i started playing atelier marie. not the remake but the ps2 version that released with the second game, because it got a translation patch 5 years ago i recently learned about. although already i'm feeling like i'm going to have to buy it on principle to find out what they did with this game to make it palatable to 2023 audiences
(twitter/click_burgundy/status/1675144815179177986)
i made the philosopher's stone and got one of the endings. awesome game. it's like 8-12 hours long and your goals and actions change in a kind of clever and organic way. at the start you're careful, trying to make sure you don't run out of money or waste too much time, then you move towards trying to better balance all the facets of the mechanics, learning recipes and crafting while still making time to gather and work on your fighting team. eventually you reach a strong footing where you can start subcontracting a ton of the most unrewarding work to fairies, and once you've set that up so you only need to do a few easy requests every couple months to stay afloat, you can finally start aiming for endgame-type goals
it's kinda funny how much the game accelerates as things go on. experience is totally unscaled as far as i can tell, each level is 100 exp and you gain the same experience for fighting any given enemy at any level, so once it's easier to win real fights it's faster to continue leveling up...it's a little bit scuffed. but the people who made this game were very brave and they really figured out successfully how a lot of things should work even if the result is something very simplistic in certain ways. even if the battle system is simple and "imbalanced" it works, and the minigames are funny. (especially the metal slime one.) and it's wild how there's tons of stuff going on around town i'm pretty sure i only saw glimpses of late in the game, which makes me think better of the game in so many ways. not just that you can finish without knowing so much, but recognizing that the game's goals and progression are something that comes from the player with just a little bit of prodding. so really when i said "your goals" up there i meant my goals
this is up there with legend of mana for console rpgs of this era where i feel like the game is very anarchic about what the point is, in some ways even more since the game "progresses" even if you do nothing. obviously, given that i've played a lot of rpgs, i was kind of drawn to hammering the obvious goals and trying to powergame some of the crafting aspects in particular. but, you don't...have to. you could fight a lot more, you could switch up battle partners all the time, you could play marie as an easygoing girl who likes to visit everyone around town as much as possible and only makes a couple of bombs in her basement every year. i'm deeply fascinated by games where the entire texture is made up of subtle player choices. what you do on one day of the game "doesn't matter", it's a completely trivial portion of the game's timeline and could in most cases just as easily be replaced by doing something different or changing the order of things around. except it does matter because it's literally the entire act of playing the game
man, i really gotta play steambot chronicles again
but really, the adhd thing keeps hitting home. the plot pitch is that marie has the worst grades ever and they decide to give her a chance to learn outside of the classroom, so she has to manage her own workshop to make money and keep learning. it was long enough ago i don't think about it very often, but i was rather close to not getting my high school diploma. and there's not some exciting story there, but it's weird how hard some of the mechanical narrative hits me in that way. the only game i've played that hits me with that feeling like fuck, i just realized it's 10pm and i never decided what to eat so i never ate for a reason that wasn't "because i played it till 10pm and never ate". and that feeling comes from a combination of both the broad strokes and the fact that you are controlling a kind of...mad genius who'll go outside one time in 3 months and then camp in a spooky forest for 2 weeks.
and won't clean her room. i'm sorry.