the in between you have class projects to complete. The better you do on class projects, the better grades you'll get, and the sooner you get all the grades you need, the sooner you can stop doing projects and start getting free time. Once again, free time is used for character quests, and unlike the first game, you can actually do all of the character quests in one playthrough this time! Whereas Mana Khemia 1 restricts you to only one person's final character quest (do one person's last one and it locks you out of the others), this game lets you do all of them and then you pick whose ending you want by a dialogue choice near the end of the game. Mana Khemia 1 really got something good down with how it handled the overall gameplay loop, and the sequel here really takes a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach that I really like.
The alchemy and other assorted mechanics also work more or less exactly as they did in the last game. The main exception is that, where in Mana Khemia 1, you could pick the sub-skills you wanted put onto weapons and armor, here you no longer do that. Higher grade weapons and armor simply have better skills/passives, and each item has its own respective skills/passives for better or higher qualities. The other slight change is that the character you have help you make something is now no longer optional. Now you have to have an assistant when you make things, and depending on whom you pick, you'll get different passives applied to the alchemy mini-game you're playing. It's all around a much better system than the first game, and I really appreciate it.
It's not all steps forward though, sadly. The system that the last game had of "make X item with Y character to unlock the recipe for Z item" has been broken into just a system where it tells you a particular item needs to be made with someone helping you to unlock that new recipe. It makes for a lot of annoying save/loading trial and error, and it feels like a very pointless bit of obfuscation given that, even if you weren't save/loading for the right character, this game has no hard time limit. All it'd take to get more materials to make the thing again is your real life time, and it feels like a very needless waste of the player's time at that.
The other main mechanical changes are that in battle you now usually have 5 party members in total instead of 6, so you need to choose when you do support attacks much more deliberately than you used to in the first game, as well as a major change to how leveling works. Where in the first game, the growbook system was basically an alchemy powered FFX sphere grid, now it's just a big list instead of a tree you go down. Additionally, your max HP and MP have been divorced from the growbook's upgrades, and now it seems that, as you gain more AP (the thing you use to unlock stat boost nodes in the growbook), you gain invisible character levels that, once reached, just boost your HP and MP independently from unlocking stuff, which I liked.
The only sorta downside to that change towards one big list is that this game has enough new items, many of which craftable all at once, that it can often be very difficult to actually tell what new armor or weapons are actually worth using, and during the later game when you have a HUGE library of crap lying around, it can be hard to tell or remember what's even a new item in the first place ^^;. The game is thankfully not quite hard enough to make that a really significant problem, but the game's got a pretty stiff difficulty curve in the first place, so it's still stuff absolutely worth keeping track of at any rate.
Presentation-wise, Mana Khemia 2 is a little bit of a step up from its predecessor, but not by very much. Areas look a bit nicer, and the 2D sprites mesh with their 3D environments a fair bit better, but overall it's more or less the same. The sprite work, animation, and character portrait art/expressions are still as excellent as ever, of course, but there's just not a very big jump from the previous game. Again, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Same thing goes for the music. Same composers as the last game, and once again they do an awesome job. No complaints on aesthetics at all, though I did prefer the somewhat more 90's-ish style of the first game's character art over this one (if I had to choose one over the other).
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. As much as Mana Khemia 2 is only "three steps forward, one step back" in terms of its mechanics, it's narrative leaves SO much to be desired that it's a much harder sell than the first game, and a real bummer ending to the Atelier series on PS2 (as this was their last game on the console). If you get it and play Roze's route, I think you'll likely have a pretty good time as long as you don't expect anything quite as good as the first game's stuff, but Ulrika's route isn't worth doing at all (let alone doing like I did and doing both routes). I don't ultimately regret my time with this game, but gods damn do I still wish it'd been better TwT
The titular "fall of alchemy" is in fact literal, as a decline in the power of Mana (the elemental spirits of this game, not like magic points) during the time since the end of the last game has caused the magic that allowed the academy of Al-Revis to float has failed, causing it to fall to the ground. They've since restructured significantly, now instituting a one-year degree system instead of a three-year one as well as opening up their course options to those significantly beyond just alchemy. Roze (the boytagonist) as well as Ulrika (the girltagonist) are both enrolled there, but they don't really get along. In fact, much to my surprise, their routes only actually ever intermingle if you complete both routes completely and go through to the extra mode at the end, so each protagonist has an almost entirely separate story detailing the events of their year at the academy.
The writing in those routes, extra mode or no, leaves a LOT to be desired, however. Given the amount of the main scenario writer's work that I've played outside of this game, this is a remarkably poor showing for him, and I can only really assume that the production timeline of this game must've been absolute hell for it to end up in this state. Roze's route is overall alright. This game does a far poorer job than the first in tying the side content to the main story content, and that combined with generally quite filler-y feeling character quests gives the game quite bad pacing overall. However, Roze's route still manages to stick the landing. The comedy therein has some PROBLEMS in where it draws its comedy from (though, surprisingly for '08, not homophobic ones. I was kinda blown away at how genuinely good and positive the gay humor is in this ^^;), but there are still a lot of good jokes and gags beyond that, and they stick their landings well enough most of the time. Roze's route is certainly disappointing and a bit too filler-y to really hold a candle to this scenario writer's other games for Gust, but it's ultimately pretty good.
Ulrika's, on the other hand, is fucking atrocious. Ulrika herself is easily one of the worst main characters I've ever seen in an RPG, and her completely illogical selfishness, stupidity, and impulsiveness makes her a very difficult character to like very much. Add on top of that that, unlike most of the side characters or even the other protagonist, she lacks a character arc of any kind (she ends the narrative exactly as she starts it), and you have a character who routinely ruins every scene she's in as a matter of course. I have my other hypotheses as to why her route is so inferior to the other one, but regardless of the why, her route is what it is and there's nothing changing that. If her route were at least similarly good to Roze's, I could recommend playing either or both, but as things stand, I can really only recommend Roze's route at all. This is the first game in a long, long time that I can remember genuinely making me outright angry with how it ended because the writing was so awful and despicable in its handling and messaging of certain things, and if that isn't damning enough of her route's writing, I don't know what is XD
The actual gameplay of Mana Khemia 2 is, thankfully, an all around enhancement on its predecessor in most ways. You still have an overall school/project system that works very much like the first game. You have big story events at the start and end of terms, and in the in between you have class projects to complete. The better you do on class projects, the better grades you'll get, and the sooner you get all the grades you need, the sooner you can stop doing projects and start getting free time. Once again, free time is used for character quests, and unlike the first game, you can actually do all of the character quests in one playthrough this time! Whereas Mana Khemia 1 restricts you to only one person's final character quest (do one person's last one and it locks you out of the others), this game lets you do all of them and then you pick whose ending you want by a dialogue choice near the end of the game. Mana Khemia 1 really got something good down with how it handled the overall gameplay loop, and the sequel here really takes a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach that I really like.
The alchemy and other assorted mechanics also work more or less exactly as they did in the last game. The main exception is that, where in Mana Khemia 1, you could pick the sub-skills you wanted put onto weapons and armor, here you no longer do that. Higher grade weapons and armor simply have better skills/passives, and each item has its own respective skills/passives for better or higher qualities. The other slight change is that the character you have help you make something is now no longer optional. Now you have to have an assistant when you make things, and depending on whom you pick, you'll get different passives applied to the alchemy mini-game you're playing. It's all around a much better system than the first game, and I really appreciate it.
It's not all steps forward though, sadly. The system that the last game had of "make X item with Y character to unlock the recipe for Z item" has been broken into just a system where it tells you a particular item needs to be made with someone helping you to unlock that new recipe. It makes for a lot of annoying save/loading trial and error, and it feels like a very pointless bit of obfuscation given that, even if you weren't save/loading for the right character, this game has no hard time limit. All it'd take to get more materials to make the thing again is your real life time, and it feels like a very needless waste of the player's time at that.
The other main mechanical changes are that in battle you now usually have 5 party members in total instead of 6, so you need to choose when you do support attacks much more deliberately than you used to in the first game, as well as a major change to how leveling works. Where in the first game, the growbook system was basically an alchemy powered FFX sphere grid, now it's just a big list instead of a tree you go down. Additionally, your max HP and MP have been divorced from the growbook's upgrades, and now it seems that, as you gain more AP (the thing you use to unlock stat boost nodes in the growbook), you gain invisible character levels that, once reached, just boost your HP and MP independently from unlocking stuff, which I liked.
The only sorta downside to that change towards one big list is that this game has enough new items, many of which craftable all at once, that it can often be very difficult to actually tell what new armor or weapons are actually worth using, and during the later game when you have a HUGE library of crap lying around, it can be hard to tell or remember what's even a new item in the first place ^^;. The game is thankfully not quite hard enough to make that a really significant problem, but the game's got a pretty stiff difficulty curve in the first place, so it's still stuff absolutely worth keeping track of at any rate.
Presentation-wise, Mana Khemia 2 is a little bit of a step up from its predecessor, but not by very much. Areas look a bit nicer, and the 2D sprites mesh with their 3D environments a fair bit better, but overall it's more or less the same. The sprite work, animation, and character portrait art/expressions are still as excellent as ever, of course, but there's just not a very big jump from the previous game. Again, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Same thing goes for the music. Same composers as the last game, and once again they do an awesome job. No complaints on aesthetics at all, though I did prefer the somewhat more 90's-ish style of the first game's character art over this one (if I had to choose one over the other).
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. As much as Mana Khemia 2 is only "three steps forward, one step back" in terms of its mechanics, it's narrative leaves SO much to be desired that it's a much harder sell than the first game, and a real bummer ending to the Atelier series on PS2 (as this was their last game on the console). If you get it and play Roze's route, I think you'll likely have a pretty good time as long as you don't expect anything quite as good as the first game's stuff, but Ulrika's route isn't worth doing at all (let alone doing like I did and doing both routes). I don't ultimately regret my time with this game, but gods damn do I still wish it'd been better TwT