Developed by Gust in 2010 and published by Nis America a year later in the rest of the world, Atelier Totori is the 12th game in the long running, but kind of obscure RPG series, the Atelier series. It is also the second game in the Arland trilogy.

For many of those who are unfamiliar with the Atelier series, it's a bit of a departure from most RPG's in a sense that it focuses more on alchemy and collecting ingredients than focusing heavily on a story.

Story:
Taking place 5 years after the first game, Atelier Rorona, you play as the titular character Totori who, as the subtitle suggests, has a dream to become an adventurer and discover the whereabouts of her mother, who has been missing for years. As you soon find out, Totori is an alchemy student of the previous game's heroine Rorona, who is going around the countryside looking for her old teacher.

You gain your adventuring license about 30 mins into the game, and most of the game consists of you wandering around the world doing either fetch quests or monster hunting for the Adventurer's Guild with bits of the story here and there to progress the plot. Unlike the previous game, this game has a story that feels like it actually matters more. The previous game followed sort of a Harvest Moon type of deal where Rorona has X many days to make the alchemy lab prosper, or risk shutting down, while this one makes you continue because you're curious about what happened to Totori's mother.

For such a non story heavy game, there's a fairly decently sized cast full of colorful characters, with a handful returning from the previous game. The game also has a very large emphasis on kawaii, which you'll soon discover with its heavy focus on mostly female cast members, and many of the male characters are either uninteresting, or unimportant. Despite having cutesy shojo style artwork, you'll soon discover that the kawaii nature of this game is heavily catered towards guys, especially with its sometimes questionable dialog. While some of the dialog is just silly stuff discussing who has a cuter butt, there's some pretty heavy lesbian subtext, especially with the character Melvia who you'll find out molests massages Totori and her friend Mimi, and a few other questionable deeds. So it's strange seeing molestation jokes about groping 14 year old girls, but it's totally acceptable when they're getting molested by another girl because yuri's hot. So it's reassuring to know that it's only considered child molestation if it's an older man touching a 14 year old girl.

While it's not to say this game is not girl friendly (there's a large female fanbase), and not dangerous for your little sister to play. It does get a bit too silly at times, especially when the town creeper Peter makes you go out and find 8 beautiful women for the town festival and later reveals it as a dubious plot to host a swimsuit contest.

The game has voice acting, and the female voice actors (excluding Pamela) are pretty good and even has a few known anime voice actresses like the famous Wendee Lee, Cristina Vee, and Cassandra Morris. The male actors range from decent to meh. The game does have the option for the Japanese audio, but you'll probably end up changing the voices back to English because all of the female characters almost all sound the same and have the high pitched kawaii voice, so the really high pitched voices can start to get grating after awhile.

Gameplay
Much of the game consists of you doing various fetch quests or going on hunts. As the game progresses, you have two bases of operation. Your house in Alanya Village, and Rorona's in the capitol Arland. At your bases, you have the option of saving your game, using alchemy to synthesize various items, or go to sleep to regain health and MP used to synthesize. Also the towns your bases are in are also the only two places to pick up the job requests, and to report them to gain gold and extra synthesis ingredients. Arland is the only place where you can update your job license, and to order weapons and armor.

With your adventuring license, you can gain points by doing the various jobs, or by exploring various regions in the overworld. So it's best to periodically visit Cordelia in the Adventurer's Guild and see if you rack up enough points. With the weapons and armor, you must collect the required ingredients first, and then Hagel will forge the weapons and armor for you.

Another feature of this game is that there's a time limit. The game progresses in days, and synthesizing and traveling across the overworld takes up days. So anyone completely unfamiliar with the series will probably not be able to manage their time well enough to beat the final boss in their first playthrough, but luckily the way the game is, you can transfer your equipment over in a new game plus.

Monster battles are largely standard turn base battles. The only thing that's a little different is that monsters appear in lines, so certain attacks can attack monsters in either a horizontal or vertical line, while Rorona's bombs can attack a large sum of monsters at once.

Graphically the cell shaded anime graphics are pretty nice. There are a few annoying instances: like how the game isn't fully 3D. It's sort of like Final Fantasy X where everything is 3D, but it's all a fixed camera angle, you'd think that a game on the PS3 is fully capable of being completely 3D with rotating cameras. Another thing is that all the story and dialog is done in visual novel style. Where they show just an image of the character that's talking, and change their expression to match the emotion. It seems a bit lazy that they can't fully animate the character models when they're talking.







Music:
Not much to say about the music, but it's alright. It's decent and matches the kawaii nature of the game, but outside of that, there's not many standalone tracks, though I do have to say the theme song during the title opening is utterly atrocious. Though if you really enjoy the game, you can buy the OST off of the PSN in the DLC section.







Verdict:
Atelier Totori is one of those games that one shouldn't really take seriously, as it doesn't doesn't present itself as a serious game. So while it's not an RPG that prides itself as an epic tale, it's like a nice breather where you just spend time collecting items to synthesize or fighting monsters. So while not a memorable game, it's one of those games that are a nice way to kill time.

So in a nutshell, Atelier Totori is not for those who are serious gamers, but if you just want a relatively simple game as a breather, then Atelier Totori is for you.

Music: 7/10.
Visuals (Or Graphics): 7/10.
Story: 7/10.
Content: 8/10.

Conclusion: 7/10