A very different Atelier game.
What They Say:
An Atelier town built together with legendary alchemists.
This title aims to combine the “slice-of-life” atmosphere of living in a town and collaborating with various characters and the exaltation that comes from successfully governing a town and expanding your world. This title is designed to represent a new milestone in the evolution of the “Atelier” series, marking their 20th anniversary, and its theme is: Town-management Simulation x RPG. We aim to provide our fans with an entirely new “Atelier” experience, while also inviting back many popular characters of past titles.
The Review:
Nelke & the Legendary Alchemists: Ateliers of the New World is certainly a different game than many players might expect from the Atelier series. Celebrating the 20th anniversary of the synthesis-centric JRPG, Nelke feels very much like a spin-off of sorts for the franchise. While it contains many of the same elements that fans know and love from previous games, it also branches out into new and unexpected territory.
From the onset, I knew that Nelke & the Legendary Alchemists has you star as Nelke, a girl is not an alchemist and must, therefore, employ familiar faces from across the series to do it for her while also managing a town. What I didn’t realize is how staunchly different this would make the game feel from other entries in the series.
Booting up Nelke & the Legendary Alchemists can be a shock for sure as familiar elements like 3D free-roaming and exploration are obsolete in this game. You aren’t able to freely explore the main town of Westwald in your leisure as easily as with other games and the same goes for the fields and dungeons, too.
That’s because, while it remains having the core of an RPG, it is a town management game first and foremost. In fact, it dives really deep into the managing aspects and streamlines much of everything else that you expect from an Atelier game. This can be surprising and offputting if you aren’t aware of this ahead of time.
That isn’t to say that Nelke & the Legendary Alchemists isn’t a good game. In fact, it’s actually a great town management game kitchen sink sort of situation that is a jack of all trades. I’ve enjoyed my time with it immensely and it’s addictive enough to keep wanting to come back to it. As Nelke, you have a very small village of Westwald to manage.
Starting off with one district at your disposal and just a few people, you are able to build various locations like stores, Ateliers, gardens, and so on. You have free rein of where you place the buildings as well as minor little things like decorations and roads to make your town look and feel unique.
This alone is deep as you are able to customize your town to your heart’s content. Your initial plot of land to build upon is small but as you develop the area and raise the population, you can slowly see the town gain more and more districts and become much larger.
The second half of managing the town is, of course, delegating the various people you have living there. There are four main roles that you play a hand in directly. The first is the alchemy itself. Since Nelke can’t perform alchemy, you have to assign various familiar alchemists from the series to help you out.
You don’t directly synthesize like in other games but instead, order them to create specific items that week. You can make those items using materials that you either gather yourself or dispatch NPC’s who aren’t busy doing other stuff to get. You also can assign what plants your gardens and groves will grow that week.
Lastly, you have the stores in town. You can assign various NPC’s to run the stores and select which items they sell. Obviously, selling items that are worth more with typically result in more money. That money is then added up at the end of each week in an extremely detailed report, sacrificing all costs and upkeep for each person and building you create.
It’s all extremely detailed and as deep as you want to go, which I really enjoyed. The craziest part? That was only what you do during the week. Once you’ve assigned everything for that week, you switch over to your holiday or weekend and it’s a totally different set of tasks for you to do.
You can visit the NPC’s around town and building your relationship with them, research things to further Nelke’s personal goal in the story and go looking for materials in the nearby forests and dungeons. Again, this is where everything you find normally in an Atelier game is streamlined.
You have an action bar that decreases as you visit NPC’s and when you’re gathering materials in the field. Gathering materials play out in an on-rails section where Nelke and up to four other party members go out together. You can choose to only walk across each route and the team will essentially focus on gathering materials. But you have to reach the end of that section to unlock the next one.
For the most part, just walking won’t get you to the end of that area. As such, you have to balance running as well but that makes you fight more and not be able to gather materials. It’s a very mobile game-esque system due to its automation. When you get into battle, it, too, is a much more simplified version of the already simple turn-based battles in other games.
You, typically, can directly control some NPC’s and their few attacks while other ones like alchemists will act on their own for the most part. Combat is really simple and forgiving compared to other games since it is much less of the focus here. After you finish gathering materials, the game switches back to the weekday turn.
The game continues going back and forth with frequent story segments in between. Nelke is one of the more interesting protagonists I’ve seen in the series thus far as she is certainly more womanly and mature than I expected. I enjoyed the mix of her personal ambitions along with her struggles of managing a town for the first time.
But this does bring up the most glaring flaw with Nelke & the Legendary Alchemists and that is it is super linear. While you can customize the town to your liking, the progression of everything is pretty linear in nature. Similar to other Atelier games, you have main story tasks you must complete within a certain period of time. These range from raising the population to a certain number or making sure your income is in the green for several turns and so on.
But this does make Nelke & the Legendary Alchemists a rather linear experience and one that is fairly easy to rush through from start to finish. However, the journey along the way is extremely fun, deep, and has my favorite town management system in a game to date.
In Summary:
Nelke & the Legendary Alchemists is a great Atelier game that branches the series off in a new and interesting way. If you go in with an open mind and a desire to manage a town, you will probably come out having truly enjoyed yourself like in my case. While most mechanics like synthesizing and gathering materials are extremely streamlined here, there is an addictive joy found in helping Nelke develop a town that you have ownership of alongside some familiar faces.
Grade: B-
Released By: Koei Tecmo
Developer: Gust
MSRP: $59.99
Release Date: March 26, 2019
Platform: Switch (reviewed), PS4, PC
This review was done with a review copy provided by the publisher. We are grateful for their continued support.