The setup: Young, moody sword-wielder, Edge, and his alchemist-babe comrade, Iris, need to collect the gems in order to assemble a legendary, wish-granting tome. It's a fairly generic story-mold of heroes, guilds and quests that you've likely been poured into before, full of tasks and side-tasks -- enough to keep players busy (going back and forth between non-player characters, in lieu of outlining the primary goals in some more coherent fashion), and mixed in with one or two arguably enjoyable mechanics that can't offset the 1990s-era graphics and the lingering, overall feel that one may have played this game, or something awfully like it, about fifteen times in past fantasy RPGs.
The good news is that the all-important personality element is here in acceptable force: Iris' visual character and voice-acting bring goofy, endearing charm while the eventual addition of a third party-member only improves the back-and-forth character chatter -- it may hold your interest in the game as long as the actual, pertinent quests do, if not longer. There's also a dorky/satisfying alchemy/item-creation scheme that steals the show in much the same way that certain character-creation systems do in other less-than-stellar games out there.
Furthermore, in AI3's various "alterworlds" -- in-game geekspeak for "dungeons" -- there is a virtual clock ticking: Due to the inconvenient weirdnesses of transdimensional adventuring, you'll be summarily yanked from far afield and back to the hub city, after a certain amount of time has passed: Smacking down enemies quickly, however, adds to the time you can spend in the alterworld (as does the possession of certain items). The scheme creates a strangely-appealing, kill-or-be-removed immediacy to the alterworld proceedings: Find and/or fight whatever-it-is at a rapid hike, or get summarily hooked offstage like a bombing Vaudeville act. Actually, it's probably the coolest element of the whole game.
Ultimately, even the sometimes-amusing dialogue and charm of the whole outing can't really offset the stark fact of the linear, diminutive, repetitive nature of the endless quests -- most of which are not merely non-critical, but, in fact, oddly superfluous. Any item-creation or "leveling" you might need to do, you'll find that you could do outside the constraints of this-or-that "quest."
If you're a newcomer to the "J-RPG" scene, there is some layman-level charm to found here (in fact, go back and play the previous Atelier Iris games, while you're at it): If you're even remotely experienced, on the other hand, you've already been tried by fire in more fleshed-out, sophisticated, up-to-date games than this.
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
