Atelier Sophie 2: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Dream

I can't recommend this. 80% of the "game" is spent watching cutscenes. There are seriously places where it's 30 seconds or less between cutscenes. You enter a building, and get a cutscene. You walk through a door and get another cutscene. Which might have been ok, except that the story has some of the worst writing I've ever seen in any medium, ever, game or otherwise. It's one contrivance and coincidence after another. Flashbacks to things that happened mere minutes ago, people suddenly remembering that they run an alchemy store after you, the alchemist, have been adventuring with them for days, people randomly walking up the moment they're needed, etc. Even the problems to be solved tend to be monumentally stupid. For example, there's a huge quest chain where you're looking for somebody and get blocked by a waist-deep river with some boxes by it. Neither you nor the other alchemist in the party have any idea what the boxes are, but action-girl remembers that she saw the person your'e after use those boxes that one time to stop the rain. You go back to the guild, and everybody knows all about these alchemy-rain-stopping boxes except for the alchemists, and they explain that you need some super rare recharging tool to recharge the boxes, and nobody knows where to find them. A guy who is also not an alchemist walks in right that second and mentions that he has the item you need and gives it to you...but oops, the recharging item needs to be recharged with some rocks that only an alchemist can do that. Suddenly you remember that you know how to make the rock you need to recharge the boxes you had no clue what they were for. You make the rocks and recharge the item and use it to recharge the boxes...which makes the rain stop. Instantly the river dries up and you can cross. Oh, and now you can make rocks to recharge boxes whenever you want, no special item needed anymore, and these boxes suddenly exist all over the place whenever you need to raise or lower a river. This is immediately followed by a mountain pass that you can't get through because a dragon attacked a caravan travelling through it. Does the dragon stop you? Do you have to level up and fight it later? No, of course not. The dragon's already gone, but during the battle he knocked some bags off the caravan, and the bags are blocking your path. So you can't simply help move them, so you'll just have to come back later, never mind the fact that the bags are also waist-high and have huge visible gaps between them. That was about when I gave up on the game. I'll grant that the alchemy minigame is mildly interesting, Drop shapes on a field and try to line up special symbols, score better to make better equipment. But it seems kind of useless, because combat is easy and mostly optional. You can walk around most monsters in the game, and boss fights are easy enough that after 7 hours of play I've yet to lose a battle even though it took me four hours to figure out how to equip anything and I haven't bothered leveling because I can walk around everything that isn't a boss. As a plus, none of the characters are unlikable. This is basically a "cute girls doing cute things" slice-of-life anime, with little bits of running around and easy battles in between. If that's what you want, you might like it. But don't buy this expecting much of a game. Or much of a story.