Atelier Sophie 2: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Dream

My favorite atelier I've played so far. A turn based combat system that was ahead of it's time and done better than expedition 33 if you ask me. Engaging story, great gameplay. Good music. Easy recommend.

I can't recommend this. 80% of the "game" is spent watching cutscenes. There are seriously places where it's 30 seconds or less between cutscenes. You enter a building, and get a cutscene. You walk through a door and get another cutscene. Which might have been ok, except that the story has some of the worst writing I've ever seen in any medium, ever, game or otherwise. It's one contrivance and coincidence after another. Flashbacks to things that happened mere minutes ago, people suddenly remembering that they run an alchemy store after you, the alchemist, have been adventuring with them for days, people randomly walking up the moment they're needed, etc. Even the problems to be solved tend to be monumentally stupid. For example, there's a huge quest chain where you're looking for somebody and get blocked by a waist-deep river with some boxes by it. Neither you nor the other alchemist in the party have any idea what the boxes are, but action-girl remembers that she saw the person your'e after use those boxes that one time to stop the rain. You go back to the guild, and everybody knows all about these alchemy-rain-stopping boxes except for the alchemists, and they explain that you need some super rare recharging tool to recharge the boxes, and nobody knows where to find them. A guy who is also not an alchemist walks in right that second and mentions that he has the item you need and gives it to you...but oops, the recharging item needs to be recharged with some rocks that only an alchemist can do that. Suddenly you remember that you know how to make the rock you need to recharge the boxes you had no clue what they were for. You make the rocks and recharge the item and use it to recharge the boxes...which makes the rain stop. Instantly the river dries up and you can cross. Oh, and now you can make rocks to recharge boxes whenever you want, no special item needed anymore, and these boxes suddenly exist all over the place whenever you need to raise or lower a river. This is immediately followed by a mountain pass that you can't get through because a dragon attacked a caravan travelling through it. Does the dragon stop you? Do you have to level up and fight it later? No, of course not. The dragon's already gone, but during the battle he knocked some bags off the caravan, and the bags are blocking your path. So you can't simply help move them, so you'll just have to come back later, never mind the fact that the bags are also waist-high and have huge visible gaps between them. That was about when I gave up on the game. I'll grant that the alchemy minigame is mildly interesting, Drop shapes on a field and try to line up special symbols, score better to make better equipment. But it seems kind of useless, because combat is easy and mostly optional. You can walk around most monsters in the game, and boss fights are easy enough that after 7 hours of play I've yet to lose a battle even though it took me four hours to figure out how to equip anything and I haven't bothered leveling because I can walk around everything that isn't a boss. As a plus, none of the characters are unlikable. This is basically a "cute girls doing cute things" slice-of-life anime, with little bits of running around and easy battles in between. If that's what you want, you might like it. But don't buy this expecting much of a game. Or much of a story.

引き継ぎなし難易度レジェンドをお勧めしたい。 驚くほど敵が強く、普通にプレイするとこちらのターンが一生回ってこないのは思わず笑ってしまう。 レベルを上げて物理で殴るという古風なRPG的攻略は不可能。 錬金アイテムを工夫する愉しみを存分に味わえる。

I love her, grandma. And I also love her grandma.

Atelier Sophie 2 is the 4th game I've played by gust and up until playing it I thought their games were overpriced and mediocre at best. Thankfully Sophie 2 has proven Gust are capable of making and writing a good game. Pros - - Sophie 2s graphics are immediately what made me fall in-love with this game. The scenery, character models, zones, weapon designs, all of it is so beautiful. - Music was nice here, but it usually is in JRPGs. Nothing groundbreaking but all nice to listen to. - The combat was really fun for turn base. You can activate switch attacks, guard switches and ultimate moves. The 6 companions come with an ok amount of skills. I felt the combat was still pretty fun to engage with by the end. If you want to play on the higher difficulties you're probably going to need to spend a much larger amount of time playing perfecting the combat and skills. - The synthesis/crafting system was so much fun and a huge upgrade from Sophie XD. I found the bonuses a lot easier to understand and incorporate into my creations, and the auto synthesis option was amazing for when I just wanted to level up Atelier skills. - Exploration was pretty good here. Every new region you unlocked looked unique enough to make exploring it fun, and the added addition of some puzzles and mini games with materials crafting made exploring even better (most of the time). - The story was also a positive here, which surprises me because Atelier games are often noted for being pretty bad in the story department. Maybe I just connected with the characters pretty well! It did drag out a little bit at times, but not enough to leave me with negative feelings toward it. - The characters were pretty well written, though mostly fall into cliches. Their interactions with each other felt natural with no forced rivalries or hatred for the sake of it. Their goals and motivation for joining Sophie felt well written. Cons - - I found some of the exploration and puzzles a little tedious by the end of the game. Maybe it was due to burn out after 49 hours, but I was also not expecting an Atlelier game to have much depth outside of the synthesis system, so maybe that was it as well. Not a massive con, just something I noticed one or two times. - The difficulty seemed a little unbalanced to me. Normal mode and hard mode didn't feel much different, like they both required the same amount of effort to prepare for. I ended up putting the game on easy as I wasn't interested in being massively challenged, and normal felt too close to hard mode to enjoy. - I wish the game had some unlockable costumes, but unfortunately it's all DLC. I think maybe there's some save file costumes for Sophie but it's just costumes from older games. Overall I had a very positive experience with Sophie 2, and it has reassured me that this series can do a much better job than that awful first Sophie game, and the mediocre experience of both Fairy Tail games. I'm excited to try Ryza next! 8.5/10.

Sophie my beloved megalomaniac wife T^T

Easily one of the best Atelier games. You don't have to play Sophie 1 in order to play this one; but you will be missing out a little bit on the relationship between Sophie and Plachta. At the time of this review, it's currently the last Atelier game that's properly turn-based. But thankfully it is the best iteration of proper turn-based combat in Atelier games, along with a really robust crafting system that improved upon the previous iterations within the Mysterious' sub-series.