Played through it, I liked more things than I didn't
Good
- The character designs are nice and appealing and the animation (being largely mocap) seems a step up from previous Atelier games
- I don't mind the combat. It's a bit spammy at this stage but with very few items available and only a handful of skills there's probably not much to dig into yet. If one is familiar with modern Tales Of games, it feels a lot like that.
- Mobility / traversal is enjoyable enough. Fast travel is accessible and the character's run speed seems appropriate (the transition to auto-run is also nice; no need to hold down the sprint key all of the time).
- The faster gathering animation is appreciated.
- Performance on desktop seems "fine" - was easy to hold 60 even on an older machine (albeit a pretty good one in its day). We'll see about steamdeck; I'll try it out later. Character models aside, the graphics are so meh I'm not sure there's any drawback to dropping everything to Low for handheld play.
- I like the idea of the base-building, but didn't see enough of it in the demo to see if it will be enjoyable or not. Do appreciate that they give you a "Make it look good by default" template so that people who don't have degrees in Architecture can still get something that looks better than a "3x3 box with a flat roof on it" with little effort, while the budding designers can get as sweaty as they like.
- Apparently the MC
does have a pelvis modeled and it's not a gaping black void of missing geometry
Bad
- The field geometry and textures are PS3-era at
best (the Vita counts as PS3-era right?)
- I'm not sure I can sit through a 90 second ballet dance every time I synth a basic ingot. I get that we can skip/FF it but it's... certainly a very long sequence.
- The camera is horribly broken. Disregarding the AP (Anti Panty) Field protection that prevents you from looking higher than 5 degrees of elevation, the camera/world collision is a mess, jittering and vibrating whenever you stand near an object or inside a structure. Which is irritating, since the whole game seems to be about building houses and entering dungeons.
All in all I'll definitely pick it up at some point, either when they do some perf tweaks or during an inevitable sale. Or sooner, if I run out of other things to play at Drink 'o Clock on a Friday night.