Atelier Marie Remake: The Alchemist of Salburg

Genre: Turn-Based JRPG

Players: 1

The Nintendo Switch 2 Difference

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Review:

For those unfamiliar with the Atelier franchise, an atelier (it’s a French word that’s normally pronounced “uh-tell-ee-yay”, but the characters in these games pronounce the word in various ways) is a workshop or studio used by a craftsman or artisan… or in these games, by an alchemist. The Atelier games are a franchise of JRPGs that focuses on young, almost exclusively female adventurers who seek ingredients they can combine and use to enhance their items, with these crafting mechanics forming a central part of the game.

These games have each been released in a subset series that ties them together with a few of the other games in the franchise both in terms of mechanics, but also in terms of the storyline. I know that for many, the Atelier series can seem somewhat intimidating, but BarrelWisdom.com thankfully has a helpful guide to introduce players to the series, though as of this writing it is sadly out-of-date. However, for the purposes of this review I’ll try to address where this game fits both into the Atelier franchise as a whole, as well as within its individual sub-series.

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Atelier Primer: Salburg Series

Atelier Marie originally released on PlayStation and Sega Saturn only in Japan in 1997, and while it has seen numerous re-releases since then, none of those have ever made it to the West until Atelier Marie Remake, which remade the original game for release on modern platforms, releasing in 2023 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch. As of this writing, this is the only game of the Salburg trilogy to release outside of Japan

As for how it compares to the rest of the Atelier franchise, Atelier Marie is the Atelier franchise’s first game ever, which also means that it is very likely the epitome of trends the franchise has been gradually moving away from in the decades since its original release.

What does that mean? Extremely restrictive level design, limited story, simple turn-based combat, and… oh yeah, extremely rigid in-game time limits. Atelier Marie Remake even gives players the option to play with a new “Unlimited Mode” that removes the game’s original 5-year in-game time limit, but even players who do so will find every goal in this game comes with a time limit attached, and a deadline that penalizes you for missing. Furthermore, even some of the simplest actions chip away at your time – so much as entering your atelier to save or bending down to pick up an item off the ground will cost you one day of in-game time.

Needless to say, Atelier Marie is extremely niche in a way that will run a lot of players the wrong way, and that’s before we even get to talking about the quality of the game itself.

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Is This Game an IceSalburg With Hidden Depths?

Yeah, sorry. I started doing bad puns for these Atelier game reviews and now I feel like I’m stuck with it.

Atelier Marie is extremely task-focused, sacrificing the focus on story many later games in the series would have. You have a basic over-arching plot that sees Marie as a floundering alchemist who’s at the worst of her class and likely to fail unless she shapes up and improves by the time the graduation exam rolls around. At that point, everything you’re doing is basically just trying to improve Marie’s skills so she can pass the exam when it rolls around.

Some of this comes in the form of typical RPG stuff: fighting in battles to gain experience. These battles aren’t anything especially interesting or exceptional, save for how you recruit your party… by literally hiring people to join you. To the game’s credit, you form relationships with your recruits, not only leveling them up but improving bonds with them to get better prices from them in the future. But otherwise, there’s very little in the way of party camaraderie here, nor customization – every hirable ally has one skill, and you only improve them by grinding them up… and of course that grinding takes in-game time to do, expending perhaps the game’s most valuable resource.

Completing quests generally comes in the form of delivering a certain number of a certain type of item, but if the only quests available are for items you haven’t encountered, you’re kinda’ out of luck since you’ll have no way to know how to obtain it. Of course, some items require crafting using the alchemy system and… yeah, this is the most basic, boring crafting mechanic in the whole series: ingredient in, product out, that’s it.

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Does It At Least Have a Marieally Good Presentation?

Atelier Marie Remake is remaking a game from the original PlayStation, so there’s definitely a lot of room for improvement and interpretation in this release, but the question is how far this remake would go towards modernizing the game’s presentation.

Ultimately, it favors a relatively faithful approach, but beautifying the game as much as possible within that faithfulness. So instead of having the beautiful anime style of modern Atelier games, Atelier Marie adopts a more chibi style, showing more traditional-looking anime-style characters in its character portraits for brief story and conversation snippets.

However, within this style, the game adds a lot of detail into the game’s cel-shaded 3D characters and environments, with good use of lighting and shadow, and lots of nice-looking foliage in the game’s natural environments. However, this is somewhat marred by one of the most absurd examples of overbearing “depth of field” blur I have ever seen in a videogame, paired with a camera that is already zoomed in far too close to see the area around you, making your view even more restrictive.

These visuals are joined by some nice Japanese-language voice acting, and a remade instrumental soundtrack that… I’ll be honest, I found this game’s soundtrack extremely grating and did not like it at all.

If that’s all I had to write, my overall impression of the presentation would be overall pretty mixed. However, I did have another issue that was curiously intermittent – loading times. Sometimes when I played the game, the loading times were just fine, barely even noticeable. Other times, they were an absolute nightmare, with long loading times every time I changed locations, entered a menu, or started a conversation with a random non-voiced character. The odd thing is that this issue came and went every time I started the game up again – sometimes it would be fine, and sometimes it would be absolutely intolerable. I still have no idea what the trigger is.

Given that Atelier Marie is the start of a long JRPG franchise that has produced some truly great games, it’s sad for me to say this but I hated this game. It’s not just the rigid and restrictive time limits, not just the dated gameplay, not just the underwhelming graphics, not just the terrible soundtrack… it’s that all of this comes with an occasional issue with horrendous loading times that make this frustrating game into an absolute slog. If you’re new to the Atelier series, I implore you, do not look at this game, see it’s the first in the franchise, and decide to start at the beginning. Look at this game the same way you’d look at the original Street Fighter or the original Metroid – games that set the foundation for the much, much better games that would follow it, but that’s not worth playing now except to see how far the series has come in the years since.

tl;dr – Atelier Marie Remake is a remake of the very first game in the Atelier franchise, and even with the improvements this game adds, it’s still pretty terrible. A simple story about a failing alchemist student working to get a passing grade, simple Turn-Based RPG gameplay, a grating soundtrack, graphics that are a mixed bag at best, oppressive in-game time limits, and intermittent issues with frequent and long loading times every time you do virtually anything in this game on Nintendo Switch. I hate this, and I absolutely cannot recommend it.

Grade: D+

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The Nintendo Switch 2 Difference

Atelier Marie Remake: The Alchemist of Salburg

Genre: Turn-Based JRPG

Players: 1

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Review:

In my review of the Nintendo Switch version of this game, I did not hold back my venom for how terrible an experience I thought Atelier Marie Remake was. However, to play devil’s advocate, a part of what made the experience so intolerable was an odd intermittent issue that caused frequent, long loading times. Is there any chance that playing this game on Nintendo Switch 2 will improve the experience? Let’s have a look…

Well, I’ll start by saying that playing this game on Nintendo Switch 2 didn’t seem to improve the presentation in any way. No boost to framerates or resolution. But okay, how about those loading times?

Overall, the improvements to loading times are pretty good here. Compared to the original Nintendo Switch (at a time when I wasn’t experiencing loading time issues), which took me 25 seconds to load to the main menu, 4 seconds to load a game save, and 4 seconds to transition from one area to another, on Nintendo Switch 2, those times are cut down to 11 seconds, 3 seconds, and 3 seconds. Furthermore, in my time playing on Nintendo Switch 2, I didn’t encounter the issue with long and frequent loading times that I sometimes had on Nintendo Switch.

Does the improvements to loading times make Atelier Marie Remake a good game on Nintendo Switch 2? No, all my other complaints remain. But it does make this game more tolerable, and perhaps even enjoyable for Atelier franchise diehards who want to experience the entire series. Still, if that doesn’t describe you, I recommend starting elsewhere in the franchise, even if you’re playing on Nintendo Switch 2.

tl;dr – Atelier Marie Remake is a remake of the very first game in the Atelier franchise, and even with the improvements this game adds, it’s still pretty terrible. A simple story about a failing alchemist student working to get a passing grade, simple Turn-Based RPG gameplay, a grating soundtrack, graphics that are a mixed bag at best, and oppressive in-game time limits. This game has aged extremely poorly, and I absolutely cannot recommend it to anyone but diehard Atelier franchise fans.

Grade: C-

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