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Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana by NIS is an RPG centered around alchemy. The story starts off lightly with the lead hero, Klein, wandering about the countryside trying to learn more about alchemy and improve his abilities. He is soon joined by the female lead, Lita Blanchimont, and they form a galgazit troupe, which is basically a group of mercenaries that act for the good of the people. The real story takes root when, on a mission, a powerful alchemist named Mull attacks the group, endangers Lita, and of course has a plot to alter the world in catastrophic ways. All the galgazit work becomes side quests which are fun little diversions.

The main story may not be the most gripping, but that doesn’t really matter, as there’s so much humor off to the side, as well as in many of the story line locations. This game is very funny, ranging from Lita’s arbitrary feud with the standoffish magic shop owner, the rivalry between the bumbling baker’s apprentice and hillbilly grocer, and Pamela the friendly ghost. The point is, the game doesn’t take itself too seriously even nearing the end, and that really works for it.

The battle system is fairly simple turn based with some minor strategic elements in attacking multiple enemies or healing multiple allies based on positioning. Overall, nothing too special, but it gets the job done just fine.

Where the battle system lacks, the dungeon controls more than make up for it. It plays a bit more like a platformer than an RPG since you can jump, and acquire a variety of abilities to use out of battle to gain access to various areas, although the most used one will be “element extract” which you will find yourself using almost constantly.

As I said in the first paragraph, the game is centered around alchemy, and element extract will destroy objects in dungeons or towns into raw elements for Klein to use in creating mana items. Only he can use these items which can be a real hassle since the healing mana items make the regular healing items look like crap.

Creating mana items is all fine and dandy, but sometimes it seems there’s just too much alchemy. Using certain items, you can perform weapon synthesis on certain pieces of equipment to power them up. Also, some shops have an option to perform shop synthesis to create new items, most of which don’t really do a whole lot except maybe need to be used in another shop synthesis. You’re also rated on the quality depending on what items you use, and this feels like a pointless afterthought. While some of these can be fairly amusing, most of the time it doesn’t seem worth the time.

In terms of difficulty, it’s a bit hard to say as sometimes you need a bit of luck to get by, more so than most other RPGs. Overall though I’d have to say it’s about average to a little above average nearing the end. One thing that bothered me was that the poison status effect is too damn strong. Some enemies would hit for decent damage plus poison, effectively taking a character down to half HP in one turn, leading me to just run from every battle in certain dungeons since I didn’t want to spend my whole time in menus healing after every fight.

The visuals are top notch, and the level designs are original. One moment you’ll be walking through a giant slimes stomach, and the next you’ll be on an oversized chess board. Character designs are well done, and although there was quite a bit of palette swapping going on for some enemies, there are a few memorable bosses such as a giant unicorn made of prisms.

Many parts of the game feature voice acting which was amusing for the most part. At least in my opinion it was. There seemed to be an issue which wasn’t unbearably prevalent, but enough to be mentioned, and that was sometimes the voice track would cut out mid sentence. My copy of the game was new, and my PS2 has never shown an issue like this before or since, so I know that if it isn’t a glitch in all the copies, there’s at least a buggy batch out there. Musically the game is fairly average until later in the game with the second normal battle track, “Beat of Illusion”, a couple of the later boss themes, “Horned Enigma” and “Duke of the Stratosphere”, and my favorite, “Eternal Eyes”, which is the theme the titular dungeon.

Overall, this is a very good RPG that may be a little overwhelming with optional errands. Thinking back I’m really looking forward to giving this a second go, as the humor was excellent, and the parts that dragged, didn’t for very long. This game gets a 4/5.

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