The Atelier series, though little known outside of Japan, has actually been running for seventeen years. Typified by heroine heavy casts, lax pacing and a focus on item collecting and crafting, they fill a niche somewhere between Animal Crossing-style life-sims and Dragon Quest-style RPG-lites.
The 15th entry, Atelier Escha and Logy: Alchemists of the Dusk Sky, allows players to jump into the series as either a male or female protagonist; the bubbly, air-headed and impressionably romantic Escha (pronounced Eska) or the calm, composed Logy (lo-ji). Although some skits between the protagonist and supporting characters are character-specific, the gameplay remains the same for both. Regardless of who you choose, you’ll be spending 45 hours merrily traipsing through the countryside, picking flowers and subduing Slags. Yeah…there are some translation issues here.
Escha and Logy takes place against the serene backdrop of Colseit; a sleepy hollow on the fringes of modern civilization; remarkable only for its apple orchards and proximity to the sky-locked Unexplored Ruins.
Escha and Logy – the only two alchemists in town- are employed by the town council’s R&D department. Every four months an assignment is handed down to them from the Central City office: check the nearby river that’s dried up and write-up a report on it; Central will decide how to respond, or prepare Central’s packed lunches so their expedition can proceed when they arrive; Central will do the exploration (no really, that’s an actual assignment). Escha and Logy are rarely at the point of narrative causation, they don’t set out to solve the cases they are tasked with; they’re small-fry performing cursory tasks for the important people.
There’s no world that needs saving and no threatening monsters that need immediate quelling. The (very) minor tension between the people on the ground in Colseit and the incompetents in Central gently nudges the characters towards scraps of plot development. Lack of narrative immediacy gives way to a bizarrely compulsive routine of lighthearted, basket-filling item collection and genial run-ins with whimsical, if shallowly developed, characters.
The game reliably plays out like this: with each new assignment you are able to select new areas further afield on the world map. The first few weeks (or even days) are spent checking the new area out, clearing the main assignment; leaving you with a surplus of free-time to tackle sidequests, catch up with amicable supporting characters and craft better items and equipment in preparation to do it all again four months down the line.
Your assignments typically place emphasis on getting to a specific location or gathering enough of a material to craft a particular item. Combat is ancillary; it isn’t what your assignments are about but you will see quite a bit of it. This is because in Escha and Logy progressing to the next area requires you to kill a certain amount of enemies or check a particular number of shimmering material-gathering points to progress; the next area will only materialize for selection on the world-map if you satisfy these undemanding, invisible quotas.
Initially baffling and nonsensical from a narrative perspective, this choice actually makes sense from a design perspective; both killing enemies and gathering materials are among the many triggers in the game that move the game clock forward. Along with trotting around the world map and crafting items.
There’s a little strategy in planning ahead so you can clear multiple sidequests on a single time-saving trip out onto the world-map, but you normally have enough free-time to pull everything off. Even if you don’t, the last assignment generously grants you an entire year to clear off any unfinished sidequests. Time doesn’t stress you out with micro-management; it exists to create a tepid sense of urgency, just enough to prevent the game from slipping into being an aimless life-sim.
It’s the way that preparation and battle play off each other that gives Escha and Logy its unique flavor: before setting out into the field, you fill your limited Adventure Inventory slots with healing and attack items. Once in the field, you’re limited to only the range and number of items you pre-selected; this has the effect of making the Adventure Inventory function as a kind of item loadout. Your stocks replenish automatically whenever you return to Colseit, making item stocking a non-factor.
The focus here is on securing the items for pre-selection in the first place. Shops don’t randomly stock bombs and healing salves. I mean… why the hell would they? *shoots awkward glance at the entire genre* If you want items you’ll have to create them yourself through Synthesis:
Synthesis is the alchemic process of creating items from a combination of other items. Each item you add to the mix comes with an ‘Effect’ value for the four cardinal elements. The higher the’ Effect’ value the more the ‘Element’ and ‘Attribute’ gauges of the corresponding elements fill up. The goal of Synthesis is to get the Attribute gauges of a particular element high enough to unlock a ‘Property’; a passive enhancement on the created item (such as increasing the amount a potion heals by). But to do so you’ll have to carefully choose which order to add items and when to expend your Element stock on Synthesis aiding skills.
Experimenting is low-risk and encouraged as you can always hit Circle and undo any number of choices to your hearts’ content. This is imperative at the beginning of the game when you are putting a lot of educated guesswork and trial-and-error into working out the optimal order to use items and skills. Sadly, the strategy in crafting is undercut in the end-game where high quality items and powerful skills allow you to get by on routine instead of having to think things through.
Fortunately getting your head around Effects, Elements, Attributes and Properties in the first place is manageable because of the well-paced roll-out of new mechanics; Escha and Logy deals out tutorials and new Synthesis mechanics throughout the game at a brisk pace, without overwhelming the player.
The same is true of combat; even as late as the 25 hour mark, new skills and mechanics are introduced making combat faster and more varied as you get further into the game. Though battles get faster in part because they get easier; many fights ending before the enemy even has a chance to move. Near the end of the game it’s possible to gloss over entire assignments without leveling-up or improving your equipment at all whilst staying ahead of the difficulty curve.
This is a shame, because Escha and Logy is at its most interesting - and educational - when it challenges you. Take the Support gauge; a meter that can you can expend to chain together attacks from different party members or cash-in to shield them from incoming attacks; its only during the few optional end-game bosses where choosing to forgo attacking for defending (or vice versa) becomes a strategic consideration.
There is a lot of unrealized potential in the combat with little opportunity to explore it and even scanter player incentive to try. Sure, you can summon super powerful monsters on a whim if you wanted a fight for a fight’s sake; but why would you when getting the same amount of experience from smaller fights is quicker and easier? And when no loot those monsters drop matters because there isn’t enough of a challenge out there to legitimize becoming stronger?
Unfortunately the brisk, steady introduction of new elements carries over to other parts of the game to negative effect. Several characters in the end game suddenly develop new plot threads from nowhere; an unrequited love story that sees no resolution, a scholar’s abruptly announced rivalry with her uncle (who we’ve never heard of before) and one character even seems to be a clone or robot; something which everyone seems to nonchalantly accept despite it never being explained.
But even these late additions to character story threads don’t change the fact that there is remarkably little character development beyond exchanging pleasantries. Despite the story taking place over years the characters only are only shallowly acquainted with each other by the games’ end. Time in Colseit feels like it is almost at a standstill; there are no seasons and characters don’t celebrate birthdays or take part in any other events that could act as catalysts for character growth. In Escha and Logy, time isn’t a process, it’s an abundant expendable; a commodity weighted with about the same about of narrative meaning as EXP or MP.
This is yet another area where Escha and Logy falls short where it had potential. These are whimsical characters with interesting, if cartoony, character flaws. Take Linca, a swordswoman capable of braving any dragon,
but easily bested by paperwork. Or Wilbell, a haughty young witch who hides her magical lineage…by posing as a magician.
The translation does an admirable job of packing the characters with well…character; casting cowboy treasure hunter Reyfer with a southern drawl is a nice touch. And the English voice cast does about as good a job as they could’ve bringing these characters to life, so you might want to reconsider switching straight over to the included Japanese dub track.
But even so, Escha and Logy’s localization is hampered by remnants of the Japanese source material that the translators didn’t iron out. Characters are referred to stiltedly by job title or forced honorifics; Escha’s boss goes from being ‘Colland’ to ‘Mr Branch Chief’. And although the English voice actors do their best at bringing the characters to life, the fact remains that they are based on idiosyncratically Japanese character archetypes; Escha’s brand of almost pedantic sugary-sweet hyper femininity simply doesn’t translate into English with the intensity of its Japanese counterpart (though a bullet may have been dodged in that particular case).
There are also some consistency and translations issues, leading to moments of unintelligible instruction. Momentary confusion set in during one sidequest which tasked us with creating a Lavacube imbued with the ‘Meteor’ ability…an ability which doesn’t exist. This is an inconsistency that arose from not keeping the terms ‘Meteor’ and ‘Rain of Fire’ straight during translation. Likewise, the game can’t decide on how to spell Escha’s father’s name or, at times, whether the text should even stay neatly in the confines of the text boxes. These inconsistencies vary from being confusing to simply bemusing, but they are a constant. Escha and Logy’s translation doesn’t feel like it was checked by as many hands and eyes as it should have been, the telltale marks of fan translation all over it.
This roughness carries over to the presentation as well. The game world is made up of small, spartan areas. There’s no interplay between lighting and shadows, at all, even baked shadows don’t shade. And lip-synching animations appear to have been motion-captured off goldfish. But these rough edges are evened out slightly by smooth battle animations and some serious attention to detail in the embroidery work on character dresses. Escha and Logy doesn’t suffer much for the crumples in presentation, but combined with the limited number of enemy types (recolors aplenty) they do contribute to making the game feel like a poor-mans’… what, exactly? What other games are really like Escha and Logy? It doesn’t engage the player with narrative or gripping, intense combat. It’s a game that sometimes comes into its own as a relaxing, almost therapeutic experience. And between the incredibly attention to dress design, the female heavy cast and the teenage heartthrob approach to the male character design, Escha and Logy feels uniquely (and distinctly) girly.
If all of this fails to perturb you, you’ll find 45 hours of very laid-back RPG’ing and a game that throughout its narrative, battle system design, character development and presentation, occasionally demonstrates potential - but rarely shines brightly. Atelier Escha and Logy: Alchemists of the Dusk Sky has the misfortune of being overshadowed by Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster and Tales of Symphonia Chronicles. We can’t recommend Escha and Logy over those games, but it’s undemanding and unique enough that you might want to consider it as a low-intensity supplement.
Shehzaan Abdulla
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