บทวิจารณ์ล่าสุดโดย iriyap

They uncensored the game, you can buy it now.

Create an empty text file in the game's folder and rename it to Minigame.dat to unlock all removed content. Make sure you're changing the "txt" extension to "dat", your game folder should look like this[i.imgur.com].

Atelier Lulua is the fourth game in the Arland subseries and a love letter to Arland fans. You play as Lulua, the daughter of Rorona, and a good chunk of the game will be spent revisiting past locations and catching up with the previous three protagonists and their friends. There are quite a few returning characters, so playing the original trilogy first is recommended if you don't want to feel lost.

However, gameplay wise this is essentially Lydie & Suelle 2, for all intents and purposes Lulua is just a Mysterious game with Arland characters, with the mechanics being particularly close to Lydie & Suelle (which came before Lulua). There are no time limits or missables of any kind, even noticeboard requests will never expire. There's a couple of time sensitive events but they will cycle back each year.

The cast is great, there are 10 playable characters, 5 new ones, 5 returning. Lulua and Eva are great leads and have excellent chemistry. The dudes are very shoujo manga style, but again good picks, I especially liked the illusionist. However, the returning characters got a bit sidelined. Piana is the only one with any screentime, being Lulua's mentor. Totori and Meruru are DLC characters and join shortly after being introduced in the story, but don't appear in any cutscenes or events outside of their towns. And Rorona and Sterk join quite late (chapter 7). Disappointingly, Cordelia doesn't make an appearance, despite becoming the chancellor of Arland, perhaps they couldn't get her VA to reprise the role. Instead you get to meet some other secondary characters like Keina, Lionela and Mimi, each with a decent number of scenes.

The story is largely character driven, you get some minor goals such as renew mom's atelier license, figure out your life goal, investigate ancient high tech ruins etc, but those largely serve as excuses to get characters together and have them bounce off each other. The writing is overall very enjoyable, and the humor is more witty instead of just being anime slapstick. All of the game's dialog is fully voiced in Japanese, but there's no English dubbing at all, unlike the original Arland trilogy.

This time around there are three town hubs instead of just one, Arklys (Lulua's hometown), Arls (from Atelier Meruru) and Arland (from Atelier Rorona). Once unlocked you can instantly fast travel between them and your atelier will follow suit, being a wagon pulled by horses. The rest of the world consists of numerous small locations connected by routes on the world map, not unlike Atelier Sophie.

The combat is mostly the same as in Lydie & Suelle, it's a turn-based system with a party of 3 active and 2 support characters. The support characters don't get their own turns but can execute powerful follow up moves based on the front row characters' actions. The only new gimmick here is the interrupt system. The alchemists in your party have an extra item slot, and once their interrupt gauge is full, you can press a button combination to interrupt anyone's turn and use that item without wasting its charges (similar to Ryza's core crystal system). Of course, you can also use items normally but that will consume their charges. Of note, non-alchemist characters can't use any items at all and will have to rely solely on their skills. The weapon core system from L&S is back as well except you don't have to fuse/unfuse them with weapons anymore, it's just a separate equipment slot now called symbols, basically like a third accessory but with weapon related effects and traits.

The alchemy doesn't have a mini-game like in Mysterious, instead each effect gauge is a pair of elements that cancel out each other. For example, the damage effect on the basic bomb requires fire element materials to build up while ice based ones will make it go down. If the main effect gauge goes into the negative, the synthesis fails and you're left with ashes. Essentially the whole thing boils down to balancing multiple elemental gauges. The materials you gather all have static elemental values with no RNG, but the items you craft yourself can be given elemental boosts via awakened effects. The awakened effects can even change the category of an item, allowing for some 4D chess plays where you e.g. add (vapor) to an ingot so that it can be used a couple more times during equipment creation for even more stat boosts.

Later on you also unlock enhancing agents, letting you swap elemental values around or give them an extra boost, not unlike the paints in L&S. Trait inheritance is similar to the original Arland trilogy, there's a trait point (TP) system where each trait has a TP cost and the number of TP you can use per each synthesis is tied to your alchemy level and can also be increased by adding materials with TP boosting traits. Apart from that, there's a nice quality-of-life feature allowing you to synthesize multiple copies of the same item at once (very useful for bombs early on), however no traits will be inherited this way. Item duping and refills are unlocked halfway through, as is tradition.

The recipe ideas from Mysterious are back in the form of alchemy riddles. You have a book that asks you to do various things like gather this material, fight this enemy, craft this item, visit this area etc, but the hints are usually vague instead of telling you exactly what to do. The riddles unlock not only recipes but also gathering areas and sometimes combat abilities. Some of recipes are unlocked by finding or purchasing alchemy books, but the majority still come from the riddles. The gathering tools (first introduced in Firis) are here as well, you get a fishing rod, bug net, fairy sack (for collecting fruit), pickaxe, mining bomb etc. The fishing mini-game has sadly been removed though, the process is now automated.

Challenge wise, the game is much harder than the Ryza games and a bit harder than the Mysterious trilogy. It starts off easy, but eventually ramps up and the final set of bosses hit very hard. You absolutely can't ignore traits, and quality matters a lot as it boosts all of your stats and greatly increases item effectiveness.

Nitpicks wise, party members don't scale to your level when joining the party, so some of them will be 5 levels above you, some 10 levels below you (especially the latecomers). The friendship point grind is even worse than Lydie & Suelle and if you don't rotate party members regularly you'll finish the game with half of the party still being under 50% friendship. Also, the camera behavior is similar to Sophie and Lydie & Suelle. It automatically follows you when you move which can be disorienting and irritating. I personally prefer a completely manual camera like in Firis and Ryza.

The PC port is great, it supports an uncapped framerate and the performance is excellent. I haven't come across any bugs, crashes, graphical glitches or other technical issues. However, the port doesn't offer much in terms of options. The only graphics settings are resolution and full screen/windowed. A gamepad is highly recommended as there's no mouse support. Keyboard only players will have to bind the camera to 4 keyboard keys.

Dragon Star Varnir is definitely one of Compile Heart's better games, featuring a strong art direction, unique setting, great soundtrack and a decent combat system. It's still a pretty low budget game like most of the studio's works, but a very solid package overall. The game was developed under the Galapagos RPG brand, the brand that Compile Heart uses for their more serious games, such as for example Death end re;Quest and Fairy Fencer F. And indeed Dragon Star Varnir is quite similar to those. It's a JRPG/VN hybrid running on the same engine as DERQ and has a lot of the same trappings. And there's also a male protagonist and multiple story paths just like in FFF.

The story revolves around witches and dragons. In this world there are dedicated knight squads hunting down and killing cute witches because... witches are the ones giving birth to dragons, and dragons of all shapes and sizes are already a huge problem in this world. You play as one of such knights. One day you get separated from the rest of your squad, suffer massive injuries, almost die, and long story short you awaken as a man-witch yourself. Now you have to live together with the witches, and try to make sense of their existence as well as your own fate.

There's a dragon fetus inside every witch's womb (and yes, this does somehow include the male protagonist), this is what gives them their magical powers, but also greatly limits their lifespan as the fetus will eventually grow and burst through their stomach killing them in a very violent fashion (not unlike in the Alien movies). Well, either that or they go insane. They have to hunt down dragons and eat their meat to keep their sanity in check, but eating the said meat will also make the fetus grow faster, so it's a zero sum game.

Now, all of this is actually relevant gameplay mechanics wise because there's a soft time limit. Starting from chapter 4 you have to babysit 3 very cute little witches, watch their hunger bar and give them dragon meat as needed. This little sister system is a common point of contention and had ruined the game for some people. Spend too much time outside and they go insane and turn into dragons, feed them too much and they turn into dragons anyway. Mind you, you don't lose the game, you just get a less favorable ending.

But fear not, the time limit is actually not a bad thing at all. First of all, it's incredibly lenient, it's not real time, the hunger bar is simply tied to the distance walked while in dungeons, you can loot and fight as much as you want, just don't run in circles or backtrack too much. Second, the difficulty curve is actually designed with the time limit in mind, so the game can be beaten without any grinding at all, which is a very welcome change of pace in a Compile Heart game. That's not to say the combat is easy, on the contrary it can be quite difficult at times, but making full use of the mechanics will help you win almost any battle. Better put, the combat is more tactical/strategic than "just grind more".

The combat is a standard turn-based system with a party of 3 active and 3 support characters (but support actions are pretty rare and not on the level of Atelier games), you can swap each pair at any time. The main gimmick is the elevation system. Every battle takes place on 3 levels of elevation and everyone is airborne, your party will be riding broomsticks, while the enemies are usually dragons or (rarely) humans with jetpacks. There's no free movement like in other Compile Heart games, you can only move between 3 set positions, which kind of makes the whole gimmick pointless outside of the "wow, that's cool" factor. You can spread out your party so that each witch is on a different level and won't fall victim to the same area-of-effect attack but that's about it.

There are numerous physical and magical attacks you can acquire as well as passive skills, all of which can be equipped like you would equip gear and there's a cost limit (very similar to Evenicle) which allows for some build diversity. But provided you're not playing on easy and/or using overpowered DLC gear (all DLC is just cheats, skip it if you want to actually play the game) you'll want to make a dedicated tank/healer character (stack all defensive passives on her and give her all utility spells such as buffs, debuffs, heals and revives). Having a nigh unkillable tank who can heal/revive each turn while everyone else is spamming the element the boss is weak to will let you kill bosses 20+ levels above you.

Another unique feature is the devour mechanic. It's a lot like Pokémon. There are dozens of cool and diverse dragon enemies in the game and each of them can be devoured, and this is how you get new skills and stat boosts. Bring the enemy's HP down and then use the devour command to finish them off. If successful, the party member will acquire the dragon's core and the abilities within. Yes, you have to do it with every party member. Eventually you get better devour skills (with up to 70% chance of devour at full enemy health), and simply spamming devour can completely trivialize the game's difficulty outside of boss fights (bosses cannot be devoured).

The dungeons are a bit better designed than Compile Heart's usual, although the biome diversity is a bit lacking, it's mostly gloomy forests, deserts/canyons, caves and dilapidated temples. They fit the dark fantasy aesthetic very well, but a little bit more variety wouldn't have hurt. Still, none of the dungeon layouts are outright recycled, everything is unique and you don't ever backtrack to previous dungeons. There's also no annoying key hunts like in say Death end re;Quest.

Content length wise, there are three endings each with a different final chapter depending on your choices and the fate of little sisters. You can also romance any of the party members and they all have a unique epilogue ending. Going straight for the true ending will take you about 20 hours of playtime, I suppose. But completing all events and quests, as well as seeing the other endings and doing the post-game dungeon can bump your playtime up to 50 hours or so.

The PC port is very good, and definitely the best way to experience the game as the PS4 version is censored (in the West) and the Switch version is a big downgrade. The game is running on the same engine as DERQ, aka the Orochi 4 / Mizuchi engine that Compile Heart has been using in their more recent games, but the performance is completely fine here (playing at 1080p@60fps on a 1070 Ti). I haven't encountered any weird issues, bugs or crashes. It supports 1080p and 4K with all non-4K resolutions being up/downscaled from 1080p (yeah, it's a shame if you're a 1440p user).

Ryza 2 is a more traditional Atelier game with most of the story content being purely character events with no big "happenings" while Ryza 1 was the opposite and followed a more typical JRPG plot progression where the party came across various plot twists, fought a number of big threatening monsters (the dragon, the sea monster etc) and there was even a group of antagonistic characters constantly pestering you (Bos and co). I suppose that was all done on purpose with Gust trying to go for a more mainstream appeal with Ryza 1, but in Ryza 2 they went back to their usual formula, aka a slower paced, relaxing game with lots of character events and little to no drama. If you're an older Atelier fan who was disappointed with Ryza 1, then Ryza 2 is still very much worth a try.

The combat has seen improvements too and you can now use your items much more frequently and the tactics level goes up on its own without you having to spend AP on it. But at its core it's still the same ATB system and most of the time you'll be just idling and waiting for your AP and CC to go up so that you can actually do stuff. The battle system is definitely still the weakest part of the Ryza/Secret subseries. It doesn't help that the base difficulty is so low, to the point that hard feels like easy, and you have to beat the game at least once to unlock actually challenging difficulty modes (but at least on PC you can just download a clear data file).

Apart from that, it's a good game that fixes most of the issues with the original. Bigger and better. More party members, more areas to explore, a huge amount of character events (all of them being fully voiced outside of only a couple minor quest chains). If you loved Firis there are a few things borrowed from that game too, such as underwater exploration and a rideable mount. Overall the game feels much more complete than Ryza 1, it has a lot more content and it's a longer game with about 50+ hours needed to reach the ending. And if you still want more, there are two DLC dungeons, one mid-game and one post-game, both have actual story content but unvoiced.

Atelier Lydie & Suelle is the third and final game in the Mysterious subseries, it concludes and wraps ups all the story arcs and plot points started in Atelier Sophie and Atelier Firis.

Design wise this game is the opposite of Firis. Firis had a mixed reception, in part due to its open world survival gameplay, but also because of the initial release being plagued with bugs. So Gust chose to play it very safe with Lydie & Suelle and removed most of the things introduced in Firis, even some of its unquestionable improvements. No more LP, recipe proficiency or time limits, but the sprawling interconnected world with multiple towns is gone too. The game uses a traditional town hub + world map combo with fast travel to isolated fields and dungeons. The paintings work the same way too, it's just another world map screen. Granted the areas are bigger than in Sophie and other older Atelier games but nowhere as big as in Firis or Ryza. And the only biome variety is in the paintings, the "regular" locations are pretty much all grassy fields and forest clearings.

The setting and characters have a very shoujo manga feel to them. You play as a duo of extra cute twins living in the capital city of Adalet (not-France) and the story is very straightforward, Lydie and Suelle want to make their atelier the greatest in the country. This is done by participating in the atelier ranking system and competing with other ateliers. Each chapter is very formulaic, you complete a series of chores to raise your reputation, then take a rank up exam, which is another chore, and once your rank goes up you're given a new mysterious painting to explore as your reward. The paintings are usually small self-contained stories. E.g. in the volcano painting you have to protect a village from a fire dragon. The writing is hit or miss and very heavy on comedy and anime humor, the game has very few serious moments, and some of the characters definitely feel flanderized and reduced to 1-2 gags (I'm looking at you, Liane).

Being the final game in the trilogy there are a lot of returning characters. Sophie, Plachta, Firis, Liane, Ilmeria, Pamela, the Weissberg family, Corneria, Luard etc all return and their story arcs get very satisfying conclusions. The game is overall rife with references and callbacks to numerous things from the previous two games, which fans will greatly appreciate. However, the party is pretty small this time around, there are only 6 party members not counting the twins and the only playable returning characters are Sophie, Firis and Ilmeria. While Plachta, Corneria, Fritz, Liane and Drossel are sadly not playable. And yes, the item registration is back thanks to Corneria moving her shop to Adalet.

The combat system is pretty interesting and uses a party of 3 active and 3 support characters. Support characters don't get their own turns but can execute very strong follow up moves depending on the front row character's actions. For example, let's say you make a front row character paired up with Firis throw a bomb that does multiple kinds of elemental damage, Firis will immediately follow up with a series of devastating elemental attacks racking up thousands of damage. And you can also switch between each pair at any time. Funnily enough, all playable characters but one are alchemists, so frequent item use is still greatly encouraged, although the skills are much more useful than in Firis, and it's possible to make end game builds that are all about skill spam.

The alchemy here uses a very elaborate catalyst system, the base grid is almost entirely worthless and you're forced to use a catalyst for most of your crafting. Each catalyst has its own grid size + various bonuses and penalties, and catalysts are necessary for trait inheritance. It all sounds fine in theory but the crafting difficulty curve is very strange. Early game you're confused by dozens of complex looking catalysts and it's hard to make anything half-decent, but then once you can craft (and dupe) rubies you just ignore the whole system and use the ruby, which is the best catalyst, for everything. And around the same time you also unlock enhancing agents which allow you to recolor ingredients on the fly greatly simplifying the process of filling up effect gauges. The recipe idea system is back again but basically acts the same as in Sophie, so it's usually very obvious what you need to do to unlock a recipe.

The post-game content is probably the best in the trilogy, with numerous high level areas and many very powerful bosses. Crafting the best possible equipment and items to take on all the crazy challenges can be a lot of fun.

Sadly, there's also a number of questionable design choices with some of them being quality-of-life downgrades compared to Firis:
- No full map display (was a thing in Firis). It's mini-map only now like Sophie, except Sophie had tiny locations but some of the areas in L&S are big and labyrinthine and hard to navigate with only the small mini-map circle.
- Slow movement speed, even with the sprint button. Apparently this was done to sell the Spiked Boots DLC (the original release was infamous for a lot of overpriced DLC). Granted, all DLC is free in the DX version but you can't craft the best version of boots until mid-late game.
- The camera behavior was reverted to how it was in Sophie, meaning the camera auto-follows you when you walk, making it hard to keep track of your surroundings as it keeps auto-correcting. I'm not sure how popular this camera style was with the fans, but Ryza games went back to Firis's behavior.
- Most alternate outfits are just asset flips from Sophie. E.g. Firis gets Sophie's second outfit, Lucia gets Tess's outfit, Ilmeria gets Corneria's outfit, Sophie herself gets Plachta's outfit and so on. Very lazy.
- No way to skip the credits (you could in Firis). You literally have to wait 6 minutes every time you want to watch an ending and the game has 5. I ended up just deleting the credits video file.

This is a post-Ryza PC port, so there are no complaints here, everything just works. There are remappable keyboard controls, mouse support, graphics settings, uncapped framerate. Haven't had any crashes or other technical issues. The performance and system requirements should be about on par with Atelier Ryza.

- All DLC is already included. 2 extra party members, 7 outfits, many additional recipes, high-level post-game areas from Atelier Firis, Blue Reflection and Nights of Azure 2.
- Nelke's painting. Collecting 9 painting scraps from 9 main paintings will unlock a new painting where you travel to Nelke's world. All cutscenes are fully voiced.
- Clicking the left stick while in-combat allows you to adjust the combat speed between 1.0x, 1.5x and 2.0x.
- Clicking the left stick outside of combat launches photo mode (exact same functionality as in Ryza). You can move the camera around, spawn and pose party members, NPCs and enemies.
- Digital artbook with a couple hundred high quality artworks and concept art pieces.

Atelier Firis is the second game in the Mysterious subseries and the most ambitious take on the Atelier formula yet. It's very different from every Atelier game that came before it and ended up being very polarizing in the community. It's an Atelier game set in a massive open world with some survival mechanics and mostly vague goals to encourage exploration and experimentation. If that sounds awesome to you then you'll love the game. The DX version fixes most bugs and issues that plagued the original release so now is actually the best time to finally give Firis a try.

The game's engine is a huge upgrade over previous Atelier games, as Firis was Gust's first true next gen title. The game has a big interconnected world with each area being truly massive. Even Ryza 2's world is nowhere as big as Firis's. There's also underwater exploration, vehicles, as well as numerous gathering tools, e.g. a fishing rod for fishing, a pickaxe for breaking stone and wood logs, a bag for collecting fruit from trees, a lantern and so on. You can also simply use any of your bombs to quickly blow up an ore deposit. A lot of ideas and concepts that are commonplace in modern Atelier games like Ryza 2 were all first introduced here in Firis.

The story starts in an isolated underground town, a young girl named Firis dreams of leaving this dark place and seeing the outside world, yet her parents and the village elder strongly forbid it. Every day she comes to the huge stone door at the entrance and laments her fate. Long story short, Sophie shows up and teaches Firis the basics of alchemy. The parents and the elder agree to let Firis go provided she can pass the alchemy exam in one year, and if she fails she has to come back. Firis's elder sister Liane is sent together with her to ensure this arrangement. Sophie leaves on her merry way, but not before giving Firis an amazing gift, a mobile atelier tent. This tent will be your main base of operations throughout the game as there's no main hub like in other games. Most areas have multiple campfires and you can instantly deploy your atelier near any of them. And yes, there's a time limit of 361 days for the first half of the game. You must acquire at least 3 recommendation letters from licensed alchemists and reach Reisenberg, the city where the exam is to be taken. The time limit is very scary at first, as the time moves very fast, even just walking around will make the clock spin and the sun will go down in only about 5 minutes of real time. Crafting anything also takes 10 to 20 hours on average. But even so, the time limit is a joke, I played largely blind and was able to get all 5 letters in only 130 days. As long as you don't do something really unnatural like excessive grinding you will be fine. And once you pass the exam there's no time limit anymore, you can explore to your heart's content and the game really opens up.

There isn't any big goal in the post-exam half of the game. You have over 20 character event lines to complete, half of them unlocking character endings, but the main heart of the game is its world. There are numerous biomes ranging from canyons and deserts to grassy fields and thick forests to snowy mountains and ice caves. There are many settlements with two of them being large cities. Once you're done with the exam, you can craft a flying broomstick and fly over rivers at the speed of sound. You can build an airship and soar the skies to go to a floating island. You can dive underwater and explore ancient ruins with a scary monster at the bottom of them. You can even build an artificial sun and melt the snow literally terraforming a whole region (but only for a few days). It's an amazing game that lets your imagination run wild.

The combat has been improved since Sophie. The defensive/offensive stances were removed in favor of a new system, when Firis is targeted by an enemy you can let any other party member take a hit for her. You also don't have to pre-plan a whole round in advance like in Sophie, characters act immediately after choosing their actions. Everyone but Firis now also has a second weapon slot, which allows them to double their damage output as well as acquire many more skills. For example, Ilmeria is normally a staff user, but can also equip guns and daggers as off-hand weapons and these will give her unique skills. Although, spamming debuffing items + strong bombs is still the most straightforward way to do battle, especially in the post-exam half of the game where you can make a party of 4 alchemists and be able to use any item on any turn. The alchemy was also streamlined. There's now a catalyst system instead of the customizable cauldrons from Sophie. Basically, some items can be used as a catalyst during the synthesis which will change the grid and allow for various bonuses (as well as penalties). Although not using a catalyst is fine too, the base grid is robust enough.

Sadly, a game of this scope is not a good fit for Gust's annual release schedule and there's a number of poor design choices and half-baked ideas.
- LP aka stamina. LP makes a comeback and this time around it's actually harsh. Every action you take outside of the tent (or a major city) will drain your stamina. Once it reaches 0% you will be knocked out. This means you need to be on a constant look out for campfires.
- Recipe proficiency. Now this was a really awful idea. Basically each item (or a category of items) must be leveled up before you can synthesize a decent copy. This leads to a waste of both resources and time. Thankfully there are tools that can greatly speed up the item XP growth, allowing you to max out an item's level in only 3-4 crafts.
- The recipe ideas are more obtuse than ever, they're outright hidden until you do something random and it will only show a basic hint such as keep gathering this type of ore. But it still won't tell you how many are needed. But thankfully you can simply spend idea points to skip this process in most cases.
- No item duplication. There are item refills (for bombs etc) in the second half of the game, but there's no way to dupe materials whatsoever. Make sure to store your valuable traits in material loops.
- Limited storage. Your base container can only hold 1000 items, but can eventually be upgraded to 4000.
- True fast travel is unlocked very late in the game.

While the content additions are minimal, this version is worth buying for the vastly improved PC port alone. They fixed the broken shadows and ambient occlusion, the draw distance is greatly increased. The performance is much better and the game is very stable. I'm playing at 1080p@75fps on a 1070 Ti with everything on max and my GPU is mostly idling. The only reproducible crash is when you try to draw too much water from Ertona's well and that's an old bug that also happens on consoles. Outside of this one issue the game has never crashed for me. Here are some graphics comparisons between the old and new PC ports (top = old, bottom = new):
Example 1[i.imgur.com]
Example 2[i.imgur.com]

- All DLC is already included. 2 extra party members (each with numerous events and their own endings), 16 outfits for most party members, 2 high level post-game areas.
- 4 new vehicles, craftable in the post-exam half of the game. Notably there's a submarine that allows for much faster underwater movement.
- Clicking the left stick while in-combat allows you to adjust the combat speed between 1.0x, 1.5x and 2.0x.
- Clicking the left stick outside of combat launches photo mode (exact same functionality as in Ryza). You can move the camera around, spawn and pose party members, NPCs and enemies.
- Digital artbook with a couple hundred high quality artworks and concept art pieces.

Atelier Sophie is the first game in the Mysterious subseries and an excellent entry point for newcomers. While Ryza might be more popular in the West, Sophie is the queen in Atelier's country of origin. According to a 2021 Japanese poll[nlab.itmedia.co.jp] Sophie is still the most beloved Atelier game ever and got twice as many votes as Ryza. How did this happen? Is the game really that good? Both yes and no.

Part of the appeal is the low barrier of entry. Sophie was the first modern Atelier game with many quality-of-life improvements, it released on multiple platforms (in fact it was the first Atelier game to come to Steam) and ditched the controversial time limit mechanic (which was often central in previous games). This resulted in a moody, slower paced game that nevertheless has a lot of charm.

The story follows the life of Sophie, a young budding alchemist living in an atelier left by her late grandmother. She lives on the outskirts of a small Christian town somewhere in not-Germany and her daily routine is as mundane as it can be. But one day, after fooling around with her friends, she picks up a random reference book in the atelier, writes down a recipe into it, and the book... comes to life. After taking flight and scaring the life out of Sophie, the book politely introduces herself as Plachta. Plachta doesn't remember much of anything, not even why is she a talking book at all, but she encourages Sophie to keep studying alchemy in earnest. And with every new recipe Sophie writes into Plachta, more and more of Plachta's memories return and the plot gets thicker. Like other Atelier games and most of Gust's catalogue, this is primarily a character driven game, there's no grand tale or epic drama to be found here. There are 8 party members (in addition to Sophie), all of them with a very long chain of quests and events. And other non-playable characters in the town also have their own stories to tell. The character cast is decently varied, you have a depressed clockmaker turned gunslinger, a pious knight templar, a reclusive dollmaker obsessed with his trade, a soft spoken Asian immigrant, a snobbish clothier, an airheaded nun with a heart of gold and so on. All dialog is fully voiced (in Japanese, the English dub only covers a small amount of scenes).

The main gameplay loop revolves around finding "recipe ideas", basically performing actions that would make Sophie go "aha!" and think of a new recipe and thus unlock another item to be synthesized in the alchemy cauldron. Once you unlock enough recipes Plachta regains some of her memories, reveals something important and you move onto the next chapter, and so on. The recipe idea book is generally very easy to understand so you never have to guess on what to do. E.g. it might ask you to gather a certain material, or synthesize an item with a particular effect or trait. Apart from that there's a noticeboard quest system where you can accept time limited requests, completing them will provide you with money and raise your reputation in the town.

The town hub is split into multiple districts which you can instantly fast travel to. There's a day and night system, in addition to a weekly calendar, and different NPCs will be doing different things at different times. E.g. continuing the story of a certain NPC might require talking to them at the church on a weekend. The world itself however is split into dozens of (usually) very small dungeons, and travelling to faraway places drains your stamina although the game is not very punishing about it. There's a number of really cool locations, like an abandoned haunted mansion, an inverted castle inhabited by demons, a foggy forest guarded by fairies, an underground lake, and even a pocket dimension that requires solving a riddle to get into. Overall, the game's environments have a rather melancholic feel to them, which makes them "comfy".

The combat is a standard turn-based affair with a party of 4 characters. The only gimmicks are offensive/defensive stances and the fact that you need to pre-plan your whole turn in advance, i.e. you need to assign all 4 character's actions before the game executes them. The stances are pretty straightforward, defensive gives you a DEF boost, while offensive is an ATK boost. Different stances also result in different support actions (another mainstay of Atelier games). The system is sadly a bit counterintuitive, e.g. logic tells you to put your fragile characters on defensive during a boss fight, but that is wrong, as their support actions will make them tank hits for others and they will end up taking more damage than if they stayed on offensive. So generally speaking, you only use defensive for your dedicated tank.

Now, the alchemy system is one of the coolest in the series. Each ingredient has a Tetris block like shape and you lay them on a grid, each ingredient has a different color and the order you put them in and where will have a big effect on your results. Your cauldron can also be upgraded with many different models, which will increase the grid size, let you flip/rotate the ingredients, improve the effect strength and might also introduce some more gimmicks. It sounds complicated but it's very easy to understand in action.

Graphics wise, you have to keep in mind that this was a crossgen PS3/Vita/PS4 title and the last Atelier game made on the old PS3/Vita engine. The game features incredibly detailed and gorgeous character models, but the environments are fairly simple and look just okay. The soundtrack is excellent and never fails to put you in a good mood.

This is a post-Ryza PC port, so there are no complaints here, everything just works. Compared to the old port of Sophie they added keyboard button prompts and full mouse support, as well as better looking soft shadows. The game is very easy to run, I'm playing at 4K@75fps on a 1070 Ti and my GPU usage is only around 50%. Haven't had any crashes or other technical issues.

- All DLC is already included (but this was true of the original PC version as well). There's a post-game chapter that leads into Atelier Firis, a high difficulty DLC dungeon and many outfits for Plachta.
- Original Attire (a more mature looking outfit for Sophie + a chain of events linked to it). The outfit changes Sophie's look in all UI screens and even some CGs, and all new events are fully voiced (but the only participating characters are Sophie, Monika and Corneria).
- 3 new cauldrons: Teacher (experience boost), Hermit (quality boost), Miraculous (all effects, no time limit).
- You can hold the right trigger to sprint (or set it as a toggle in options) similar to later Atelier games. This stacks with Traveler's Shoes for some truly super sanic speeds.
- Clicking the left stick while in-combat allows you to adjust the combat speed between 1.0x, 1.5x and 2.0x.
- Clicking the left stick outside of combat launches photo mode (exact same functionality as in Ryza). You can move the camera around, spawn and pose party members, NPCs and enemies.
- Digital artbook with a couple hundred high quality artworks and concept art pieces.

Aggelos is a French made indie action platformer/metroidvania and a love letter to the Wonder Boy series, in particular Wonder Boy in Monster World (on Sega Megadrive and Master System). If you've never played a Wonder Boy game, think something like Shovel Knight or Shantae, but set inside a continuous, interconnected world.

The pixel art is very cute and does an excellent job of imitating the 80's/90's Japanese anime games. Many enemies and especially bosses have very large and detailed sprites (like the dragon on the game's cover) but there aren't many frames of animation, which is a shame but does give the game that certain retro look, reminiscent of the Master System games. The music is just okay though, it's all chiptunes, some of them are nice to listen to, others are too low effort and grating.

This is a very classic game and the story is almost non-existent. You save a princess and the king asks you to collect 4 elemental powers and defeat an evil sorcerer. And this is what you're going to do, there aren't any twists (aside from a very small one in the ending). There are several villages with NPC's and shops, 4 large elemental temples that act as dungeons, as well as some other extra areas and lots of landscape and wilderness which connect it all together. The game is indeed a true metroidvania, you unlock various abilities which give you access to new areas and there's an RPG system that lets you grow stronger (armor/weapon upgrades + XP/leveling). There's no map, however, which is certainly unconventional for a metroidvania, but the level design is pretty straightforward, you can fast travel between checkpoints, and you can always ask the court wizard for hints if you're not sure what to do next. There's about 10 bosses in total and the game will take you about 9 hours for 100% completion, or maybe half that time if you just rush it.

The main issue with the game is its balance. Difficulty spikes are common, and the gear and levels are way too important. This results in situations like you really struggling with an area, enemies taking forever to kill and dealing massive damage, but then you buy the next weapon/armor upgrades and now you can just literally facetank the very same enemies, and you'll be taking only 1 pixel of damage. Reminded me of Ys games like Ys Origin.

Another thing, there are no checkpoints in any of the main dungeons. Instead you can unlock shortcuts and then save outside the dungeon once the boss door is open, which adds a bit of Dark Souls like backtracking. To be fair, you can also choose to "continue" when you die, which will respawn you in the same room but your potions won't be restocked and you lose XP and levels for doing this. And it also locks you out of an achievement.

- The English translation is full of embarrassing typos, but the story is minimal so it's not a big deal.
- Poor controller support, no way to rebind mappings, no D-pad support, but everything can be fixed with either Steam's controller configuration (recommended) or third party software like JoyToKey.
- No volume sliders, and as such no way to turn down the music.
- Cloud saves do not work, despite this functionality being listed on the store page.

Aggelos doesn't really break any new ground or bring anything innovative to the table. It's just a solid retro platformer, nothing more, nothing less. It will not wow you, but the visuals are cute and the gameplay is decently challenging and engaging, and it's just a good time.

Shovel Knight is probably overall the best retro throwback platformer on Steam. It's a very polished game, with lots of content, great pixel art and an amazing soundtrack. The controls are smooth, the balance is tight, and the game is a complete joy from start to finish. Just keep in mind that this is an actually challenging game with a level of difficulty similar to actual NES games from the 90's, don't expect a chill game to button mash through.

Treasure Trove is a collection of all four Shovel Knight campaigns, each being roughly 10 hours long. All but Plague of Shadows can also be bought separately as standalone games.

This is the game that started it all. Think DuckTales meets Mega Man. Shovel Knight has a short range melee attack and when jumping he can point his shovel down allowing him to pogo off enemies or obstacles. During the course of the game he also acquires many relics which are essentially Mega Man style weapons. This is a level based platformer where you have to beat each level (and its boss) in one sitting. There are checkpoints used for respawning but the game only saves after beating a boss. Bosses are honestly not that difficult, especially if you spam items, but the platforming can be very challenging and demanding. Oftentimes you're required to execute a very precise sequence, e.g. pogo off these 3 enemies, then jump on that crumbling block, all the while dodging projectiles, over a pit of spikes. Most of the difficulty comes from the knockback mechanic (think Castlevania on the NES), and unlike the other playable characters Shovel Knight has no air recovery options, if you're hit mid-air you will plummet down and probably die instantly.

Honestly, Shovel is probably overall the weakest campaign in this package, it's a very solid platformer for sure but feels pretty basic compared to the expansions. Which is actually not a bad thing as it already was a pretty high bar.

When you first start this campaign you might think that Plague Knight's moveset is bizarre and unwieldy and you'll die a few times in the very first level. But, after coming to grips with the controls and getting a few upgrades it actually becomes very, very fun. Plague Knight has an insane amount of mobility, he can launch himself in any direction in mid-air, quickly covering a lot of distance, he can triple jump and float, he can create up to 4 platforms in the air to help him zig-zag around pretty much any obstacle. And his massive arsenal of fully customizable bombs (you can change casing/powder/fuse etc at any time using a hotkey) allows him to easily shred through bosses.

But ultimately, this was the first expansion pack and it's definitely the most budget one. Plague largely reuses all the same levels and bosses as in Shovel, with only a small number of unique sections added here and there and a couple of new boss fights. It's essentially just a retread but with a higher skill ceiling. The story is lots of fun though, you play as a mad scientist with his own secret lair and minions, and then it turns into a very wholesome romance.

This is probably the smoothest game in this collection. Specter Knight has an amazing and easy to learn moveset, he can wall run/jump and dash attack (basically the same as Bash in Ori, but you can only do it in two diagonal directions). This works on enemies, projectiles and lamps, when you're below an object you dash through it upwards, and vice versa. Specter Knight also has a large arsenal of "curios", including an estus flask like healing item, various projectile attacks, and some more interesting abilities, e.g. creating a clone of himself, slowing down time or even dashing through walls to home onto an enemy. Specter's campaign features all new levels, which are better designed than the base Shovel campaign, both visuals and level design wise. The story is very interesting too, it's a prequel to Shovel, and explains how Specter came to be in service of the Enchantress, how he died and why is he a ghost now.

The only downside is, Specter is way too strong, and the estus mechanic makes him nigh impossible to kill, since simply hitting any enemy including a boss regenerates his "mana" allowing you to spam the estus almost indefinitely. You can face tank and first try every boss fight that doesn't have bottomless pits. And the first armor upgrade allows you to survive spikes and bottomless pits at the cost of some health and mana, further removing challenge.

This is the final and most lavish campaign, which is very fitting for the self-centered buffoon that is King Knight. This is the swan song of the series and the developers tried to put in as many bells and whistles as they could. There's a card game, Joustus, which is its own beast and while it can be ignored completely you might feel left out as the story revolves around it and winning matches is required for unlocking all upgrades. Personally, I didn't have too many problems with the card game, but it can be heavy on RNG, even if you know what you're doing.

As for the platforming gameplay, King Knight's moveset is small at first, he can dash horizontally and if he hits something (anything really, as long as it's not a cushioned wall), he will bounce back and do a ballerina spin which can be used to pogo on enemies and obstacles. This allows for some interesting and challenging platforming, which becomes even more fun as you unlock his other abilities. With some upgrades King can dash vertically as well, suspend himself in a bubble (allowing you to chain multiple dashes), or unleash a powerful combo with a fire sword easily decimating bosses.

The production values are much higher than the other campaigns, there are many completely new bosses and locations, and very little is recycled. This time around the game is split into 4 large worlds Super Mario World style, with many levels being optional or available only through secret exits. The story is once again a prequel where we take control of another villainous character, but unlike Plague and Specter there's no subversion here, King Knight is selfish and evil all the way through, which makes his interactions with other characters incredibly hilarious.

Mystik Belle is an interesting mix of a metroidvania and a point & click adventure game, inspired by classic puzzle platformers such as Dizzy, Slightly Magic, Seymour etc. Yes, those really old games for ZX Spectrum. The author is a talented artist, and the pixel art is really good, and the game overall features pretty high production values for a solo project apparently completed in only a few months. And the chiptune soundtrack is also a joy to listen to.

Mechanically, it's a really simple game, you just spam your projectile attack and stay out of harm's way. As long as you're somewhat decent at action games you shouldn't really have any trouble beating bosses, although some of them do have rather strange hitboxes. But most of the difficulty comes from item puzzles. And oh boy, it's really a challenge. The game has dozens of items, many of them being red herrings. You can only carry 6 items on your person (well, really 5 because you're required to carry a certain item with you at all items) and 14 in the stash (accessed from chests scattered around the game's world). Once you accumulate even more items, you'll have to just drop them on the floor and hope you won't forget where you left them. Puzzle solutions are not always obvious and may require using multiple items at once, while there's only a few warp points in the whole game. All of this can lead to excessive backtracking, as you're running back and forth trying to crack the "moon logic" of the puzzles. I'll admit, I had to consult a guide 2 times, the first time my logic was sound, it's just I was using the item at a wrong spot, the second time I didn't realize I had to investigate a hotspot multiple times to finally be able to grab the item. The game will probably take about 4 hours to beat on your fist playthrough, but there's an achievement for finishing it in under an hour. The map is actually quite small, it just feels big because of lacking fast travel and large character/enemy sprites.

Overall, I recommend the game, but with a caveat. You really have to appreciate classic puzzle/adventure games to have any sort of fun with Mystik Belle. Otherwise, the start/stop progression of getting stuck on a puzzle and then finally solving it may drive you mad. The author is working on a sequel (check out his Twitter), and he's planning to do a whole series with Belle as the main heroine. I'm definitely looking forward to it.