Atelier Shallie: Alchemists of the Dusk Sea

 PlayStation 3
User Score
7.6

Generally favorable reviews- based on 53 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 35 out of 53
  2. Mixed: 11 out of 53
  3. Negative: 7 out of 53
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  1. Quandary
    Oct 20, 2015
    10
    Atelier Shallie is the Atelier game I always wanted to play. It has the best battles in the series and the less amount of frustration since Gust decided to eliminate the time constraints typical of the series. The two heroines are very funny and charming, and their desolate world makes you want to explore every nook and cranny and to find new recipes and ingredients. The graphics are evenAtelier Shallie is the Atelier game I always wanted to play. It has the best battles in the series and the less amount of frustration since Gust decided to eliminate the time constraints typical of the series. The two heroines are very funny and charming, and their desolate world makes you want to explore every nook and cranny and to find new recipes and ingredients. The graphics are even better than before, with colorful environments and awesome characters and monsters. The Shallies' adventure is one of the funniest Japanese rpgs on Ps3 to date.… Expand
  2. DanHazy
    Feb 27, 2016
    7
    I'll tell my favorite games so you will know what kind of gamer is writing this review.

    Atelier Totori Danganronpa  Fire Emblem  You should know I played the previous two Atelier Dusk games and the Atelier Arland series. I'm a big fan of the Arland games while I don't particuraly care for the Dusk games.  THE GOOD:  GAMEPLAY: The battle system was good but the item synthesis    I'll tell my favorite games so you will know what kind of gamer is writing this review.

    Atelier Totori
    Danganronpa 
    Fire Emblem 

    You should know I played the previous two Atelier Dusk games and the Atelier Arland series. I'm a big fan of the Arland games while I don't particuraly care for the Dusk games. 

    THE GOOD: 

    GAMEPLAY: The battle system was good but the item synthesis was bland. I'll delve more into this further down in the review.

    VOICE ACTING: This game was voice acted about 70 percent of the time. It wasn't the greatest voice acting and not all of the voice actors fit the characters.

    MUSIC: Music is good but I prefered the music in the Arland games.

    GRAPHICS: Graphics were good. The dungeons looked great. 

    STORY: Story could be put into the bad category or the good. Some parts were entertaining and brought a slight smile to my face while other parts were drab. The ending definently belongs in the bad category and I'll explain why there. Don't worry though, all my reviews are 100 percent spoiler free. 

    CHARACTER CAST: Character cast is also good and bad, some characters were rather bad in my opinion. These bad characters were a serious depressed never crack a smile kind of girl. A treasure hunter who loved and bragged about her little sister. A homucouli who had poor english. There was some great characters from the previous games though. 

    THE BAD 

    The ending was a big letdown. There wasnt even an animation. You also could choose between two different ending but couldnt save before making the decision. So you would have to fight the final boss again and press x through a lot of conversation before getting both endings with the heroin that you chose at the beginning. 

    Bad voice acting on some characters. You get used to it after awhile but was off putting at first. 

    Many of the voice acted parts didn't actually match the words you would read. That's not a big deal but it would confuse you for a half second when you read along with the voice actors. 

    IN DEPTH REVIEW:

    Battle system is turn based like the other games in the series. In fact, most of it is exactly the same. Your heroine can use items that you synthsize in battle which includes healing, stat boosting, and attack items. You can have a party of 6 characters at a time. You only get 8 characters in total unless they're some dlc characters. All these characters have a unique special move they can use after certain conditions are met in battle. You always have 3 characters on the front line and 3 in the back line. The ones in the back line can be used to help defend the characters in front or for an extra attack. There is also a burst mode that you can activate by attacking the enemy. Once this fills up, you can deal extra damage and use special abilities like stat boost and damage reduction. Also you can link you characters attacks for big damage. Burst mode last about 2 or 3 turns. 

    Sythesizing items is rather bland. You wasn't required to do much of this though. You eventually get so many items to synthesize that it becomes annoying when you're trying to find a specific item to synthesize. You are also required to complete task to advance the next chapter. None of these task was overly difficult though. There was also no clock in this game like the arland games. You can spend as much time exploring and synthesizing as you like. 

    My game time was 35 hours when I beat this game. It does have replay value because of multilple endings and different heroine choice at the begining. There was also girls in swimming suits and a swimming scene in this game.
    You should know that the game has to be updated to use the growth system in this game. Your ps3 will crash and you will lose all unsaved progress if you go to the growth system screen without first updating the game. You dont unlock this untill level 40 though. 

    That wraps the review up, overall, a rather bland game with some good but few moments thrown in.    … Expand
  3. ryuzaki57
    Mar 10, 2015
    6
    Atelier Shallie is the 3rd (and last?) episode of the Dusk trilogy started with Atlier Ayesha and Atelier Escha&Logy. That's the first problem of this game, because it ends the trilogy in a rather awkward manner. None of the questions raised in the past two games finds a definitive answer : Linca's story is barely hinted at, the truth behind the drought that plagues the world is hardlyAtelier Shallie is the 3rd (and last?) episode of the Dusk trilogy started with Atlier Ayesha and Atelier Escha&Logy. That's the first problem of this game, because it ends the trilogy in a rather awkward manner. None of the questions raised in the past two games finds a definitive answer : Linca's story is barely hinted at, the truth behind the drought that plagues the world is hardly explainded, we are still waiting for an clear illustration of Alchemy's past mistakes, and Ayesha and Logy are MIA.

    Story-telling its faulty too. This sequel looks more like a spin-off that borrows some characters from before. It's composed of two separate stories : Shalistella's and Shalotte's (both called Shallie). Shalistella is your average Atelier heroine whereas Shalotte, more dynamic and lively, introduces a more moe approach. Unfortunately, neither side has been well executed, and the slim differences between the two adventures doesn't make replay value very valuable. Generally speaking, the story never takes off and stays as a series of events half-serious, half-humoristic. The tone seems mainly light in the end, because any attempt of the game to get more serious sounds really off.

    Because of low stakes and an astonishing lack of intensity, but also surprisingly shallow characters. Of all the newcomers, Miruca is the only one that shows a bit of work : only her has a solid backstory and thus the only one you sympathize with. The others feel almost invisible given the low interest of the events they're in.

    In its gameplay, Atelier Shallie changes radically. First thing, it drops the limited time frame to go for a classic progression system in chapters in which you have all the time you want. To make it further accessible, Gust opted for the Xillia method and now difficulty settings can be changed any time. Wise decision, because even though most of the game felt easy, difficulty surges at the very end. This episode adds a morale gauge, but after 70h and 2 playthrough, I'm still wondering what it is for and how it works...

    You no longer get experience points in battles (or very few). XP should be gained by doing Lifetasks, objectives comparable to Atelier Ayesha's. Some of those challenges are immediate (make a specific object, do a specific action, get some alchemy trait, beat X monsters, explore maps, etc.), but others are to be achieved on the long term. Even without the time parameter, management is still there because you'll often have 10, 20, 30... tasks available at the same time, an varied enough. The ones you complete constantly trigger others, so it's a never-ending managerial frenzy, let alone the fact that you still have to manufacture your gear from scratch. That said, there's no denying that gameplay has grown poorer. Just one example that thunderstruck me : the characters decide to hold a cake contest at some point. So I do expect to spend some hours in my atelier making the ultimate sweet. Far from that, the event launches right away and a get the free trophy without doing any action... I realised that clearly the Atelier I knew was no more. The exploration of the world map is also made boring by the infinite time, the rigidity of the progression system and the bland level-design. Exploring doesn't have the thrill it used to.

    Atelier Shallie introduces a combat system called Burst : every time you hit an enemy, a burst jauge is getting filled. When this one reaches 100%, you can deal a lot more damage. It brings nothing but wasted time between Burst sequences. Worse still, the enemy can slower your Bust jauge if you are hit too often, which in some cases (fortunately rare) is horribly irritating. Despite that little blunder, let's stress that if you meet certain conditions, you can trigger the Field Burst, kind of magical circle that boost your stats for the time of the Burst : a nice idea to further vitalize combat. The rest of the fighting is directly inherited from Dusk, that is to say equally tactic and nervous to keep interest until the end. Be warned though, the game is fairly easy until the very end, even in hard. This being due to the multiplication of super-powerful healing spell that makes the manufacturing of healing items almost useless.

    The good news is that the game has been further polished visually, as it has been the case for 4 years. Although backgrounds are still mostly bland, the battles show artistic and technical mastery : modeling is refined to the extreme, the level of detail is more than satisfying and the animation wonderful! The various moves of the 8 characters are varied, and spectacular. On design, Hidari's illustrations are as good as ever and the OST quality stays high, especially on battle themes.

    Alchemy still has the skills divided into the 4 elements, save that they are even clearer and intuitive, which makes the system extremely precise and enjoyable without any loss in complexity.    … Expand
  4. deadlysilentbob
    Mar 20, 2015
    10
    Finaly the atelier games have found perfection.

    let me explain for those of you who now want my blood. The atelier games originally were designed to be clean, simple and light rpg games. meaning they are not weighed down with too much story, too much lore, too many characters, too many bosses etc ad nausium. Unfortunately in the last 5 games (rorona, totori, meruru, ayesha and esha &    Finaly the atelier games have found perfection.

    let me explain for those of you who now want my blood. The atelier games originally were designed to be clean, simple and light rpg games. meaning they are not weighed down with too much story, too much lore, too many characters, too many bosses etc ad nausium. Unfortunately in the last 5 games (rorona, totori, meruru, ayesha and esha & logy) they artificially tried to push in some difficulty with the time mechanic to appease a select few hard core Japanese gamers who wanted something hard.

    To any of you who are in the know (or are capable of reading between the lines) you could see that this move hurt the series overall. I am NOT saying that the aforementioned games are bad. I did enjoy them. and i would have loved to enjoy them for longer than the forces 20 hours of play i had.

    shallie fixes that. I can play for as looooong as i want and advance the story as leisurely as i want to. this is how rpg's should be.

    Possitives: graphics are good, 360 camera is a nice addition, music is realy nice, i love the character shalotte as i always found the series could use a punky/mildly alt heroine to balance the mostly girly ones, the search and gather system is awesome (think manakhemia inspired battles with sleek visuals) and the usable items replenish when you return to town (not too necessary a feature without a time limit to restrict synthesis but hey, ill take it)

    Negatives: the areas you visit seem a little bland (never did like desert scapes too much), the quests seem a little repatative and the layout of the quest menu is a bit of a step back from the ease of the one in ayesha.

    overall i recomend this to alllll rpg fans    … Expand
  5. MetaTotori
    Mar 13, 2015
    10
    A delightful end to the Dusk Trilogy that stands on its own quite nicely. Despite the lack of the time-management feature the game is still enjoyable and a delight to play. It works as an excellent entry point to the series, or as a way for long-time fans to say goodbye to the Dusk series.
  6. LadyAshe
    Apr 4, 2015
    10
    The best RPG game I've ever played in years. a true RPG game. real RPG. hard core RPG. this game is soooo addicting! I've been playing it for days now none stop! the moment you start the game it's too late! it's so hard to put down the controller! goodbye my social life!
    thank you Gust for listening to your fans and remove the frustraiting time system from the game. finally an atelier    The best RPG game I've ever played in years. a true RPG game. real RPG. hard core RPG. this game is soooo addicting! I've been playing it for days now none stop! the moment you start the game it's too late! it's so hard to put down the controller! goodbye my social life!
    thank you Gust for listening to your fans and remove the frustraiting time system from the game. finally an atelier that is wide OPEN since atelier landed on PS3, yey!    … Expand
  7. Dynel
    May 9, 2015
    0
    Not a real rpg. That's my first thought.

    the mechanics and game in general are... weird. Explains nothing and brings nothing new. An uninteresting game in a trilogy I'd prefer to think never existed.

    All 3 games are from worse to bad. This being bad. Not acceptable to have to pay top price for a low end BAD game that can brick your console.

    AVOID. 0/10 score.
  8. Terrabyte
    Dec 29, 2015
    10
    Great game. Must buy!!! Its just that good characters amazing soundtrack amazing designs amazing everything about this game is amazing if you werent sur you wanged to buy one this is the game for you to try out it is simply that amazing
  9. aosan
    May 17, 2021
    5
    This game is very mediocre. Sometimes very boring, life tasks are pure BS, sometimes difficulty is very weird and even unfair, level design is kinda meh. After this game, I'm not surprised that almost no one knew about this series before Ryza.
  10. Vadrael
    Apr 7, 2018
    8
    A great game, while compared to the other 2 entries in the Dusk Trilogy is this game rather weak in Characters and story. The graphic are sure great and i can recommend this game for those who like solid games.

Awards & Rankings

5
#5 Best PS3 Game of 2015
3
#3 Most Discussed PS3 Game of 2015
8
#8 Most Shared PS3 Game of 2015

Critic Reviews

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Metascore
76

Generally favorable reviews - based on 26 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 18 out of 26
  2. Mixed: 7 out of 26
  3. Negative: 1 out of 26
  1. Playstation Official Magazine Australia
    May 26, 2015
    80
    Still pretty niche as far as JRPGs go, but well presented and packed with multiple paths and replayability. [May 2015, p80]
  2. Hardcore Gamer
    Apr 25, 2015
    80
    Fans of the series, as well as newcomers looking for a different style of JRPG owe it to themselves to try Atelier Shallie: Alchemists of the Dusk Sea.
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  3. Worth Playing
    Apr 16, 2015
    85
    Some minor flaws aside, Atelier Shallie doesn't break the mold and is an excellent ending to the Dusk trilogy. While the presentation lacks a little polish, it has the most refined and enjoyable version of the core franchise mechanics to date.
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