Partridge Senpai's 2023 Beaten Games:Previously:
2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022* indicates a repeat
1.
Super Hero Operations (PS1)
2.
Lil' Gator Game (PC)
3.
Disco Elysium: The Final Cut (PC)
4.
Dragon Quest VII (PS1)
5.
Dragon Quest III (SFC)
6.
Dragon Quest VIII (PS2)
7.
Dragon Quest Monsters (GBC)
8.
Mario Party 6 (GC)
9.
Last Bible 3 (SFC)
10.
Mario Party 4 (GC)
11.
Kirby and the Forgotten Land (Switch)
12.
Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest (SFC)
13.
Chrono Trigger (SFC) *
14.
BoxBoy + BoxGirl! (Switch)
15.
The Murder of Sonic The Hedgehog (PC)
16.
SaGa (GB)
17.
Wario Land 3 (GBC) *
18.
Sutte Hakkun (SFC)
19.
Kane & Lynch 2 (PC)
20.
Burger Time Deluxe (GB)
21.
Super Mario Advance 4: World e+ (GBA)
22.
Bomberman GB 2 (GB)
23.
Mario Party 5 (GC)
24.
Klonoa: door to phantomile (PS1)
25.
Mario Party 7 (GC)
26.
Mario Party (N64) *
27.
Crash Bash (PS1)
28.
Balan Wonderworld (PS4)
29.
From TV Animation One Piece Tobidase Kaizokudan! (PS1)
30.
One Piece Pirate Warriors 3 (Vita)
31. Atelier Iris: Grand Phantasm (PS2)
After a brief two year hiatus, I’ve finally gotten off my butt and played through the third and last of the Atelier Iris games. While I really enjoyed the first one, the second one I was far more lukewarm on, and my initial impressions of the writing in Grand Phantasm were mixed enough that I just never got around to getting into this one before getting distracted with other things. I’m finally back in an RPG mood though, so I decided it was high time I finally knock this one out. It took me about 50-ish hours to do most every quest in the game and get the good ending, and I played the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
Despite the ‘3’ added to the game’s title in English, Grand Phantasm actually has nothing to do with the previous two Atelier Iris games beyond a handful of aesthetic similarities. Our story this time follows the raiders Edge and Iris (no relation) as they complete requests for the guild by venturing into Alterworlds. However, just as they begin to get serious about their jobs as raiders, they encounter a mysterious gem that unlocks a deep secret within Iris’s magical but mysterious tome, the Escalario, and they’re pulled into an adventure far greater than either of them ever expected.
The writing in Grand Phantasm is quite good. I’d go as far as to describe it as even surprisingly good, given my poor first impression with it. Starting the game up and immediately encountering a very tsundere-type, brooding young protagonist like Edge really turned me off the game at first blush, but he’s actually a really fun and well written character. All three of the (eventual) main cast members have a ton of fun character to them, and overall the game’s writing makes them very endearing and memorable. That said, I would still say I prefer the first Atelier Iris’s writing over this one’s still, if even only slightly. I’ll get more into it when I describe the mechanics later, but this game suffers from some pretty bad pacing issues that really harm the impact the main narrative might otherwise have.
We end up with a very mixed bag where the paradoxically mandatory “side content” winds up becoming far more engaging and important-feeling than the “main story”, and the game’s ending winds up feeling quite abrupt and low impact by comparison. While this game absolutely does have some very affecting story beats in it, some of them even in the main story, I think it would've been well serviced by trimming back its scale a bit and leaning into a more low-stakes narrative more like the earlier Atelier games. It’s a kinda frustrating situation where the game winds up being only quite good when its potential to be genuinely great is well within sight, but at least it still manages to be good fun in spite of that.
The gameplay of Grand Phantasm is, like Iris 2 before it, another attempt to square the circle of combining the classic gameplay style of the first five Atelier games with the newer no-time-management style of the Iris series. However, I would say that Grand Phantasm achieves this much more successfully than Iris 2 does. Starting with the combat, we now have a proper turn order sequence at the top much like a game like FFX has, but like the Atelier series had effectively always had behind the scenes. Now you have very well visible the way your attacks will slow enemy turns, how some attacks will take “longer” than others, and other such things. We also have removed MP completely, and special moves are now done with a shared AP bar among all characters, and dealing damage through normal attacks charges this bar you can use to use your special moves. You can even activate a burst mode for MUCH higher damage from your special attacks by dealing out enough hits with your normal and special attacks. This has a sort of knock-on effect of highly discouraging using high-damage low-hit-number moves, but by using equipment creatively you can still get around that a bit.
Speaking of damage vs. combo numbers, now is as good a time as ever to talk about the job system the game sort of has. Instead of having a bunch of characters your party can have like basically every other Atelier game, Grand Phantasm only has a dedicated three people you ever have. To compensate for this, your two non-alchemist party members get the ability to change jobs at your home base which completely changes what weapons they use as well as what special abilities they have access to. This is a cool idea, but the execution is a bit half-baked. Given that your alchemist can never change jobs, and she’s basically always more of a support character you’ll probably have healing (between items and her naturally high magic attack that makes healing spells you give her very good), it just never makes much sense to choose support-focused jobs on your other two party members. Just letting everyone have multiple jobs probably would’ve been the better choice, especially as the new focus to the AP-based combat system makes your alchemist’s items more redundant than they’ve ever been.
This game isn’t the hardest in the world, but even then, I always felt I had way more than enough options to the point that I used items in or out of battle less than a dozen times over 50 hours. This still all makes for a fun and dynamic combat system where you’re trying to account for enemy weaknesses to up your boost gauge faster, but the lack of the ability to change your load-out once already in battle can make some boss battles needlessly frustrating (or just outright doomed from the start in the very late-game optional stuff). I quite liked the combat system in this game either way, though. It was always good fun to mulch up enemies with well activated burst modes, even if battles can become a bit formulaic after a while.
The bits between battles though, back at your workshop, are one of the more interesting and impactful aspects of the gameplay loop, for better and worse. As with the other Atelier Iris games, we once again have a game with no time management, so for those of you who get turned away by that sort of thing, you have nothing to worry about here~. The game has 10 chapters, with there being more “free” periods where you can do both story and optional guild requests, and once you’ve done enough story requests to raise your guild rank, you’re automatically forced onto one of the game’s ten story missions. It’s completely impossible to do any requests during a story mission segment, so it’s best to plan around that fact if there are some in particular you’d rather have done sooner than later. As a general gameplay loop, I think this works really well. Having one main hub that you go out and explore Alterworlds from is a very nice execution of that idea of combining the old and new ways of the Atelier gameplay systems.
However, this well constructed gameplay system comes at a cost. Those ten story missions take maybe an hour each, and in my fifty hours of game time, that makes the main story some barely 20% of your time with the game (likely much less), and this means that, even when the stakes are at their highest, the main narrative’s pacing is incredibly slow and constantly being interrupted. The reasons for this in-narrative are justified well enough, but the effect is still a main plot that feels needlessly staggered and a bit bloated regardless. Most characters get far more fun and interesting characterization through those story-related guild requests during the free periods than they ever do during the story missions, and this makes for a very uneven experience overall. I still liked the story and I think it’s overall a quite well put together one, but this unevenness does make me prefer Atelier Iris 1’s story overall at the end of the day, even if I’d say this one overall has stronger characters.
The presentation is very well done, as usual, especially the music~. This is the last of what I think could could fairly consider the completely 2D game of the mainline Atelier games, and it looks very pretty as a result. There are tons of sprite variations for the main characters including a fair few completely unique ones for certain otherwise not that traditionally important bits of story, and it gives everyone a really delightful sense of personality. Monster designs are fun and big, and the battle animations for the alternate jobs especially are super fun and cool as well. The VN-like talking segments have very nicely designed art for the characters with lots of expressive sprites for each of them, but the character design is probably where the game’s most significant design weaknesses go. While I overall quite like the character design, a few characters feel overly sexualized in way that feels super out of place for their characters. Especially with Nell’s character design, it just doesn’t compliment her character at all, and it ended up coming off as very creepily fetishizing in a way I really didn’t care for. It’s a shame too, since otherwise I’d say the character design and art is really excellent, but this was a big enough sticking point for me that I couldn’t just let it go unmentioned here.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. Warts and all, this still manages to be a really excellent late-life PS2 RPG. The writing and gameplay systems aren’t perfect, but they’re still super fun and a delight to spend time with, as this game’s 50 hours just absolutely flew by I was having such a good time. While I can’t speak to the quality of the English translation, I know enough people who’ve played and enjoyed it to believe that it’s at the very least acceptable if not just good, so this is one well worth picking up in English too if you like fantasy worlds and turn-based RPGs, even if you’re otherwise not that familiar with the Atelier series~.
I identify everyone via avatar, so if you change your avatar, I genuinely might completely forget who you are. -- Me
