YMMV / Atelier Meruru: The Apprentice of Arland

• Contested Sequel: Even now, most people agree that as far as gameplay design is concerned, it's an Even Better Sequel to Rorona and Totori (especially when the original version of Rorona is used as comparison and not Rorona Plus). The writing is a completely different matter, since while some people considered it to be a fun and "festival-like" game, people who were more strongly invested in the characters were quick to criticize its penchant for Flanderization, its way of prioritizing being Denser and Wackier over resolving anything, the lack of depth given to the new characters, and the excessive fanservice and heavy use of poorly-aged tropes like the Old Maid concept, especially de-aging Rorona and ruining her life over something as petty as that.
• Die for Our Ship: Rorona being turned into a kid and therefore nullifying opportunities for being shipped with anyone (at least, without making someone into a pedophile) led to quite a few people developing a grudge against Astrid for doing that to her. It doesn't help that even after the Author's Saving Throw ending was added, it's still made clear that even if Astrid's act of not caring about Rorona's well-being is a front, she'd still have Rorona stay as a teenager if she had her way without Meruru and Totori making her promise to do things properly.
• Even Better Sequel: Generally the reaction the game got on both sides of the Pacific when it first released. In Japan, it made waves for being the highest-reviewed Atelier game since the original release of Atelier Marie at the time, and the battle and alchemy systems being heavily refined stuck out to give it extra polish compared to those of Rorona and Totori. While later games building right on top of it made it come off as less impressive as time went on, Meruru is still considered to be one of the more well-rounded executions of an Atelier game system.
• Game-Breaker: The "Infinite Gio" build takes the Makina Domain and META bosses from face-meltingly hard to pathetically easy. You essentially build a Gio that can always go first, repeatedly using his Slash attack to generate consecutive hits, and then heal his own LP so he never runs out of attacks. It's the only set you can't build before New Game Plus due to both Gio and Makina Domain being unplayable in the first playthrough.
• Never Live It Down: The entire Potion of Youth debacle resulted in Astrid getting stigmatized as "being so horny for Rorona she's willing to ruin her life over it" (and, more broadly, "being willing to mess up other people's bodies for her own perverted amusement") in fan circles. In actuality, her behavior in Meruru was the result of being turned into a dev mouthpiece and unusually callous for her (even by the standards of later works that otherwise continued maintaining Meruru's Flanderization of her character), and the Author's Saving Throw ending tweaked things to suggest that she may have had less control over the situation than she tried to pretend she did, but it's still all too easy to find fans reinterpreting her Parental Substitute role in Rorona as her grooming Rorona to be her toy.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The fact that certain important elements are locked behind New Game Plus tends to be one of the biggest points of criticism against the game's actual progression and gameplay, since while an expectation of multiple playthroughs is normal for time-limit Atelier games, previous games had only "required" it in the sense that the "rich" endings would be more difficult (but not impossible) to achieve without multiple runs, let alone the fact that the one in Rorona wasn't even one of its Omega Ending requirements. Meruru locks enough critical elements behind a second playthrough that it can make a player's first playthrough feel like a waste of time, since it becomes something that exists just to make good equipment for the next run. Unlike Escha & Logy and Shallie, there aren't enough new elements on the second run for it to not feel repetitive and tedious, especially since the New Game Plus bonuses aren't generous enough to significantly speed things up.
  • Another common criticism against the game is that it subjects you to event after event after event if you so much as even move to a single location, annoying players who really would like to get back to playing the actual game already.

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