Atelier Meruru ~The Apprentice of Arland~ DX

( full review with screenshots: https://gaming-parrot.com/post/atelier-meruru-review-craft-me-a-village/ ) Note: Although listed as unsupported for Steak Deck, this runs perfectly other than needing mouse controls to launch. If anything, it actually runs better than on regular PC if you have a monitor over 60Hz. The map controls will be almost unusable in that case because the sensitivity is tied to framerate. Atelier Meruru is the final game of the Arland trilogy. The plot follows Meruru, princess of the kingdom of Arls, who has decided to become an alchemist rather than do anything princess-y. Her father agrees to this as long as she uses alchemy to advance the kingdom, which is how Gust justified this being a very light city building game. Every task you complete awards development points and population, and development points can be spent to build facilities that give passive bonuses and more population. Your goal is to hit certain population milestones at the end of each year. Just like with Rorona, the time limits in Atelier Meruru are so forgiving that you can basically just ignore them if you're not going for 100%. If you are trying to get the best endings, the time limits are so punishing that reaching most of them is generally considered unrealistic until New Game+. This time around, there are no deadlines at all except for the easily reachable yearly population goals. Every task can otherwise be completed whenever. The vast majority of these require you to make a certain number of items and deliver them to a place, and any item with a particular specified trait counts twice. Other tasks require you to beat a particular enemy or just reward you for doing some action a ton of times. Many tasks that take place in a particular location cause visual and functional changes in that place after completion, which is very cool. The city building you can do from completing tasks is fun at first, but ends up being pretty shallow. It's presented as building facilities, but all you're really doing is buying a bonus that gets delivered after some number of days. There's no synergy between buildings and you can't see the unlock chains in advance, so you usually can't strategize any more than skimming the handful of options you have and picking the one with the most immediately useful bonus. It's also disappointing that the developments never actually show up anywhere other than the world map, at least as far as I could tell. A couple of them do kick off some event chains, but you don't get to see your shiny new facilities pop up in town. They're just sprites in the center of the map. Outside of those systems, there's not much new about Atelier Meruru. Crafting and combat are almost entirely unchanged from Rorona and both still very rarely require any strategy. There are still far too many characters with too little personality, and you're still constantly interrupted by boring events for those characters every time you try to move around town. Luckily, the fast forward options for text and battles have less lag than in Rorona, so you can at least speed through the boring bits.

the time limit felt brutal despite it not being too different from rorona n totori, maybe i just have bad time management. loved the events between rufus n sterk

I can very clearly see a world where I fall in love with Atelier Meruru, and have it be one of my favorite Atelier games, but there are just a few flaws within the game that I can't help but get stuck at. Firstly, the game is way to relient on characters from the previous 2 games from the Arland series. Atelier Totori had a few characters pop up from Atelier Ronona, but all of those were in the location where the previos game took place. Atelier Meruru just keeps bring back character after character, whilst barely introducing any new ones. There are only six new characters with a bio in the library in this game, which is just to few honestly. Now I will say that I do iike what they did with some of the old characters, (Mimi being a lesbian just fits her perfectly), but then they also bring back Astrid, who might be one of the worst Atelier characters ever, rivalling Muppy, and Flay in Mana Khemia 2. Most of this could have been resolved if there were just a tad more new characters, and a tad less old ones. The second biggest issue is the progression of the game, you get enough time to do what you want, but the issue lies at that if you acidentilly miss a single action, you won't progress certain events, and the game won't tell you, or show you what you missed. Then, when you do activate the trigger multiple months later, you suddenly get thrown into a sequence of many cutscenes. This process can make the game feel bloated at times, while at other times it feels baren. Those two points aside, the game is still a lot of fun. You can tell they were trying to make this the biggest Atelier game yet at it's release. Having influence over what boosts you get, by allocating poits into the construction of facilities is a great idea. And even though I'm not to big a fan of time limits in Atelier games, I do admit that a time limit is necicairy for this to work as well as it does in game. I cannot say I didn't like my time with Atelier Meruru, but my mindset throughout most of the game was: "This is good, but it could have been even better." 7/10