Atelier Iris 3: Grand Phantasm follows the exploits of Edge, a fighter, and Iris, an alchemist, a pair of plucky adventurers known as raiders. Raiders act as mercenaries for hire to the common folk of the central city of the story, Zey Maruze, venturing outside the city walls into the dangerous Alterworlds to return with requested items, or tasks completed. Their main quest involves these two seeking out pieces of a book that can grant the bearer anything they wish for. Along the way there’s the obligatory fights to be fought and people to be met, and occasionally travelled with.
Atelier Iris’s graphics are a sight to behold, unfortunately this is for all the wrong reasons. It’s very difficult to tear your eyes away from the tearing seams of the shoddily put together world long enough to feel immersed in the environments it offers up. The art style is decent enough. Cutesy characters models, whose portraits look great, are the standout. However, when it’s all put together and begins moving, everything falls in a heap. The isometric view coupled with flat 2D character models means it feels as though the person you’re controlling is not attached to the world appearing behind them. It all ends up feeling like a bit of a mess. In fact, we asked our Dreamcast what it thought of the game’s visuals and animations and even it told us what it saw looked decidedly old.
The information may get updated, but the way it looks definitely doesn't.
Many of Grand Phantasm’s quests feel as if they’ve been plucked from the MMORPRG book of quest design. Go here, collect 10 of A, and 10 of B, then return them to where you received the quest. Unfortunately in a single player game, players don't even have the excuse that they continue to play out of loyalty to their guild and their friends. A great number of the quests relate to the core storyline, but when taken overall it definitely feels as though the title would have benefited from some tightened direction.
Much of the game feels extremely compartmentalised as quests are in ‘bite-sized’ chunks and story rarely blends with simple fetch quests. In a couple of ways Grand Phantasm would have profited from being released on a handheld system, both because of its quest structure and its visual style.
If you’ve played a Japanese RPG within the last ten years, you’ll be able to navigate Atelier Iris’s combat system almost using simple muscle memory. An endearing feature or a familial curse? We imagine each player will take this traditionalism in either way. There’s a standard attack and a special attack along with the possibility of defending, 'high tailing' it, or using an item. As you battle a ‘Burst’ meter fills up. Once this reaches its fullest, Burst mode begins and special attacks performed within this time inflict powerful damage. Whilst this is a decent addition, battles tend to be incredibly straight forward and a little bland.
Thankfully, the game shirks random encounters for a system in which you can pick and choose which encounter to launch into. As you traverse the lands of the Alterworld, gelatinous blobs squelch around the map and once bumped into will trigger a battle. One can only imagine why the bestiary of the Alterworld is represented as blobs on the map, especially when they’re often rather large and hairy bears or odd sentient flying swords (although there are a few jellylike foes found throughout each level).
Tasty.
One unique element that the game provides is the alchemy system. Iris’s skill at transforming a multitude of items into new provisions by simply throwing a few things into her cauldron is a novel way of obtaining new weapons and potions. Scattered throughout the lands there are areas where Iris can learn new concoctions and as a result, the list of creations is able to expand throughout the game. In fact as you learn more and more tricks of the alchemy trade you’ll find shops less and less relevant and you begin to live a lifestyle rivalling that of the self sufficiency dream of the 1970’s.
The major distinguishing mark smeared across the game is the way in which it provides time limits to your access of the Alterworlds. Spend too long in an area and you’ll be booted out into the main world. This adds a small amount of urgency to your quests for items however, this feature ends up being both a novel blessing and an annoying curse as there are times when it would be nice to explore the environments a little more without the countdown urging you forward.
Grand Phantasm’s voice acting is an area that could do with a little polishing. The characters can be humorous at times but due to some hammy voice work, a lot of the time they come off as being a little too irritating to want to spend a great deal of time with.
Atelier Iris is one of those games that the West could definitely have done without. It’s not that it’s absolutely terrible, it’s just entirely bland. The game may have benefited from being released on a handheld system where its shortcomings would have not be so pronounced. However you look at it, if the series is to continue to make it outside of Japan, the developers definitely need to rethink how to present these games.
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