Atelier Escha & Logy Plus ~Alchemists of the Dusk Sky~ review for PS Vita

Last year, writing about Atelier Ayesha Plus, I wrote:

“To the untrained eye, Atelier Ayesha Plus: The Alchemist of Dusk may look like just another Atelier game on the Vita. After all, it features all the hallmarks of every other game in the series that’s graced the handheld: it’s still all about girls in frilly dresses running around a quasi-medieval world looking for ingredients for potions and fighting monsters along the way.”

Apologies for the self-quoting, but one year later, I could say pretty much the same thing about Atelier Escha & Logy Plus.

There are worse things that could be said about it, of course. Over the course of the series’ lifespan — at least on the Vita, which is the only platform on which I’ve played them — the Atelier games have consistently proven to be solidly above-average JRPG experiences. They may not be very surprising, but you know that you’re going to get lots of quests, lots of crafting, and lots of turn-based combat, all of it wrapped up in a neat little package that will appeal to both veterans of the series and newcomers alike. So it is too with Atelier Escha & Logy Plus.

Admittedly, things aren’t entirely the same here. For starters, as the title implies, the game has two protagonists, which means you’re basically get double the gameplay. Or, more accurately, you’re getting the same story told from two different perspectives, with a slightly different emphasis in each one: the Escha side focuses a little more heavily on the crafting (which is to say, as much as you get in every other game in the series), while Logy comes off as being slightly more RPG-ish (though only slightly, since this is, above all else, an Atelier game).

And for the rest…well, actually, that’s about the extent of the differences. Two times the usual number of protagonists, so two times the amount of gameplay. Whether you’ll think it’s worthwhile gameplay, of course, will depend on how much you can tolerate it the first time through to begin with, but if you’ve stuck with the Atelier series so far, Atelier Escha & Logy Plus will feel like a comfortably familiar.