Atelier Rorona: The Alchemist of Arland (PS3) - Normal Ending
Channel: Louis B
Date: 2013-08-25

The seventh generation has been nothing less but underwhelming in regards to delivering any localised JRPGs. Being strapped for options on Playstation 3, I shrugged off the Magical girl vibes beamed at me upon picking up Atelier Rorona. I'm partly glad.

I say partly because Rorona's closing moments are remorseless on the player. Throughout the game you're given twelve assignments to complete, most of which have ninety day deadlines. While the challenge gradually grows with each new assignment, the tenth onwards sharply throws the difficulty curve upwards upon the discovery of two dungeons: Night's Domain and Orthogalaxen. Not only do these dungeons take up a week in travel time but naturally feature tough enemies to fight and sadly have items only exclusively found in their respective zones.

More over, up until that point I had been playing Rorona blind without anysort of assistance from a walk-through or hints guide. Finding myself forced into reading one, because of the grueling challenge I faced in assignment 10, I discovered just how much was exactly missed because of the way I played. It is very easy to altogether skip items crucial to Rorona as commonly they're only available once triggered by story-based events which, more often than not, happen by accident based on my experience.

It is clear the developers at GUST did this to encourage the player to experiment only the oxymora imposed by the assignment deadlines would encourage you to do the exact opposite, multiple playthroughs or otherwise (Atelier Rorona fortunately features a New Game+ option).

So overall I got the normal ending which ultimately finishes the narrative on a bittersweet tone. Maybe in the future I'll get at achieving the true ending, besides uploading footage of Atelier Rorona from beginning to end, but it'll be a while before I stop sadfacing at the amount I accidentally disregarded during my first run of the game. 


The Atelier series is developed and owned by Gust Corporation, copyright 1997-2013. This video was made using a Roxio HD Capture Pro in 720 Component settings with subsequent up-scaling and encoding made on Roxio VideoWave and Handbrake respectively. Please feel free to ask me any questions about this video and thanks for watching.