Atelier Marie Remake: The Alchemist of Salburg Review

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Fast Facts

Guess Who’s Back!

Atelier Marie Remake: The Alchemist of Salburg is a peaceful, exploration-focused role-playing game featuring a chemistry student struggling in school. I played and enjoyed Blue Reflection: Second Light, a game from the same developer a while ago, so my expectations were high. Did Atelier Marie Remake: The Alchemist of Salburg meet my expectations? Find out in this Rapid Review.

As I began spending time with the title, I quickly realised that despite being a cosy RPG, the story elements did not play as significant a role as I would have liked. There is an overarching plot, but it did not captivate me much. For starters, my character is supposed to be a bad student, incapable of anything. However, this did not impact the gameplay or story whatsoever. I was consistently comfortable completing tasks without much struggle at all. Crafting items, which is the task most closely related to school was somehow simplest of all. The rift between gameplay and story was a bit disappointing. 

It was further disappointing that no other stories picked up the slack. Atelier Marie Remake: The Alchemist of Salburg features some additional story content, especially when I developed a relationship with certain characters, but these components also failed to captivate. The characters were not deep, and their problems did not seem particularly important. Even when they came to me with requests for things, they were often unthemed and had little to do with any overarching plot. Simply, the story in this title is not a major selling point.

Getting to Business

While the story did not move me, it set up the context of the game nicely. Atelier Marie Remake: The Alchemist of Salburg gave me five (in-game) years for me to complete the game. There are options to turn this off, but I enjoyed having this pressure to do the things I wanted. Each item I crafted took time. Foraging, and travelling to areas took time. Considering all of these elements was a lot of fun, especially at the beginning of the game. 

However, things took a turn for the worse towards the end. Within the last year, there was not much left for me to do. It felt like I was just waiting for the remaining time to elapse since I had already completed all of my objectives. Though this time structure worked well to encourage me initially, towards the end, it almost seemed like I had to wait for the period to catch up to me, so I could officially finish the game. 

However, despite those fairly major criticisms, there are a lot of fun things to do in Atelier Marie Remake: The Alchemist of Salburg. I enjoyed foraging for different items, even though this was very rudimentary. It was fun to craft different things and sell them at the market. These things did not test me, or develop me in any significant way, but it was easy to come back from a busy day and continue working on my shop. 

Cosy Combat

In addition to foraging, I faced some enemies in certain areas. Though bosses existed, it seemed that each of them was entirely optional. That did not bother me though, sometimes I got unique loot which facilitated new quests, and other times I got to dismantle foes just for fun. The turn-based combat is not particularly deep. I only had a couple of moves to choose from, and enemy attacks were not particularly damaging. In addition, it was very easy to flee from combat when things took a turn for the worse. This format worked well for the title. Atelier Marie Remake: The Alchemist of Salburg touts itself as a casual adventure, so this worked nicely. Nothing was particularly hard or complex, but having this component added variety to the typical foraging. 

While I briefly mentioned the crafting mechanics before, I want to emphasize that the act of creating items is not mechanically intensive. There is no skill involved outside of time management. If I wanted to craft something, I simply collected all the prerequisite materials and crafted it. There were a couple of examples where I had to complete a minigame after creating something, but this was very infrequent.  Again, outside of theming,  this was not an issue. I enjoyed the peaceful work, and it made it easy to get back into the title. However, the title is certainly aimed at a very casual audience.

A Charming Ambiance

To complete the package, Atelier Marie Remake: The Alchemist of Salburg features a solid sound design. There is Japanese voice acting for the cutscenes, which adds personality to each of the characters. Additionally, the music is charming, and there were other supplemental sounds for things like crafting and battling which worked nicely too.

The visuals, while less impressive, were solid. The sprites look cute, and it was nice to see different characters look significantly distinct, but the visuals were not a major selling point of the title. 

Overall, I did have fun with Atelier Marie Remake: The Alchemist of Salburg. However, the lack of an immersive story was a significant letdown, especially for an RPG. The gameplay, while basic was entertaining, especially in the beginning when I was immersed in optimizing my gameplay. However, since things are quite simple, the game does not provide anything particularly noteworthy or enticing. This title is by no means bad, but it did not leave a strong impact on me.

3 out of 5

3

You can purchase Atelier Marie Remake: The Alchemist of Salburg on the PlayStation store here.