Atelier Sophie
Seeing this series improve from a solid foundation further and further was nice but around Shallie it started to crack and Sophie is just plain bad. Its so boring!
There's not any stakes in Atelier Sophie nor is there much of a major goal to work towards once you turn the book Plachta into a doll. Its very fluffy anime slice of life but most of the characters don't have much to them. There's no looming threat of failure like in the Atelier Arland games or a dying world like in the Atelier Dusk games.
My biggest issue though is that progression is very frustratingly vague and trial & error-y. You might get a goal to make a particular item, but that item requires an ingredient made in a recipe you don't have, where you don't even know how to get said recipe, and the only thing you can do is grind out cutscenes in the hopes of getting a new location unlocked or something. You sometimes get ideas for new recipes from betting certain enemies, getting certain enemies to use certain skills, being in the right place at the right time, examining an object that's not special or pointed out to you in any particular way. It makes getting anywhere in this game a chore of trial and error. So there's no stakes, progression is a chore, the combat system is inferior to the previous games' combat system where you could control when characters use support skills
And beyond that the alchemy system tbh I just don't really understand very well. You put items down on a grid to try and light up like colors for that particular ingredient on the grid in order to strengthen the effects of the particular material but the grids are sometimes small enough to where they'll cover each other and you'll lose some of the effects of the material. In the older games it was more a matter of using the right material at the right time, not a matter of placement, and you could bonuses on the materials cleverly to maximise a material's effectiveness and I think that system was just a lot more fun and rewarding
rather than playing alchemy tetris
maybe its not that the alchemy system is bad I just don't care for it
