This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Space Drake: Everything below aside,I've gone ahead and put the fact that Liese Randel is the Princess of the Kingdom of Randel in spoilertags, as, well, we're rather starting in the middle here with the upcoming release of Atelier Annie, and the promotional website makes no mention of it; since it'll likely be a bit of a surprise for new players of Annie who may not be familiar with other games in the franchise, I'd like to keep this one fact spoilered, at least for now. (Should Atelier Lise Liese ever make it over to the States the tags can be removed, since the "spoiler" is revealed in the opening movie of Liese. For now, though, it seems better to be safe than sorry.)
Speaking of which: while NISA's choice of name for Liese makes sense from a pronunciation and cultural standpoint ("Liese" being the proper spelling of that name in German), it does make the English title of リーズのアトリエ a little fiddly, since previous material has given the name as "Lise". I'm going to render it as Atelier Liese unless anyone has strenuous objection to this, just so people are clear who the main character of Annie's prequel is at a glance.
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Space Drake: Another point of discussion to consider: now that we seem to be getting into producing a page for each individual game that comes out in America (save for Mana Khemia, which shares a page between the two games), is it perhaps time to trim the trope list for the index here ala the Shin Megami Tensei "main" trope page? That page only has tropes that apply to multiple games; it might be wise to prune the main Atelier Series page similarly, putting only tropes that apply to multiple games on or games that aren't available outside of Japan yet (and the manga, since it really isn't worth creating its own trope page for). Any objections to this plan?
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Plasma Wing: There seems to be one user on this site who insists that the Atelier series created Item Crafting, and that other jRPGs that use similar systems are just following the leader. I'm not so sure about that. At the very least, Star Ocean, which came out in 1996 for the SNES, had an item crafting system. I'm wondering if the troper who keeps mentioning this has his/her facts straight.
Space Drake: That would, in fact, be me. And I am actually quite confident in making the assertion.
The crafting system included in Star Ocean was a very, very simple affair; you could only modify a few weapons in a specific way. Atelier Marie was, in fact, the very first Japanese-produced role playing game to feature a "Western" crafting system of similar depth to the systems found in Western games such as Ultima VII (and note that I'm not saying it invented all item crafting, far from it; crafting had been a component in the Western market going all the way back to Gygax's Chainmail and saw its culmination in U7).
I do, in fact, encourage research on this issue. Atelier Marie was released on May 23rd, 1997. From that date, compare games that came before and then after that date. One or two games with minor crafting systems may exist, but as far as I have been able to find from extensive fact-checking, not a thing on the Japanese market matched Marie for complexity or focus on crafting. Meanwhile, titles after this date begin to include crafting more and more prominently; as pointed out, by 2004 Dragon Quest VII used a system of "combine this, this and this item in a pot to make this item, which can then maybe be used to make this item as well" combined with a system of reading books for clues to new recipes that seems all but lifted directly from the Atelier model.
Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc?
Well, maybe. We'll never be able to get every game developer in existence to admit that they were influenced by Atelier. But with the number of games featuring crafting in today's market, and with the number that refer to what occurs as "alchemy" even, the evidence begins to become fairly prominent. It does seem rational to say that Atelier had a profound impact on its industry, even if the series itself was never a blockbuster.
I can go back and edit the entries in question if you wish to reflect the fact that the assertions may contain a tiny seed of doubt, although I remain very, very confident in the fundamental assertion that Atelier Marie and its descendants influenced the way the Japanese game industry approached Item Crafting.
