Atelier Iris 3: Grand Phantasm

I thought this game was a bit better than the previous game, never played the first game in the series though so I can not really compare it with that one. Overall, the game is fun with nice music and a cute assortment of characters like most good role playing games. The game also has that look of an older game as the graphics look more like something from an earlier system than that of the Playstation 2. What I mean to say it looks older in style, but it certainly has a more polished look to it than most older games. The main problem I had with this title is the same I had with the previous game. They both run a bit to long for my tastes. Granted I have really enjoyed games that run much longer than these two games, but considering they go for a more classic look, perhaps the makers should make them more like classic role playing games of old and have them wrap up in under thirty hours. This one took 45 hours for me to win and that is a bit to long. You also have to retrace your steps a lot and go back over the same lands again and again. Sometimes it is not so bad, but I was getting very sick of going to the Posperia battlegrounds near the end of this game. Still, it was a very fun game as in this one you play the role of Edge and Iris, two raiders that go to these other dimensions called alterworlds doing requests for other people. During the course of the game you begin to collect these strange glowing orbs that somehow manage to meld with Iris' book known as the Escalario. Along the way you are also joined by a spunky girl named Nell as you must overcome the many challenges along the way along with a strange man named Crowley and a rather underdeveloped character named Ash. The combat is turned based, but with a nice touch of charging up to really do damage to an enemy and to use special attacks. The fighting is very nice and fast paced in this one, most fights do not take all that much time and the enemies do not have super long drawn out attacks that I can not stand in other role playing games. Alchemy is also a very big deal in this one as it was in the last game as you get to mix and match and make your own inventory, by the end I was not really using money for anything except boat rides. Granted, it was not as good and useful as the alchemy of the last game, there you only had to have the barest of ingredients to make a lot of stuff. So all in all a very fun role playing game, though it is essentially a role playing game made up of side quests with a main story that appears from time to time in the middle and at the end of the chapters.