The Platinum Series: [10] Atelier Totori

Finally another Platinum to add to my growing list: Atelier Totori - The Adventurer of Arland. Being an ardent fan of the predecessor Atelier Rorona - The Alchemist of Arland, I knew I just had to get Totori, play the game, savour the scenes, and PLATINUM the game. Time for some brief platinum endnotes.

Title: Atelier Totori: The Adventurer of of Arland
Developer: Gust
Platform: PlayStation 3 (PS3)
Genre: Japanese role playing game [jrpg]
Release date: June 2010 [Japanese], September 2011 [NA/EU]


Overall Platinum difficulty: 3.5/10 (easy)

What, 3.5 difficulty rating only? Compared to Atelier Rorona (which was already easy to Plat), I'd definitely say that Totori was easier to Platinum - IF you know how to handle the events, calendar, dates, scenes, schedule blablabla in the game. Trophies are pretty much similar to how trophies were in Rorona - special events/scenes, max levels, beating monsters, endings, endings and ENDINGS. Some are straightforwards and automatically obtained, like the opening scenes, character introduction scenes (Mel/Sterk/Mio/Rorona etc), while others, you had to work for it a bit. Especially the multiple endings, which made up of probably about half of the total trophies needed for Platinum. One thing for sure, things are less repetitive and tedious in Totori. No more going to the Guild/meeting friends for requests, and the world map is much bigger. Though to get 500,000 cole, you probably had to do some utterly boring task of selling liquids from Spring Water over and over and over again....

Just like Rorona, events that can trigger a certain trophy will appear within a certain time limit, or when certain condition was fulfilled. But while in Rorona you had only 3 months for 3 years interval to do your assignments and complete some character's events/endings requirement, in Totori the time gap is much wider - 6 month interval, with the game spanning over 6 years of timeline, and hence you had a more flexible time to manage your stuff, juggling between traveling/adventuring, synthesizing or focusing on characters's scenes. Though that was kinda balanced by the fact that traveling, battle, collecting items from gather points etc consumed more time than it was in Rorona.

Triggering events for each and every ending trophies (11 in total - Bad, Normal, True, Wealth, Chim, Marc, Mel, Gino, Rorona, Sterk, Mio) were obviously hard without some sort of guidance, and it was definitely impossible to get all ending in a single playthrough without following a walkthrough. Thankfully the same method from Rorona work in order to obtain all endings in one go - by loading save files near the end of the game after fulfilling conditions for each endings, ie 500k money+certain quests for Wealth Ending, Chim's pie for Chim ending, character's friendship and quests for their ending, and ALL possible events for the True Ending. Unfortunately, the True End was kinda disappointing. Predictable and way too short compared to the beautiful reunion we had in Rorona's True Ending. Nevertheless, Sterk's Ending was the best, damn that lucky bastard!!!!

Overall, I really enjoyed Atelier Totori. Most of the fun factor came from watching Totori getting teased by people around her as well as many other funny scenes in the game. At the same time, I also enjoyed the alchemy/synthesis in this game, playing around with traits to make the best possible items, foods, weapons, BOMBS etc. N/A bomb was a real killer, but I wish that Tera Bomb from Rorona made a comeback. The animation when Rorona use that bomb was simply hilarious, and the damage a finely crafted bomb dealt was.....phenomenal. But if I had to pick either Atelier Rorona or Atelier Totori, I would say that I'm enjoying the predecessor more than the sequel. Maybe because I like Rorona Frixel better than Totori Helmold, especially due to the voice of Mai Kadowaki ;p


now GIVE me Atelier Meruru this May!!!


full Atelier Totori review coming...later.