Adventure through this RPG as a young alchemist in search for the endless secrets of his profession.
Full Review
Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana Review
By, Josh Ferguson
Backdrop
.hack Part 1 Infection (Dot Hack) begins with a bang. Something disastrous happens to your character‘s real world friend, while innocently playing a 20 million-subscriber base, wildly popular online RPG game (MMORPG), The World. To unravel the mystery of your friend’s misfortune, you become an online, ingame rogue hacker, exploring every corner of The World, even some virus-infected ones.
The hero is armed with the special skills of Data Drain and Gate Hack, and some colorful, talented fellow adventurers to fill the two other available party slots. Different adventurers must accompany you depending on the plot‘s development. You have some control over the others in your party, including upgrading them through trades or gifts. You can play only a single class, Twin Blade. Other characters are from different classes, with varied strengths and weaknesses, from a mage type (Wavemaster) to a bully (Heavy Axeman).
Gameplay
Gameplay takes place in three principal areas – towns, fields, and dungeons. Towns house The World’s servers. There, the player can save the game, buy magic scrolls and useful and unique items, store items, buy equipment, and talk and trade with lots of other players in character online. One town has an unusual ranch to check out, a patent homage to an enduring feature of just about every Final Fantasy.
The town’s Chaos Gate provides instant teleportation to a particular wide-open Field, containing monster encounter hotspots, a mystical spring, treasure, and lots of mysterious food. You enter three distinct keywords, some known at the game‘s onset, and others learned through play. Whatever keywords are entered, the difficulty level of the destination is helpfully revealed. This prevents a low-level party from being massacred. Once the keywords are entered, you travel through the Chaos Gate. (You can enter specific keywords learned to continue the plot, do side quests, or do unlimited exploring. Or, you can instruct the Gate to enter random keywords, and take your chances. There‘s also an option to enter any keywords you wish from a word list.) Every Field houses a single Dungeon. The dungeons, where you spend much of the game fighting for your life, are not overly large in size, and always range between three and five average levels.
Many have compared Dot Hack to Phantasy Star Online Episode I and II (PSO) on the Gamecube. Let us gently discredit this. We feel Dot Hack has far better graphics than PSO. The Fields and Dungeons contain many colorful, over stylized backdrops and settings, including weather effects. Dot Hack’s monsters resemble the beautifully-drawn monsters of the later Final Fantasy’s. Dot Hack’s world is gigantic with a seeming infinite number of locations to explore. PSO’s world is relatively small, and plot is threadbare, with meaningless, though fun, side quests, which instill no enthusiasm in the player. Dot Hack’s plot is deep and complex, with each subplot advancing the story just a little bit further. (Remember though, the end of this game in no way comes close to wrapping up the story, to be completed in the three games to be released later this year.) One visual treat, however, was lifted directly from PSO – the cascading rings that accompany the teleportation of characters to and from different areas.
Combat
Dot Hack’s combat engine can best be described as modified real-time. Much like the action-RPG, Kingdom Hearts, button mashing can be effective to beat monsters. Monster combat icons appear as large yellow twirling landmarks. As you approach, the landmark dissolves, monsters come at you big-time, and, undoubtedly, players will feel a healthy adrenaline rush. Some of Dot Hack’s many monsters do not stand around waiting to be pummeled, rather some you need to catch. Dot Hack lets you turn combat almost into a turn-based affair. The player needs only to hit Triangle in the middle of battle to pause the game instantly. From there the player can give orders to the others in the party, anything from healing someone, reviving another, casting a spell, designating a target monster. Without jeopardizing your party from the hailstorm of monster blows, combat becomes a calmer, more strategic, experience. This will help the many action-challenged. Camera angles play a big role in successful combat. You must be facing a monster to do any damage. As in many games, manipulating opposing environmental elements, like fire vs. water, is a key to successful monster combat.
Dot Hack’s cyberspace setting provides a wealth of Wow-inducing outbursts. The Data Drain option in combat is a great example. When a monster’s approaches zero, the player can Data Drain to reduce a horrendous, gigantic steel robot, for example, into a sniveling, puny monster, easily defeated with a single blow. Data Drain always results in a nifty, rare item or essential Virus Cores so you can Gate Hack areas of The World now closed, but needing investigation. One bad side effect – if you defeat, a Data Drained monster, but a single experience point is earned. One REALLY bad side effect – if you Data Drain too often without giving the skill a rest, you may overload and explode. Game Over. In the case of Boss monsters, Data Drain works the same, but what remains is no sniveling puny monster, but a full-blooded slightly less tough monster. All of this makes for interesting and captivating combat, a large part of the game.
Fresh Features
Dot Hack is replete with new and interesting features that kept us riveted.
To start, the entire background and story of a real world gamer becoming a rascal hacker, penetrating deep into a virus-infected online game, is quite novel. Combine this with Dot Hack’s emulating the look and feel of an online game universe. (Message traffic on the web shows many gamers mistakenly believe Dot Hack is a real online MMORPG, along with monthly fees! No real Internet connection is required.)
Just like in the real word, Dot Hack replicates your excitement level when “New” appears before a popular forum or on your email screen. Some of the game involves receiving emails as the plot develops, as well as new, crucial information surfacing on The World’s Board. (Look out for emails challenging you to a strange game of Tag.) The online game world looks very familiar with a bunch of characters wandering around the game’s towns, with the ubiquitous balloon icons talking typical “trash” to each other, even criticizing “newbies“.
Combat grippingly called for surprisingly strategic decision-making to succeed, not related to the usual attack or defend choices. Do you go for experience and upgrade your character or try for some special equipment or a Virus Core, vital to Gate Hacking? The innovative control of other party members became second nature to us after some practice. The game rewards a player taking chances, like entering a Field or Dungeon rated 5 levels above the player’s current level. On the other hand, the game scoffed at players entering areas much lower rated the their current level, by awarding negligible experience points for victory.
Dot Hack takes progress reports to a new level, by slowly unlocking books that contain much in the way of statistics and information. There’s even a monster compendium with tips for defeating them.
Some might complain about the minimal “Save Game” ability, but we thrived on it. You explore a very hostile cyberspace environment without the facility to save. Only in a server-hosting town is saving possible at the local Recorder. We may be a solitary voice in the Wilderness, but we like this throwback to the good old RPG days. Those of you old enough to remember the Wizardry series, may recall those fingernail-biting multi-combat treks back to the Castle just to save the game. In case you’re really stuck deep in a dungeon, a common item will teleport you to the outdoor field, from where you can simply gate back to town from the command menu.
Many pieces of equipment come with distinctive powerful attack, healing, and status skills, essential to combat dominance. The player must tradeoff whether to equip something that will raise defense or offense or something less vigorous that lets you use a powerful skill. Trading is the most successful way to upgrade equipment.
In a first, Dot Hack comes with a 45 minute anime video. This gives some great background on what’s going on in The World, as well as provide clues for completing the game. In a nice twist, voiceovers for game speech can be set for Japanese or English presentation. Listening to the authentic Japanese voices really keeps you glued to the game.
Though some may scoff at what follows as meaningless, we liked the game’s unlocking of some nifty new “toys” to like, some only available when the game is cleared. You can unlock many different background music play lists. Tired of creepy tunes, just switch to something more upbeat, or futuristic. Just like real world gamers, who constantly change their desktop wallpaper, new and different wallpapers are unlocked along the way. Some are concept art of characters, while others are full blown anime renditions of the characters. This makes for great fun, and seems to pump additional energy into the game. As you progress over a dozen special cut scenes or movies will become viewable after defeating the game.
Though Dot Hack’s extras and new wrinkles enhance the RPG game experience, much of the gameplay will ring true to those who enjoy RPG‘s. Expect plenty of exploration in a huge 3D world, frequent monster combat, tons of treasure to earn and discover, upgrading your character’s weapons and armor, and needing to level before tackling pivotal story dungeons. The status screens for the characters and all equipment are well laid out and easy to grasp.
Time for Completion
Game length in hours always concerns many purchasers. A short RPG normally takes a lot of flack, and many online are asking about Dot Hack‘s time for completion. (Some have questioned whether Bandai should have released a single 80 hour game for $50, rather than four 20-hour games for $200 for a single story. This matter is beyond the scope of this review, but our high opinion of this game as a standalone is obvious.) Our experience, playing the plot without doing side quests or extra exploration, is in the 12 to 15-hour range. Players side-questing and extensively exploring, aside from the main plot, can expect to spend 25 hours to complete the game. You can even continue to advance your character, after game completion, to get a jump start on Part 2 due in May. In the next game, your character can be imported from Part 1.
Furthermore, imagine trying to explore every nook and cranny of the fields and dungeons accessible by a large number of 3-word combinations. Doing that would put the game in the 50-hour range, if not more. However, at a certain point, new items dry up, and a single experience point is earned for any defeated monster, no matter how tough.
Shortcomings
While, as is evident above, there is much to recommend in Dot Hack, certain concerns to varying degrees deserve mention.
From the “Why oh why did they leave this out?“ File. Pregame game board traffic and information about the Japanese version released months ago had many salivating for replaying the game in “parody” mode. This mode apparently converted all Dot Hack’s game world characters into satirical comedians. Sorry to say, this highly-anticipated feature is missing from the version released here.
The game requires massive amounts of button pressing. Every item or treasure uncovered from combat victories or exploration (opening chests, searching expired adventure remains, collecting food for Grunty’s, as examples) must be confirmed with a button press. When there could be 50-100 such occurrences in a single dungeon or field, over the course of the game, finger cramps seem inevitable. Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance also required lots of bashing for buried treasure and chests, but the items literally flew into your inventory, a much better way to handle this.
The manual is woefully terse and lacking in some crucial information and guidance. While the ingame tutorials fill in many of the gaps, one extremely important gameplay feature is missing from both the manual and tutorials – instructions on control your characters directly during combat.
Final Word
We got a kick out of Dot Hack. The feeling of “just one more dungeon” dominated our lives for the 3 days to completion. The engaging environment held our attention without much effort. The strategic nature of combat, plus the convoluted plot kept us going for hours on end. The constant unlocking of both frivolous and important gameplay features created a “what’s next” anticipation. Now, if I could only read Japanese better, Dot Hack Part 2 is already out in Japan!
Final Grade: B
Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana is NIS America’s first published title not to be developed by Nippon Ichi. Instead, Atelier Iris was created by Japanese developer, Gust. Even though Nippon Ichi did not develop the title, it still features a similar look and feel as some of their previous releases. So how does Atelier Iris compare to other Nippon Ichi titles? Well, read on to find out.
The story of Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana follows a relatively young inexperienced alchemist by the name of Klein. While the art of alchemy used to be fairly common, it seems to be have become nearly extinct. The alchemists of the past are said to be able to use the powers of the great mana spirits to create powerful magic items. With the help of the spirits, Klein must resurrect the ancient arts of alchemy and use it to save his friends and defeat the evil that threatens the world!
As an alchemist, Klein is a very unique character with his own weapons and abilities. While Klein travels through dungeons, he is able to use his cane to extract elements from the environments. For example, if he uses his cane on say…. a barrel, he will then extract a small amount of stone and wood elements. A second example is when Klein uses his cane on a bush, he will extract some water and wood elements. In order to pull off most of Klein’s abilities, you must first extract enough elements to use them. However, in order to use his abilities, Klein must first have a mana spirit.
Mana spirits are one of the main things that make Klein such a threat to his enemies. These spirits are what make it possible for Klein to produce different mana items. Mana have two types of health bars, one that shows their amount of energy and another that shows the friendship level that they have with Klein. When a mana creates an item, their energy bar will begin to decrease. The more items created, the lower their energy will become and the higher chance that they will be unsuccessful at creating mana items. Also, the more stressful work you put on a mana, the more its friendship level will drop. However, Klein is able to give his mana gifts that will not only raise their friendship level but it will also raise their energy. Of course, if these two indicators are high, the better the item creation success rate and the better chance that they will create an extra item or two.
While Klein is the main mana user, it is also possible for other characters to get some use from them, because each character is able to equip one of the different mana that Klein acquires. When a character equips a mana, that character will receive certain stat bonuses. For the most part, each mana will give characters different stat bonuses, but of course, any bonus is helpful. It is also possible to get the most out of your mana by making them go through a metamorphosis. This metamorphosis can be done by gathering aroma material, which will then transform your mana into much more powerful spirits.
Unlike previous games released by NISA, Atelier Iris features a turn-based combat system. The combat is done in 2-D, and features your characters on the right side and the enemies on the left side. During battle, your team can only consist of three of your party members, but it is possible to switch characters in and out of battle. However, if you switch a character in or out of combat this will remove that individual’s turn. Still, characters who don’t actually take place in combat will still receive about half of the experience points as the ones who actually do the fighting. I’ve always loved when RPGs do something like this because, well… let’s face it, there are always a few characters that gamers often won’t use. But if those characters receive experience too, then it makes it much easier should the need to use that character arise. Plus, I always like to keep my characters relatively close in levels.
As characters gain levels, they will occasionally be rewarded by unlocking new abilities. However, every time a character gains a level they will receive a few points to distribute toward upgrading their skills. In each level, a character normally gains three of these points, and once they distribute the required amount of points toward a skill, it will then gain a level. There are a few different ability types, including those that are unique to each character and some defensive skills.
While Klein and the rest of your characters are able to pull off abilities during combat, it is also possible to pull some off while traveling through dungeons. Aside from the ability to use his cane to extract elements, Klein is also able to use a destruction blast, which consists of launching a fireball to destroy certain barriers. These abilities are used by using the R1 and L1 buttons to switch through a dial located at the top left of the screen. There are several choices that Klein can use, including checking the current mission objective to summoning more monsters for random battles.
Aside from the actual storyline, Atelier Iris is one of those games that features some extra things to keep gamers occupied for long periods of time. Throughout the game there are several areas where you can find certain items and synthesize them to create some sort of material. An example of this is a bar that is found early on in the game. The bartender informs you that in order to help him create something to please his customers, he will need certain items that he can synthesize to make something even better. There are also weapon shops that allow for weapon synthesizing, but these seem a little more rare than the actual item synthesizing locations. Of course, these synthesizing sidequests add a lot more gameplay, but they also lead to a lot of backtracking and tend to become rather boring, which will more than likely turn many gamers away.
As for graphics, this is one of the weakest areas of Atelier Iris. The character designs are fairly decent looking, but there really isn’t a lot of detail. Still, the characters and designs of the towns and so on seem to fit well with the overall look of the game. Also, traveling around the world map isn’t very impressive looking and is kind of plain and, well… boring! It should also be noted that most of the enemies seem to be constantly used over and over with repetitive designs. Rather than battling new enemies, much of the game you will face the same enemies but with a slightly altered appearance.
The overall sound of the game is one area that I have mixed feelings about. While the game features a pretty strong soundtrack and, for the most part, some good voice work, it still has its share of problems. The biggest problem is that occasionally during some voice acting the sound will completely cut out, or at other times it will begin to skip. It is too bad because I generally liked most of the voice actors.
Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana suffers from some minor problems, such as some dated graphics and the occasional glitch in sound, but by no means is it a bad game. If you can get past these small problems, chances are you will find another good title released from NIS America. With its unique sense of humor and style, Atelier Iris will more than likely appeal to fans of previous Nippon Ichi titles.
Final Verdict: 75%
