Atelier Rorona: The Alchemist of Arland

Not all items are equal, however, and it pays to check the quality of the goods you're adding to your basket, particularly given the finite space. With just 60 item slots, it's wise to be picky, although it's not always the highest quality ingredients that make the best recipes. Items have different traits, and learning which traits to blend to boost an item's stats is the key to getting a good evaluation on the assignment's due date.

That said, you can occasionally get away with carelessly bunging a bunch of items in the pot, and still achieve decent results. Twelve bad cabbages and several buckets of water from the local well produced a batch of cabbage soup apparently fit for a king. In a fleeting moment of self-indulgence, I saved my finest quality Normal Pie just for Rorona, who'd been slaving over a hot cauldron for several days making that little lot.

Another side-effect of the alchemy process is that you lose time and energy, two valuable commodities in the Atelier universe. Though the deadlines are fairly generous, to get the best assessment you'll need to do more than the bare minimum, so careful time management is required. With other characters offering additional requests and the need to factor in several days' worth of travel to the most distant foraging spots, it's surprisingly easy to miss deadlines, especially if you allow Rorona to take on too much at once.

If you're regularly late in delivering on your promises, then friendship and respect levels will diminish, and you'll be charged more and rewarded less by your peers. It's wise, therefore, to focus on satisfying just a few customers. Whether you choose to concentrate on making pies or forging weapons, it soon becomes obvious that excelling in one discipline restricts you from doing so in another. You simply don't have the time to see all the endings in one play-through.

There's something of Harvest Moon – particularly the Rune Factory spin-offs with their monster-hunting – in the simple pleasure of routine and the satisfaction of keeping so many plates spinning at once. Yet there's not quite the same sense of achievement at the end of your toil. By limiting the player's capacity for experimentation, the alchemy process is ultimately no more involving than following instructions in a recipe book.

After a while, it all starts to feel a little too much like hard work, and you'll start to cut corners, buying ingredients from the shops instead of synthesising your own. It's like making do with takeaway when you've got all the ingredients for a nice stew in the fridge: sometimes you just can't be bothered going to all that trouble.

Typically for a Nippon Ichi title, there's a pleasing vein of humour running through Atelier's dialogue which occasionally ventures into slightly risqué territory. Arland itself isn't quite the bustling, prosperous hamlet it's painted as, with static characters constantly spouting the same lines of dialogue, though a neat visual touch sees Rorona's workshop fill with different items the more recipes she learns. A number of the incidental story threads – notably one where a group of older men turn up to fawn over the pretty, young owner of the sundries store – are amusing in a gentle, Sunday-evening-TV kind of way.

Like labelmate Trinity Universe, Atelier Rorona is a hard game to dislike, but it ultimately feels a little too tied to JRPG convention for its ideas to bear fruit. It might be admirable for a game to promote such a diligent work ethic, but it never quite rewards you handsomely enough for your efforts.