Nelke & The Legendary Alchemists: Ateliers Of The New World Review (PS4)

It's time to enter the world of Atelier once again.  That means taking the role of a cute, little girl in a cute, little world to fight cute, little monsters and...build cute, little cities?  This is Nelke & The Legendary Alchemists: Ateliers Of The New World.

Nelke & The Legendary Alchemists is a different kind of Atelier game.  You have all the things that define an Atelier game.  A cute protagonist, a cute soundtrack, and cute monsters, are all present and accounted for.  As mentioned above, however, this one adds a city-building element.  In fact, the city-building is the main part of the game.

This stylish girl is Nelke, our cute, little protagonist.

In true Atelier form, there's plenty of time management.  In other words, you have to get your butt in gear if you want to win.  Your father sets Tasks you MUST do within a set length of time or it's game over.  It doesn't matter how happy your people are, if you screw up at ANY point it's the end of the game, no questions asked.  The game isn't particularly hard for Atelier veterans, but if you are new to the series, this game will tear you a new butthole.  And the game over screen is pretty dark.

Make sure to keep an eye on those objectives or you'll be up Turd Creek.

What did they do?  Kill the poor girl?

The game is played in turns that span a whole week.  Each week is composed of two days, Weekdays and Holidays.  On Weekdays, you work on the city itself by plopping down buildings and roads.  You also clear district and open up space to build in those districts.  Finally, you give orders to your workers, telling gatherers where to search for resources, fieldworkers what to grow, alchemists what to make, and store clerks what to sell.  Then, you can sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor in each district.

On a Weekday, you can see the status of your city and see what needs to be done.

Nelke enjoys the smell of construction in the morning.

Holidays are completely different.  Here, you can Visit other characters, go on Investigations, and Research new techs.  Visiting characters will strength friendships so they will perform better, get you requests to help increase your approval rating, or even allow you to build new buildings.  Investigations allow Nelke and a group of characters to go out and procure resources and get kill cute, little monsters.  Research allows you to get new technology, assuming you have the correct characters and items.  You also get a picture of Nelke doing cute, little stuff, such a playing the flute or sleeping in a chair.

Holidays let watch Nelke being cute, among other things.

The title of the game, Nelke & The Legendary Alchemist, should tip you off to what else this game features.  It's a crossover game, featuring characters from past Atelier games.  Fans of the series will enjoy seeing their favorites.  The execution could have been better as they just "poof" into existence.  Past protagonist DO get some backstory on how they wound up in Nelke's city, but others will just randomly materialize in whenever they feel like it.

The characters you know and probably love are all here.

These characters don't just appear, walk into a corner, and be confused.  They actually aid Nelke in her quest to build her city.  They will help the city by working whenever you put them in the workforce.  You can make them farmers to grow resource, merchants to generate income, and alchemists to make items.  You'll have to make sure they're all working in harmony or your city will fail and you will lose.  If you want results, you MUST use these characters, not the generic Hired Help girls.

The proper use of characters is the key to success.

Some can also aid Nelke in investigations, where she leaves the to gather resources herself.  Sadly, it's not the full-blown exploration featured in previous entries.  Heck, you don't even control your characters outside of combat.  They simply walk around talking, occasionally gathering resources and getting into fights.  They do this until you reach the end of the path or until they get tired and decide to go home.  It's lame.  I understand that logically Nelke can't spend days at a time away from the city like previous protagonists because she needs to oversee its development, but it's still lame.  Nelke may also randomly decide she wants to chase bugs or start digging.  If you have the appropriate equipment, you can choose to let her do it or keep walking.

Reaching the end nets you treasure or boss battles...

...while not reaching the end means you have to do it all over again.

Investigations are lame, but Nelke "digs" them.

As for combat, you still get to beat on cute little monsters.  Fights happen randomly during Investigations or when building your city.  Battles are snappy and quick.  Characters are divided into attack (who you directly control) and support characters (who you have minimal control over).  There is a level of strategy to the battles when it comes to item usage as you can only use each item once per Investigation.  Not once per battle.  Once for all the battles across the entire Investigation.  This means things can get pretty tight if the enemies are particularly strong on the map you're investigating.  It can mean the difference between finishing the Investigation or running away to get out of taking an ass-whuppin'.

Now, for the little stuff.  The game has that trademark Atelier look.  Everything is cute.  From the buildings to the most intimidating monsters to Nelke herself, the game oozes cuteness from every pore.

The sound is cute, too.  Cute music and cute sound effects litter the game.  Sadly, the voices are only in Japanese.  English voices would have been nice, but that's the way things shook out.

There are other things to do besides simply playing the game.  Going to the Extras menu enables you to do thing, like listen to the music or ogle your favorite character.

Nelke has more to offer the just gameplay.

In the end, I had a lot of fun with this game.  As a fan of the Atelier series and city-builders, I'm happy to see a game like this exist.  As long as you're not expecting a SimCity-caliber city builder, you should have fun.  There are a lot of things I couldn't touch on to keep the review short, but the experience was enjoyable. A cute, little game.  Play it.