Atelier Sophie 2: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Dream (PS4)
Atelier Sophie: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Book is a cozy role-playing game that seemed to focus more on pleasant interactions around town and working on item synthesis over combat save for a surprisingly strong final boss. Going into Atelier Sophie 2: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Dream though will see some of that laidback cozy play lost, but in its place, most everything else has been improved to a considerable degree. The story now has more direction and a stronger theme, the characters are explored more deeply and better highlighted, and the activities outside of your atelier hold more value as navigation and monster battles are far more important. The first Atelier Sophie game was the kind of experience that would grow on you as you settle into a loop, but Atelier Sophie 2: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Dream puts its best foot forward fairly early and better pulls the player into its world.
Surprisingly though, despite also being an item-crafting role-playing game, Atelier Sophie 2: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Dream doesn’t require you to have really any experience with the previous title to understand its own narrative. In fact, the game presents a video called The Story So Far that probably explains more than it needs to, most elements of this game’s story focusing on a new setting and characters. Sophie Neuenmuller has set out from her hometown of Kirchen Bell to take her alchemy work to the next level, her mentor Plachta coming along with her as they aim to get Sophie an official alchemist’s license. On the way though, the two are pulled into a world apart. Erde Wiege is a land made of dreams, one created by the goddess of dreams Elvira so she could help those with strong dreams work towards their craft. However, while Elvira was aiming only to pull one of the girls into her dimension, both Sophie and Plachta are pulled in, leading to them getting separated and their knowledge of the land has to come from locals instead of the usually provided primer from the goddess herself. While Sophie finds herself in the peaceful hub town of Roytale, Plachta is nowhere to be seen, Sophie hoping to find answers by exploring the dream realm and using her alchemy to overcome any barriers to her work.
One interesting element of Erde Wiege though is it is a land outside of time, meaning that no one lives there ages and more interestingly, the residents can be plucked from different time periods. The game generally uses a bright medieval fantasy aesthetic and there are no extreme cases like cavemen or space travelers in Roytale, there are some residents who turn out to be of special importance to Sophie. Among the supporting cast that the endearingly optimistic alchemist meets are two characters that end up forming a special heart of the experience, and one is especially surprising. While your goal is to find out what happened to Plachta, one of your allies in doing so is Plachta herself, but a far younger version who was only just starting to develop her alchemical talents. Sophie is already quite skilled in item synthesis at this story’s start, and there is no secret being made of the fact that the Plachta Sophie seeks is the younger alchemist from some point far in her future. The younger Plachta ends up in an interesting paradoxical position, where she can see the brightness of her prospective future but can’t quite gel it with her own failings in the present. She’s an amateur now living in her own shadow, the plot making sure to devote a good deal of time to looking at her struggles in a way that makes her successes feel well-earned and natural despite this incredibly unnatural situation. The game even separates the kind of items Sophie and Plachta can craft, the player needing to spend time cultivating Plachta’s weaker synthesis skills but also the girls end up coming up with unique ideas so the game’s alchemy mechanics even directly tie into Plachta’s character development.
The other character of special import to Sophie might be even stranger for her to meet, as Sophie’s grandmother Ramizel Erlenmeyer found herself in Erde Wiege while in her early twenties. Still unaware she’ll even find a husband, Ramizel and Sophie struggle to come to grips with the odd time displacement on one hand but also develop a sweet bond that adds an extra emotional layer over top the already inspiring story being told about the young Plachta. Ramizel is a lively woman in her youth and yet still able to show a mature and doting side, Sophie having to balance wanting to know Rami as she was but wanting to spend more time with her dearly departed grandma. Atelier Sophie 2: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Dream becomes an incredibly personal tale thanks to its unique way of roping in personal connections and the weight of future knowledge on a relationship in the present, but it also does well with its major theme of fulfilling one’s dreams. There are six central characters who end up joining your party, the other three all given time to endear themselves to the player even if their narrative purpose isn’t quite as deep. Alette is a loud energetic merchant with the straightforward dream of getting more cash, but the bodyguard Olias believes himself to have no dream and compensates by being a boisterous and friendly helper to those who do know theirs. The reserved and professional Diebold on the other hand has a more tragic history, for while he believes he is unworthy of being a knight, he also can’t help but act like one. As the story goes on, the idea of abandoning one’s goals, reshaping them, and rediscovering them inevitably dives into each character’s motivations, but the game approaches the subjects with the proper amount of attention as the many extra chats you can engage with know where to dive in deeper or where to keep things light like with Alette.
The narrative is definitely one of Atelier Sophie 2: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Dream’s strong points, the game gradually building up the main party and a small supporting cast so when the game does reach its finale, it ends up being the kind of game where you’ll miss the characters you’ve come to know so well. It is primarily light-hearted and pleasant, helped along quite a bit by Sophie’s upbeat attitude and own dream of making everyone happy with alchemy, and that goal in turn ties to one of the game’s main mechanics well. Item synthesis is one half of this role-playing game’s gameplay, the player needing to head out into the wilds to gather materials and learn recipes for it. Your recipe book will gradually grow over time as the story continues, but each item must be conceived of usually by completing other objectives first. This can be something like finding certain materials, having characters perform certain actions in battle, or crafting something with special qualities, but once you know a recipe, you then can chuck the required items into your cauldron and get to work making something new and often valuable. Not only can you make items like bombs to use in battle, you can create your own armor and weapons, craft specialty goods to fulfill requests for cash, and even make special creations to enhance your gathering or synthesis capabilities. Pickaxes, fishing rods, and bug nets help on the gathering side while catalysts can guarantee higher quality goods, and since item synthesis is a process in itself, you’ll want to gain whatever edges you can to ensure you’re always making the best items you can.
As for the process of alchemy, the main thing to be concerned with is a grid representing the cauldron’s interior. Every item you gather or acquire through other means has elemental affinities, and these affinities take the form of colored shapes that can be dropped into the cauldron when they are used as an ingredient. It ends up being a bit like trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle but the placement of pieces is entirely up to you, but overlapping pieces will force the other away while being able to fit as many as possible increases an item’s quality. Picking the right ingredients is important as the amount of certain colors will determine what traits your creation will gain, so using the right stuff can take a healing item that barely tops you off and turn it into a guaranteed full heal that also boosts your abilities and keeps healing you after. With the right ingredients placed the right way you can make exceptional items that make the time figuring out the right orientation in the cauldron incredibly worthwhile, and there are plenty of undo options and ways to adjust the process, including eventually developing catalysts that even remove concerns like one color pushing out another when placed in the same spot. Links end up incredibly important though, special starburst shaped elements needing to connect to make hitting the highest value traits even possible, the depth of the alchemy system hugely expanded by the wide range of considerations to make when placing pieces on the grid.
When you set out of town to find new places with new materials, you won’t often be forced into combat, meaning if you do want to just do some gathering it’s often easy enough. However, battle also leads to unique acquisitions, so sometimes you’ll have to fight the Puni slimes, giant eagles, and floating jellyfish inhabiting this world of dreams. After all, bad dreams can feature monsters like dragons and golems, so combat in the otherwise idyllic Erde Wiege doesn’t feel that out of place. The places you head to can be rather beautiful at times, a lovely soundtrack supporting glittering crystal caves, palaces of ice, and watery ruins that are all a little more complicated to explore thanks to the game’s embrace of another peculiarity its dream world allows. Weather can persist in a place regardless of time or logic, but you also can manipulate the weather with stones you create. Call down a rainstorm and then change it to snow and you can turn a once dry riverbed into a frozen surface to cross, or call down a thunderstorm and the ambient electricity can power useful lifts and doors in the area. It can feel a little fiddly, especially since you might need to refill your stone charges on occasion if you use them flippantly, but it also leads to navigation being more of a challenge that can in turn make finding valuable materials more of a hunt. You’re free to always teleport out and return to town anyway, although you do need to activate spots to teleport back into dangerous territory before they’re available.
Battle in Atelier Sophie 2: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Dream will inevitably be heavily influenced by your own creations at the atelier, and it is definitely the area where you’ll feel the fruits of your labors the strongest. Items like bombs and healing food can be used rather freely in battle, the game providing some useful insurance thanks to the item duplication services of Pirka back in town. Set up a restock option with her and for a surprisingly reasonable fee you will never need to worry much about using items out in the field as they’ll always be refilled after a return to town, freeing you up to constantly embrace goods you might have otherwise foolishly hoarded. Your weapons and armors being enhanced also has obvious benefits in battle, but it goes beyond things like strength and defense. Traits attached to your gear can gain you many passive or easily triggered boosts, meaning you can even refresh a character’s health or ability power without actively needing to tend to it if you play your alchemy right.
The connectivity between the game’s systems continues on well as your six characters all have unique abilities that grow in function as you level them up through combat. With good enough gear you’ll only need to slightly watch the individual cost of specialized attacks, meaning you can often target weaknesses or set up useful secondary effects like lowering the enemy’s power. Enemies can compensate with aura barriers that need to first be broken, the right actions more heavily reducing the barrier’s power until you can freely attack the foe while they’re stunned and take additional damage. The turn-based battle system allows for you to take your time strategizing, but things can get even more interesting because while you only have three characters out participating in the battle at one time, the other three are there as back up and can assist in many ways. Not only does a fallen character get to swap in a reserve to replace them, but attacking monsters builds up TP, a resource that allows for Twin Attacks. Your special magical abilities can be paired up, one cast by a character present in the battle and the other coming from the reserve member who then swaps in to replace them. This can lead to a surprisingly energetic battle system where your team is constantly swapping in and out members as they unleash unique attacks that aren’t focused solely on dealing damage, and then there are even extra systems like support guards where someone in reserve heavily resists an enemy attack by swapping into battle and super moves which take longer to build up but involve two characters unleashing a unique powerful ability.
Atelier Sophie 2: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Dream will sometimes require you to face bosses to progress although it does reuse a fair few designs in doing so. However, these bosses can be nail-biters depending on how far along in the alchemical tree you are and yet you are given such a range of battle options you’ll rarely find yourself just smacking foes with basic attacks to take care of them. Figuring out what effects you want to apply and how to manage the party means even just a decently strong regular enemy can still be an engaging fight, and yet you aren’t drawn into combat too often against your will so you can choose your battles and what you want to focus on at the time. Overall it ends up forging a goal-oriented style of play that is easy to get sucked into, it not uncommon to find yourself working on many goals at once and shifting your focus as you please rather than facing too many roadblocks. Admittedly though, the recipe book does feature an annoying quirk where sometimes later recipes require you to perform actions you already would have done earlier in your travels, a diversion to dig up some material you have little use for anymore not quite the kind of inspiration you’d expect to matter so late in the game.
THE VERDICT: An excellently crafted creation that would make its two lead alchemists proud, Atelier Sophie 2: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Dream includes a wonderful cast, great soundtrack, and compelling interwoven systems to make for a role-playing game that sucks you into a rewarding and sunny experience. The relationships Sophie forges with Rami and Plachta give the game a powerful heart, but the gameplay systems are smartly designed to ensure there is payoff to smart item synthesis and the battle system can still provide tough boss fights even with the character swapping and rampant ability use at play. Some elements slow down the adventure a bit too often like recipe development’s oddities, but Atelier Sophie 2 is undoubtedly a high quality combination of effective ingredients.
And so, I give Atelier Sophie 2: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Dream for PlayStation 4…
A GREAT rating. The interwoven elements of Atelier Sophie 2: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Dream make for a wonderful tapestry where you don’t dwell on the components it takes to get there. Individually explaining elements of the combat can make it sound complicated and there are many things to consider when putting ingredients in your cauldron for item synthesis, but it doesn’t get overwhelming while still valuing your knowledge and attention to detail. The boss fights, while unfortunately recycled more often than one might expect, are a strong payoff to all the work you’ll do trying to ensure the top quality items and gear are available, but the game letting you pick when to fight much of the time also means if you’re lagging behind when it comes to alchemical creation quality, you can still head out, make some good progress, and work on gathering materials. Atelier Sophie 2 doesn’t have any overly difficult challenges along its main adventure so it doesn’t feel like you need to put your nose to the grindstone in the atelier to only produce the most exceptional goods, but ideas like the aura shields also ensure you can’t just breeze through fights without thinking of what attacks you’re using. More unique major battles would be a great boon to adding in more goalposts outside of recipe development and progressing character relationships where optional chats don’t just tell a character’s story or give a fun interaction, they also work towards unlocking new boons in battle and crafting both. Recipe development could have avoided the retreads as well, and sometimes it can feel rough trying to sort the recipe book to see if you can yet have the items for something you want to synthesize. Considering how well everything else gels though, the few areas where things are a bit unpolished can’t pull away from an excellent experience, especially with such well composed event music backing scenes with wonderful characters.
The first Atelier Sophie game doesn’t feel necessary to play to understand its sequel and the two actually feel quite different ultimately, that game needing time to show you why its good while Atelier Sophie 2: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Dream pulls you in with interesting story ideas and robust crafting and combat elements that are apparent even as it eases you in to understanding them. Atelier Sophie 2 ended up on my radar because I saw it at the library, it seeming like an extremely niche pick as it sat beside many heavy hitting games in their small video game collection. However, it seems whoever selected it for inclusion had excellent taste as it shows how captivating the Atelier game concept of creating and utilizing items can be, a heart-warming story bringing it all together into an RPG experience I hope more library goers and gamers in general will give a shot.