LogFAQs > #960811484

World of Final Fantasy is excellent, it was the sort of game I never had to force myself to play. If you're a Final Fantasy buff there's a bunch of awesome callbacks, if you're not the referenced characters are divorced enough from their original contexts that you won't get spoiled about anything and you get to have a charming adventure with these little Funko Pop people.

If the cutesy art style, extremely Tetsuya Nomura design of the human sized characters and ATB-styled battle system isn't your thing, consider something else I guess. But World of Final Fantasy is - as far as I can tell - a perfect port of the PS4 and Xbone version. Best RPG I've played all year.

This next one depends on your propensity for jank. The Atelier games are a little bit trashy and a bit cheaply made to justify the price point. You're also gonna want to start with a game like Atelier Ayesha: The Alchemist of Dusk, which was a later PS3 game that streamlined the formula to be a bit more forgiving, as opposed to the Arland games like Rorona and Totori which have a bit more of a learning curve and came out before the Dusk games.

The Atelier games combine traditional RPG elements with resource collecting and item crafting - I know that sounds bad in a post-Minecraft world, but let me explain. These games have been going since the PS1 era, and what you do is you gather up monster parts and plants in order to create like potions and bombs and stuff. There's a quest board where you fill each order before the deadline, and with the gold and alchemy experience you can create better equipment and more useful items.

The games run on timers, usually around 3 years of in-game time. Travelling between towns takes time, as does alchemizing stuff. In that time, you need to level up your alchemy and your combat level, explore new locations to unlock new story beats, finish the main plot and any sidequests and usually fight an end boss. The time is turn-based, not real-time, so you can strategize.

Item crafting, resource management and time management all send up red flags, sure. But it's all turn-based so you can strategize, and there are multiple endings and New Game Plus which makes each game very replayable. They're also a bit cheesecake-y in places, so that might not be your thing.

The thing about the Atelier games is that on the Switch alone, there are nine of them. Two trilogies, I think most of a third trilogy and a party game. They also retail for a lot, and most are digital only - they cost like $30 a piece on sale. I would also say that there's a sort of janky lightweight feel to a lot of them, the focus is more on alchemy and story than on straight-up combat. Combat is necessary at times to progress the story, but it's more so to gather resources to do more alchemy.

Despite all that, they're extremely charming games that offer a unique take on the RPG formula. I can't stress enough how ehh resource/time management and item crafting sounds to me at face value, with that stuff usually taking me out of a game - but this is a formula this series has been using since the 90's, not a recent development in the footsteps of Minecraft, and because of that it's got its own flair and appeal.