How do I get into this series?

How do I get into this series?
Which games are the best ones and where do I start?

...

if you can't read japanese, start at iris and work your way up in linear order. all the games are trilogies except mana khemia, so it would be Iris 1-3, then Mana Khemia 1 and 2, then the arland trilogy, followed by the dusk trilogy, and finally the still on-going mysterious trilogy.

best ones are subjective. mana khemia is generally liked, meruru probably has the most balanced gameplay. everything else is really subjective; i'd say totori has the best characters, and ayesha has the best music.

Do the games have good stories or is it lowkey yuribait

No.

Thanks mate.
I'll keep that in mind.

They're more like slice of life with interesting worlds.

to both?

Atelier Sophie and ONLY Atelier Sophie.

The problem with the Arland series is that the developers are incapable of explaining the system to new players. Atelier Sophie ditches most of ridiculous demands and helps educate new players through hands on experience, without a time limit on gathering items and crafting.

GUST is one of the worst developers on Earth. Generic everything. After Koei Tecmo received the license, the prices on the games have remained high.

except rorona spends atleast 3~5 game months explaining everything as you get then, as does ayesha. Every new thing gets explained, unless you want them to explain it to the most minute detail, which takes away any joy in crafting and finding new shit on your own. Also there's nothing ridiculous about any of the quests in any of the games unless you're going for true end right off the bat

They have pretty simple stories with lots of SOL. Everyone plays them for gameplay and characters anyway.

Do people ignore all the old games in the series or something?

I thought /jp/ was pretty crazy about atelier before rorona came out.

This. A lot of the fun is actually figuring stuff out yourself and it gives you more then enough help getting started there. What the fuck, if you want every last little bit of mystery and exploration and experimentation sucked out go to fucking gamefaqs or something.

I would suggest starting with either Atelier Rorona Plus, or with Mana Khemia. That should give you a good idea of the game system and get used to the time limits/crafting concept. Between the two, Atelier Rorona has a poor main character and dumps a ton of tutorial logs on you right at the beginning, while Mana Khemia barely explains much and assumes you are just going to stumble through enough Game Overs in order to figure things out.

From there, just play in release order. That is: Mana Khemia, Mana Khemia 2, Atelier Rorona Plus, Atelier Totori Plus, Atelier Meruru Plus, and then so on. You'd probably want to stick with the Plus versions of the Atelier games, which are generally more complete and (in the case of early ones) a better revision.

The series apparently goes to shit at some point, turning into a collecting JRPG with no time limits, but I've not played the full series to tell where that happened.

>guide for /vitagen/

It's more the fact that theyre jp only, aswell as just old now, still very good games

>playing a spin off before the main series

OP will be expecting a jrpg with minor crafting and get a crafting game with SoL on the side instead.

good plots? not really. good individual character stories? they're alright, i guess. the writing is your standard anime affair but it's more grounded and natural since the characters themselves are less dark lord resurrected and more chef, or botanist, or shopkeeper. either scenario could be interesting or boring depending on what you like and don't like. yuribait is definitely there, actual yuri is dependent on how tight your yurigoggles are on.

>Atelier Sophie ditches most of ridiculous demands and helps educate new players through hands on experience

and in exchange you lose a lot of what made the games (or at least, arland) unique in the first place. the time limit helped to keep the player on track and challenged the player to progress at a quick enough pace that the time limit didnt run out. admittedly they were rather strict with rorona's time limit, but totori onwards smoothed things out very well, and the games after that continued to improve it. having no time limit eventually makes the game boring as the player feels no need to care about the pace at which they're going through the game.

and at the very least, the combination of a time limit coupled with numerous slice of life elements that have small windows of opportunity to trigger allows for a lot more replayability (assuming you're not aiming for 100% on the first run, which i never advocate for).

>started playing Iris via emulation
>going to want to play others
>finally going to get a ps3 I guess
They worth getting an old console for?

minor lag aside i prefer the vita versions just for portability. But either will work, and both should be fairly cheap nowadays. Rorona's going to feel pretty different from iris though

>Rorona's going to feel pretty different from iris though
Honestly Im just looking to weeb out. Game mechanics i'll deal with when I get there. Do you think I'll have trouble finding the games at a decent price?

they frequently go on discount in PSstore, if you're looking for physical copies though im sure theres plenty of used ones out there, though you run into the risk of just how "used" they are.

if you don't mind piracy, you could get a hackable Vita and pirate those games. it's probably easier than finding a hackable ps3, and might be more expensive due to the ridiculous price of the memory cards. whichever one is cheaper, go for that.

or go for a ps3 if youre gonna buy the games. you open yourself up to the entire ps3 library too, which is much stronger compared to the Vita

Oh they have them digitally? Thats fine. I have absolutely no experience with consoles since the ps2 era. Thanks

Slice of Life elements were the worst part of Rorona, though. The main character was unlikeable, the way most others treated her was unbelievable, and 90% of the gameplay was devoted to going out, fighting battles, collecting components, and crafting items. You are playing for the gameplay, right?

Also, the high school setting in Mana Khemia is fairly close enough to what you get from the Atelier series in general.

you're not wrong, im just saying MK is largely a jrpg with some crafting tacked on, its got a solid plot that advances each chapter, the "time limit" barely exists at all to the point that outside i think maybe 2 assignments, youll hit all your free periods easily.

Then you hit Rorona where crafting is 90% of the game, you have time limits within time limits, and the "plot" is barely there.

Im just saying that going from MK to rorona will feel like a major shift in play style, MK should just be its own thing, that's why its a spin off. and to not go in expecting anything but better gameplay from MK2, man that was awful

I couldn't get into Sophie because everything about the combat is so visually displeasing compared to the last Atelier I played (E&L).

They're all yuribait except Escha and Logy which is heterobait.

Combat in Sophie really was complete trash.

Is the psp version of mana khemia any good?

No, its awful, dont touch it

I had a couple of the PS2 games. They were pretty damn boring.

I played it from memory and didn't have any slowdown/loading issues, I can't speak for from disc though.

Yeah I'm definitely gonna think twice before buying Firis unless they either do some major reworking or simply go back to the Dusk system.

Sophie has ugly interface, models, animations, target aims, it's really no fun at all. A big whopping shame because Escha and Logy had some of the most fun combat I've seen in a JRPG in a long time.