Atelier Escha’s Blundering Retail Debut

We at Neko’s Shiritori have discovered that Atelier Escha has been loaded with genuinely positive reviews which display noticeable enjoyment and fairly assess flaws as well. This is a wonderful sign as the goal of Atelier Escha’s design came to fruition with their promises kept and changes for the better.

Atelier Escha First Impression

Greetings from Neko’s Shiritori! With Spring coming near and the month of March underway, it’s also one of the biggest months for multiple game releases. Thanks to the great staff at Tecmo Koei Europe and Acttil, we had the wonderful opportunity of assessing the game before the general release date. For now, we will hold off on a complete game analysis and leave out strategy specifics as the game is rather vast in information.

Atelier Costume DLC Opinions

Are these newer swimsuits just recolors of the old ones?

I will start off by saying there will be possible spoilers below as I will reference various scenes and endings that show up later in the respective Atelier games.

New Atelier Ayesha Plus DLC has been released. From what we can see, there’s more swimsuits, a white dress theme, and Wilbell in an outfit that Harry would probably wear. We do wonder though, why these outfits? The white dresses look quite nice, so that’s workable, but we feel Tecmo Koei missed a lot of potential designs that have better synergy with the characters and their world environment. Did they forget that Ayesha was supposed to be fundamentally different? Previously we mentioned how the Disney/fantasy theme was pretty cool, but also just as out of place when you consider the characters.

The World of Atelier News

New outfit designs for Atelier Ayesha Plus are out!

We know of three clear things for this Spring 2014: Atelier Escha for PS3 is slated for an English release on March 7 in Europe and March 11 in North America, Atelier Ayesha Plus will release on March 27 for the Playstation Vita in Japan, and Atelier Escha is getting an anime in April.

As clear as the release dates are, what confuses me is actually the marketing. The execution is a bit odd, as the news doesn’t quite match with what is currently available.

Atelier Ayesha Plus Announced!

Happy New Year from Neko’s Shiritori! Hope you all had a great 2013! Time to look forward to what 2014 has in store!

Atelier Ayesha Plus is announced!

Late in December, Tecmo Koei announced Atelier Ayesha Plus to be released on the Playstation Vita in March 2014. This was expected, given the release date patterns of Atelier games recently. The website for Atelier Ayesha Plus can be found here.

Since this announcement is only for the Japanese version, there is no relation to dual audio, as this has nothing to do with any possible NA/EU English release.

My Thoughts on Atelier Escha & Logy’s Anime Announcement

Yesterday there was an announcement of Atelier Escha & Logy being animated. Because Gust was acquired by Tecmo Koei back in 2011, I am not definite on who exactly brought about the anime idea. Since it is Atelier Escha & Logy we are talking about, the decision making must have been very recent and post-acquisition. The Atelier games spawn a long history of games, but only the Arland and Dusk series are mentioned more recently.

My thoughts are also assuming this would be a traditional 12 – 13 episode series because there is no initial indication that it is an original animation video (OVA). Let’s start off with the positives and potential.

Atelier Ayesha Alchemy

Greetings from Neko’s Shiritori once again. Amoirsp here decided to play more Atelier Ayesha, delving into the deepest of available alchemy while finding random amusing things along with it.

This post is to emphasize a little bit more about the item alchemy system. I’ve compiled a few conclusions from it. Most of this will be related to bomb item damage because equipment and support item perfection is already well known.

Atelier Ayesha DLC

I’m not certain if other people who have played Atelier Ayesha have noticed this but it’s fairly clear that for DLC releases, Tecmo Koei has timed it to match how the Japanese release went. Here’s a short summary of dates to paint a picture.
In Japan…

• June 28, 2012: Atelier Ayesha first edition releases.
• July 4, 2012: Atelier Ayesha BGM pack releases. This includes many (1600+) songs of previous GUST games. Priced at 300 yen.
• July 31, 2012: Cow Paradise DLC releases. Free.
• September 9, 2012: Hidden Paradise DLC. Priced at 150 yen. Marion and Odelia character DLC. Priced at 350 yen.

I’m not certain about swimsuit DLC in Japan since they were partly exclusives. It appears to also be a September 9, 2012 release, specifically for Ayesha and Linca. Wilbell’s swimsuit release appeared to be a magazine promotional material, and later implemented on October 4, 2012. Either way, the swimsuit DLC was priced at 300 yen.

My Thoughts on Atelier Totori Plus and Tecmo Koei’s Lack of Promotion

First I’ll start by saying that I do not have details of how the game industry works or how companies balance out their marketing and other costs altogether. This is just mere opinion from what I have seen.

Most of my opinions somewhat coincide with other news sources and commentary. Basically I’m rather outraged at the lack of promotion, and the behavior of the company seems really strange, almost as if they want the Atelier series to die or fail, even if that’s likely nowhere near their intentions. Then, I’m further confused by further promises of future Atelier games having Japanese voices, when they seem to not want to or cannot acquire or implement the rights into Atelier Ayesha, which they actually have right now fully released. (It’s easier to promise for future games when said future game is still under development).

I will primarily mention two games: Atelier games, and Tecmo Koei “core” games.

I will primarily mention three studios: GUST, the Japanese company that made all the Atelier games. Tecmo Koei, whom acquired GUST in late 2011. NIS America, which does the localization of Atelier and other niche games in English.

Atelier Ayesha Review

After a full week of playing this alchemy game, I decided to do a review.

Personally, before this game came out, I only heard about it via word of mouth from another person who mentioned it would come out March 5. I vaguely remembered this, but the point is that I was a bit peeved on the extreme lack of promotional material on this game. I was only able to get a good sense that this game would be decent from intuition as well as viewing Atelier Ayesha streams on the day 1 release.

I’m not much of a hardcore gamer. I looked at my handed down PS3 and thought it’d be nice to have one solid Japanese RPG game, but only one, since I basically have no PS3 games of my own. At first I was extremely bitter about the partial dub of the release, and it wasn’t until I thought about the business side of things where the decision made more sense due to the March 5 deadline as well as the transition phase from Tecmo Koei’s acquisition. Basically, I generally dislike paying full price on a game, especially when I feel like the game was over-glorified, not worth the hype, or riddled with problems on release, which feels like happens more often nowadays.