Atelier Rorona

It's finally released on NA, and I started playing it yesterday night. I love the light-hearted feel of it, I've gotten sick of every game being violent killing/shooting, mostly from crappy NA developers.
I've been interest in this game for awhile, I've wanted to play it ever since I watched a live stream of the JP version on justintv. Considering I've watched plenty of JTV live stream of other RPGs (both JP and NA), most of them didn't look interesting to me or just plain effin boring. This game was one of the only ones that looked interesting from what I watched this gen, and that's saying a lot.

I haven't played any of the previous ones in the series because they never stood for me, maybe because I'm spoiled with everything 3D ever since the PS2 era. This is the first one to 3D, which is a huge plus for me. I'm playing it on a 40in HDTV w/ its own "game mode" HDMI settings, looks much better than what's seen on Youtube videos.

The game feels both like an RPG and a sim, where time management is important. There's is no cheesy "saving the world" crap here, which is a huge plus me. The main character, Rorona has to save her shop from closing because the town of Arland had been introduced to machines & newer technology which made it harder to compete with. Rorona is given tasks to do in order for her shop it be profitable and stay open. Her master, Astrid treats Rorona like crap and pretty much put this burden her, because she's too lazy do care about saving the shop.

I'm still early in the game, but I like it so far. Good music is a huge plus for me in any game I play and ranks up there with gameplay & story, (though Atelier Totori's OST is much better than this one). The game is mostly fulfilling quests, creating items, managing inventory and interacting with other characters. The battle system is very basic and is nothing special; it also plays a minor role. This may bother some people who treat battles as the most important thing in RPGs. I don't mind since it gets rid of the battle grinding other games do. Even with that, this game still give a lot more freedom than something like say, Final Fantasy 13 where it's 90% linear.

I'm continuing with the game as I post this. :D

I preordered, was kinda annoyed that I didn't get the OST, apparently the Gamestop bundle didn't include that, the NIS one did, but they neglected to mention that the bundles offered at each store were different. I didn't get very far yet, since I was preoccupied with Etrian Odyssey and Recettear.

I don't have an HDTV, so the text is kinda hard to read on some of the menus.

You should try Recettear if you haven't already.

I gotten this game by mail and I would have to say, out of most of the Atelier games this one, by far is the most interesting!

I'm also not too far into the game yet, but I can already tell it's going to be great!