« The Atelier games are smarter than almost anyone gives them credit for, and Atelier Sophie is no different. The gentle coming of age narrative, coupled with the pastoral setting and likable ensemble cast, make for a very fine start to a new trilogy (we assume) in Gust’s marquee franchise. »

« Atelier Sophie is a wonderful game, and if you’re a new player like me, it’s a great way to get yourself hooked on the rest of the franchise. »

« Atelier Sophie: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Book is a breath of fresh air in the genre of JRPG. This game features a mundane story but in a fantasy world where the dreams of the characters are more important than the plot. »

« Surprising, fun, and challenging, Atelier Sophie is a must own in the PlayStation 4 collection. »

« While it may not have reached perfection yet, the Atelier series is getting close. Each new title offers a substantive change to the core mechanics, so vets will encounter something new and new players can easily jump in. I seem to say this in every review but it remains true—this is good as JRPG design gets, and I can’t wait to see what the developers have in store next. »

« Gust’s first foray on the PS4 with their flagship Atelier title is a rousing success, and even though I lament the removal of the time limit mechanic from the series, it still proves one of the strongest entries the franchise has had to date, and one of the best RPGs available on the PS4. »

« Atelier Sophie offers a fresh start for the franchise on the PS4 and for a new trilogy. Some design changes from previous entries made this one more enjoyable for me, so if you were on the fence before, give this entry a closer look. »

« I could go on about more of the refinements I enjoyed, such as the weather system affecting what items you find and the rumors becoming much more useful and easy to track down, but my main takeaway remains the same: Atelier Sophie improves on an already fun and engaging formula. »

« Hands down, one of the greatest Atelier games. Atelier Sophie is a whimsical adventure with the ultimate embodiment of adorableness known as Sophie Neuenmuller and an equally lovable cast. It highlights concepts like the power of community. It legit irks me that Ryza has a higher score than Sophie. I mean, ffs Lilea Xea is a god tier song that to this day, cannot be matched. Get. This. Game. »

« Not a cutesy girly game as it first appears! This is a relaxing and rewarding JRPG with surprisingly difficult endgame content. Expect 30+ hours here and plenty of freedom. Definitely worth checking out. »

« Atelier is a long running title with Sophie being the protagonist of this 17th main installment - therefore also known as project A17. As the tradition this is the first episode of the mysterious trilogy within the installment, much like the Arland trilogy and the Dusk trilogy. This trilogy features a more interactive and tetris like crafting in order to achieve the "best output" in battles - maximum quality of equipment and bombs to be specific. The interactive and open-world like environment has also improved the game. This series amazed me everytime when a new sequel came out as there are always surprise and improvement waiting for me. This series is praised as atypical JRPG as it is full of Japanese style animation and full of young and innocent little girls with seeming lesbian reference yet the battle emphasizes hugely on buf and debuf other than physical damage output. Therefore you are an alchemist who needs to fight off monsters only because you need the stuff and you save the world by synthesizing but not by fighting off the dragon. However, this time the game finally asks you to do things that you like and you want instead of saving the world. This game offers: 1. The very hard mode in NG+ 2. The free DLC for the final map 3. the balance of the available traits and properties (you need more to decide what and what not to combine) 4. Easy platinum or hardcore boss battle to show off on youtube 5. The story lines are diverse - development of multiple characters and are playable although they are all linear. 6. The world is large and filled up with things to do and read 7. Complete and vivid voice acting for all dialogues 8. Unlimited In game time to enjoy all the game has to offer (as tradition players are usually given a defined time frame to fulfill the end game requirement and arriving at different ending) »

« I used to play Atelier on ps2, specifically the Atelier Iris Trilogy and Manakhemia, without mentioning Ar Tonelico and its heavy reliance on "alchemy", so I'm not exactly new on it. However Atelier Sophie and the 2 trilogies before it were more similar to the true atelier series, which were sort of managing games about alchemy with time limits and so on. Atelier Sophie plays more like a traditional RPG, where you can explore and have a plot without any issues with times since you have none, but at the same time it has a lot to be desired. For starters the game lacks a lot of voice acting in the english version, and I'm sorry but I don't really like Japanese voice acting that much and I avoid it unless the english one is bad - like Xenoblade Chronicles 2 bad. If you like Japanese dubs you'll be fine as most if not all scenes are voiced. Secondly, the game has a really clumsy start: it took me at least 5-10 hours to fully grasp the alchemy and fighting section because they really do a bad job explaining them and only after that I managed to "manage" it properly. I didn't master it at all but I made it work, and the combat worked but it's highly unbalanced in the early stages. Speaking of combat, the level cap is very low - 20 - but after that you'll be learning skills and passives to increases stats and learn different abilities: the system is very similar to Diablo 3's Paragon points where each level grants one point to spend on specific stats. Only difference is that you literally take 2-4 hours to maximize everyone and by the 20th hour I was already having everyone at max level with all skills unlocked. The game is also easy to break too: some traits are overpowered and combining them helps making some beast items - I was killing enemies on despair with one hit bombs! - but at the same time it's highly unbalanced, with certain enemies killing you rather quickly if you're not fully prepared. Story is also a disappointment: it's not bad but it feels rushed and unpolished, especially when Sophie has no real personality and Plachta is kind of a kuudere character, always cold and distant but with a heart of gold. The side characters aren't anything great either. The world is huge but I think it's FAR too huge: there are far too many places to explore and only some of them are worth doing the exploration. A better focus on certain zone was better. And last but not least, this game was fairly stable to me and I had no crashes or glitches so that's a blus. I was going to put a 7 on the game but I'm giving 1 extra point because it's a really, REALLY good starting game for those who never touched an Atelier game thanks to its noob friendly gimmicks and the lack of timed missions, making you play at your own pace. Add the fact that it's a relatively long game - finished in 50 hours - it's definitely worth its asking price. I highly recommend it. »

« ** OVERALL 8.5/10 ** Gameplay 9/10 - Creativity 9/10 - Music 9/10 - Visuals 7/10 - Characters 7/10 - Plotline 7/10 - Emotional Engagement 7/10 - Replayability 7/10 - Difficulty */10 This was an incredibly unexpectedly lovely game. It’s 60% puzzle crafting/minmaxing, and 40% cutesy JRPG. The crafting system is the focus of the game and where you’ll be spending most of your time making the best items you can at various points. The adventure portion is mostly to go out and collect raw materials. However, you’ll be doing a lot of writing down item trees, i.e. since I want to make this, I need these 3 things with these 3 properties, and for each of those, i need these other 10 things with these properties, and for those… etc. It gets deep an engaging, and the actual process of creating an item, once you have all the materials, is a tetris-block-fitting puzzle game that, especially at the higher levels, is really challenging. The role-playing portion is cute. It’s not the deepest battle system, but it works. You see the enemies coming and you can generally run from everything. Even if you completely die, you just lose some of the crafting materials you picked up along the way, and wake up back at your shop. You probably won’t go underground into a “dungeon” for a long time in the game. You’ll be talking to people, looking for particular items, and looking for particular locations, in order to find “inspiration” for a new crafting recipe. Battles really run the gamut of difficulty, you can stomp everything and then suddenly get completely overpowered. Only bother with the difficulty setting if you want to grind for XP or GP. Once you find “gold punis”, you’ll want to set it to max (“despair”) difficulty to fight them for thousands of gold at a time - think of them as the literal “metal slimes” of the game. The music is well done and catchy, and you can adjust the game music in very fine detail. Just go to the desk in your house and select BGM and you can set any music or sets of music for any situation. As in, you can make your house music the battle music and vice versa, if you want. I like the higher level battle musics, and the traveling and night music. Night music almost makes me cry, it’s very “sad music box”-like and atmospheric. Visuals are ok. Nothing stands out as particularly bad, but I wasn’t awe-inspired by anything, either. I do like the colorful and well-crafted character designs. In particular, I like the motion capture they did - everyone’s movements are very realistic. However, they don’t quite interact in as complex a way as some other games like Tales of Berseria. In the latter, characters pick each other up, caress faces, hold people close or push them away - complex interaction done well. Atelier Sophie is more like people just reacting individually. I have to take off a point or two for fan service, though. It’s not as bad as I’ve seen, but almost every female character has “female armor” syndrome, a super-short skirt, or exploding bras. At least the main character isn’t that way, but everyone else you meet is. I wish they’d stop this. Character wise, everyone’s pretty developed. Not too many of them have arc, though. There’s event trees for all major characters and a few minor ones, but characters other than the main one don’t change much, other than maybe one or two. Their personalities are delightful and engaging, though, so they’re not boring or anything. A few cliches here and there but generally decent. The plot line’s a little on the weak side, but it’s ok. It’s mostly a crafting game, the plot is a device for making you synthesize more alchemic items. Everyone just reacts adorably and lovingly to each other over the course of some weird things that go on. It’s kinda K-On-ish to me, very “moe”. The emotional engagement isn’t great because most of the characters don’t develop much, and the physical interactions are a bit limited. Replayability is ok, I may go back to finish off some of the DLC stuff later, but there’s (sadly) no newgame+ mode. The game just ends and you can keep playing to make more items if you like. The difficulty is weird. I can’t give it a number because it’s adjustable. You can set it to easy, normal, hard, or DESPAIR. For the most part I kept it on normal, until I got the ability to craft weapons and armor, and then I felt overpowered and moved it back and forth between normal and DESPAIR. A few enemies are nasty on DESPAIR, but most just have more HP and give more XP and GP. Overall, it was an incredibly addicting game that kept me up way into the morning multiple days in a row. In true “Civ” fashion, “just one more turn!”. Highly recommended, as long as you enjoy the synthesis type puzzle system and how most of your leveling comes from that, not from grinding enemies. »

« It is a decent JRPG in terms of graphics and story and gameplay. If you are a fan of the genre you wont be upset you played it. Where it excels is in its item creation/crafting system. If, like me, you enjoy playing games where you can go in depth in the crafting system, then you definitely need to pick this game up. »

« I like this game. First, it still looks like a traditional JRPG and that is the best part of every Atelier game. Second, very beautiful design of the whole game. The third, interesting and funny story. In the Atelier series they always trying to add something new, so in this game they made a new Alchemy system. This new Alchemy system is interesting because now Sophie can learn new recipes through various activities and when she performs alchemy, the player needs to solve the easy puzzle to receives a bonus. This function reminds me of the Alchemy system in Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis where the player must choose a certain color on the roulette to get a bonus, while in Atelier Sophie the player needs to solve the puzzle. Also in Atelier Sophie they have made a new battle system. This new battle system looks just like a traditional Turn-based battle system with some new functions. My favorite battle system in the Atelier series is the one in the Mana Khemia series. The battle system in the Mana Khemia series was the best improvement of the traditional Turn-based battle system. They used that battle system again in Atelier Escha & Logy and Atelier Shallie but unfortunately they did not put this battle system in Atelier Sophie. Conclusion: Atelier Sophie is a good Atelier game and is a good JRPG but it would be even better if they put it battle system from Mana Khemia series. »

« Having played all of the PS3 Atelier games, this is definitely one of the best. Pros: * The main character is very likable this time around. Definitely one of the best. Her quest has good meaning and is something I felt compelled to complete. Though I still like Totori's quest more. * All other characters are very good and are quite a bit different than the previous games. By the end of the game, I felt only one of the characters could have used a bit more work. * Like all other Atelier games in recent memory, you play this for the character interactions. The characters are believable in their world, much more so than most other anime-like games. They are all a joy to interact with and you'll definitely find someone you like. * Big changes were made from the previous games (unlike small changes between the previous series). Battle, the friendship system, item usage, traveling, time, item traits and crafting all received big changes this time around. These really help it feel like a fresh game and not just the same game over and over with different characters. * There's still no "power of friendship" bollocks, which plagues many Japanese/anime games these days. Keep it up Gust! Cons: * This is expected for an Atelier game, but there's no real ending. It's a game about your journey and interactions with the characters and not getting to an ultimate goal. As long as you go in expecting that the main quest just fizzles out at around 80% through, then you'll be fine. Other: * The battle system isn't nearly as interactive as previous titles and is more turn-based. I liked the change of pace, but I see how many people might see this as a downgrade. * Many things are easier this time around: Transferring traits to different items, seeing everyone's events, increasing everyone's friendship level, and general team management. You won't need multiple playthroughs or a wiki to see everything this game has to offer. »