Video Game / Atelier Rorona: The Alchemist of Arland

aka: Atelier Rorona

Let's make tomorrow into something even more fun
With a mysterious recipe
(Clockwise from front: Rorona, Cordelia, Lionela, Tantris, Astrid, Gio, Sterk, Iksel)

A small kingdom built upon ancient ruins several hundred years ago. It was a peaceful kingdom; isolated from an advanced world.

One day, ancient relics, called the Machines, were discovered among the ruins. The people of Arland had no idea what to do about them at first. Then, a traveler who just happened to be visiting the kingdom at the time showed everyone how to use the Machines. Over the next few years, Arland prospered dramatically, thanks to the Machines... Which enabled all citizens to live a life of leisure and luxury.

To thank the traveler, the reigning King granted the traveler one wish. The traveler said... "Then allow me to run an alchemy workshop in this kingdom." Many years have passed since then...

Atelier Rorona: The Alchemist of Arland is the eleventh mainline entry in Gust Corporation's Atelier series. Released in 2009 for the PlayStation 3 and featuring character designs by Mel Kishida (known for his work on Hanasaku Iroha, Heaven's Memo Pad, and later Gust's Blue Reflection series), it was the first Atelier title to be made in full 3D and is generally considered to be the first title in the "modern" series.

One day, a young apprentice alchemist named Rorolina Frixell ("Rorona" for short) receives a message from the government: due to recent advancements in technology, they will no longer support the art of alchemy and have made plans to shut her workshop down. The only way that Rorona can change their mind is by carrying out a series of tasks over the next three years designed to prove that alchemy can still be relevant in an era that won't be in Medieval Stasis for much longer. With her alchemy teacher being too lazy and apathetic to care, it falls to Rorona to develop her alchemy skills and save her workshop from closure. In doing so, Rorona bonds with the townspeople around her, getting to know about their personal troubles and aspirations while coming to understand the meaning of working to help others.

After the series' attempt at a Darker and Edgier Genre Shift with the Iris and Mana Khemia games resulted in some of the franchise's worst sales at the time, Gust decided to have the series go back to its original roots as a Slice of Life Item Crafting series. As such, Rorona serves as a functional callback to the original Atelier Marie, being a Time Management Game with a low-stakes Slice of Life story and a heavy focus on Character Development. The result was a breakout hit that revitalized the series, leading to two immediate sequels in the following "Arland" subseries (Totori and Meruru) as well as a long line of successors that would follow in its wake. Another sequel featuring Rorona's daughter, Atelier Lulua, was released in 2019.

Being a landmark title for the Atelier series, Rorona has seen quite a few rereleases:

• A remake titled Atelier Rorona Plus (titled New Atelier Rorona: Story of the Beginning in Japan) was released for the PlayStation Vita and PlayStation 3 in 2013. While Gust had been making Updated Re-release "Plus" versions of their games for the Vita, Rorona was in need of a more significant graphics and system overhaul to be on par with later titles, so it was given a full remake and even accompanied by a PS3 version. It also adds extra party members and an additional "Overtime" session taking place after the events of the main game, featuring sequel protagonists Totori and Meruru arriving via Time Travel and adding events that help connect Rorona's story to its sequels.
• A version of Rorona Plus for the Nintendo 3DS was also released in 2015, featuring a heavily simplified battle system and a short prequel story "Atelier Astrid" that serves as A Day in the Limelight for Rorona's mentor Astrid. Unlike other releases, this one was never released outside Japan.
• An Updated Re-release of Plus titled Atelier Rorona DX was released in 2018 as part of the Atelier Arland Series Deluxe Pack for the PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Steam. The contents are largely untouched from the PS3 version of Rorona Plus, but it includes all of its Downloadable Content by default and some minor additional elements.

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Atelier Rorona contains examples of:

• Ambidextrous Sprite: Talking sprites are generally drawn with the character at a three-quarter view facing the left side of the screen, so if the character is moved to the left, they're flipped horizontally to face the right side. This is especially glaring because Rorona is usually placed on the left during dialogue scenes, but her design is not symmetrical, meaning the player will be seeing Rorona's hat ornament and dangling hair on the wrong side for most of the game.
• Age Lift: Rorona, Cordelia, Iksel, Sterk, Tantris, and Lionela are all three years older in the NISA English version than in the original Japanese release.
• Amicable Exes: "Amicable" might be pushing it, but although Sterk and Astrid are exes, Astrid enjoys teasing Sterk about their past relationship and dramatically gushing about what they used to do together. Despite Sterk's exasperation with her, he still diligently files her professional requests on her behalf and expresses a sentiment that he doesn't want to see her atelier get shut down.
• Beach Episode: Astrid forcibly turns an outing to Nabel Lake into this, gathering all of the girls and getting them into swimsuits. Plus's Overtime adds another one at the actual beach.
• Black Comedy: For a game that's mostly a low-stakes Slice of Life story about appreciating the people around you, Rorona sure has a lot of it: Astrid's penchant for Comedic Sociopathy, Rorona creating a living pie that she still plans to eat, the fact Rorona's parents care more about traveling than her, and more. Some of this is taken much more seriously in Lulua.
• Call-Forward: Plus adds some scenes that connect the story to the sequels, such as depicting how the Adventurer's Guild in Totori came to be and showing Gio in the process of considering dismantling the monarchy.
• Cast from Hit Points: All special attacks are like this in the original version. Plus does away with this by adding in MP bars.
• Central Theme: Forming bonds with others, getting involved with their lives, and helping them out of kindness. Rorona being The Heart is how she ends up getting her atelier to success over three years.
• Cooking Duel: Iksel starts one with Rorona in his character event chain, with Hom as the judge.
• Cutting Off the Branches: Since there are a ton of different ways events can go, it's possible for one playthrough to be completely different from another, but the sequels confirm certain versions of events to be canon: Rorona beats Sterk at the Royal Festival at least once, her item turned in for the final assignment is the Ruby/Philosopher's Pie, and the Astrid ending is canon (thus also meaning Rorona got high evaluations on all of her assignments, achieved high popularity, and went through everyone's character event stories).
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • The seventh assignment takes place during the month of summer and involves Rorona making Ice Bombs and Spring Cups to help people get through the summer heat... but since an assignment takes place over three months, it's already fall by the time of the evaluation. Sterk is embarrassed and promises to not mess up like that again.
  • Rorona, being an airhead, is especially prone to this. In Sterk's event chain, Rorona ends up taking Sterk with her to the Ster Highlands despite him having warned her to stay away from it, and when Sterk asks her why she'd brought him with her knowing he'd get mad at her for it, Rorona admits that she hadn't thought about it that far and had invited Sterk out of habit because that's what she always does when she goes out.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Sterk and Gio have the highest hiring fees in the game (something Rorona holds a Petty Childhood Grudge over Sterk for in following games). This can make hiring them prohibitive for a player in the early game, but they have the skills and power to match. Plus adds Astrid, who's this multiple times over as the unambiguously most terrifying party member available... at an equally terrifying cost of 9980 cole per outing.
• Dub-Induced Plot Hole: NISA's English version of Iris had given the Philosopher's Stone a Dub Name Change to "Ruby Prism", a change that the Rorona localization also kept for consistency. The problem is that much of the humor regarding Astrid being flabbergasted about Rorona using the ultimate goal of all alchemists to make a pie doesn't really make sense anymore, because there's no explanation as to what's so special about this rock called a Ruby Prism. Lulua goes ahead and makes it the Philosopher's Pie again, restoring the joke but resulting in an Inconsistent Dub.
• Dub Name Change: In an inversion of Clean Dub Name, Esty's name was changed from "Esty Erhard" to "Esty Dee" in English.
• Elemental Tiers: The strongest attack item in the base game, Tera Bomb, is fire-elemental.
• Final Boss: Rorona is notable for not having one at all; it has two high-level enemies required for some late-game materials and the Adventurer Ending, but it's theoretically possible to finish the entire game with only three plot-manded battles on your record. If anything, the Final Boss could be considered to be the final assignment.
• Friend to All Living Things: Tantris's introduction is a reference to the trope, as well as a subversion since he's almost entirely unlike the average example of the trope.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Plus allows the player to manually select which ending they want out of the ones they've fulfilled the requirements for (a quality of life update that was added in Ayesha and after). Some of these endings involve Rorona either failing to make her atelier popular or focusing too much on popularity without improving her alchemy skills. For the sake of convenience, the player can still pick one of these endings even if Rorona has enough skill and/or popularity to get a better ending, so it's possible to proceed with an ending that shows Rorona in significantly more dire straits than the player had gotten her in.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: Food and drinks can be consumed instantly as healing items. Iksel can essentially feed a party member a full meal in a matter of seconds as a healing ability.
• King Incognito: Gio is none other than the king of Arland himself, as well as the one who set up Rorona's assignments. He likes wandering around a lot and is too lazy to be bothered to hang around the castle, annoying Sterk very greatly, but he's otherwise a Reasonable Authority Figure.
• Idle Animation: Rorona yawns if she's left alone for a little while, and more animations were added in Plus.
• Improbable Weapon User: Most of the game's playable characters manage to avoid this, using swords, staves, knuckles and the like... but then there's Lionela with her puppets and Iksel with a Frying Pan of Doom.
• Is It Something You Eat?: Rorona's reaction to creating a Ruby Prism? It would make a good pie filling. Lulua indicates that said pie — a pie with a rock smack in the middle of it that'll break your teeth if you take a bite — was canonically the item she turned in for her final assignment as her greatest creation.
• Item Crafting: As with the series brand, Rorona puts the mechanic front and center again, using a somewhat updated version of the system found in Viorate (the last game to have also heavily been centered around crafting).
• Let's Meet the Meat: When Rorona creates the Living Pie, she hadn't thought through the implications of giving life to something she planned to eat alive, so she's taken aback when it proves unwilling to cooperate and decides to fight back for its life.
• Likes Older Men: Cordelia is very taken by the 48-year-old Gio and considers a gap of over thirty years to be "not bad". He himself finds this to be somewhat discomforting. Rorona is implied to have developed a Precocious Crush on Sterk in his ending, but since he ends up going on to be her full-on Ship Tease partner in future games, it's hard to say whether this would have applied to anyone else besides him.
• Lost Technology: The game opens up with a backstory of Arland containing ruins of advanced technology that was left behind by an ancient civilization. They were excavated and reversed-engineered by a passing traveler who showed the people of Arland how the tech worked, which in turn made their daily lives easier. This doesn't get explored in much depth in this game and is usually treated as more of a Funny Background Event (a digital screen in the middle of a town that otherwise looks like Victorian Britain) or a Riddle for the Ages, but it returns as a major plot point in Lulua.
• Low Fantasy: The only "standard" elements of low fantasy missing are the "grittiness" and the low magic. Even by Atelier standards, Rorona is as non-epic as a videogame can get: the setting is dominated completely by humanity, and the setting of the game is tightly confined to Arland City and its environs within no more than a week or two's march.
• Mistaken for Cheating: When Hom is introduced to Rorona's parents as her sibling, her parents immediately jump to the wrong conclusion and start getting in a fight over this. They have to be calmed down by Astrid before they start attempting a divorce.
• Mooks: Rorona is still the only modern Atelier game where the protagonist can fight actual humans as normal field encounters (bandits in this case). Let's not think too hard about whether that was fatal or not.
• Multiple Endings: If you count every possible ending, there are effectively up to a whole 14. In actuality, it's more accurate to describe them as eight endings, with the True, Good, and Normal versions having specific character variants:
  • Bad Ending: Obtained if Rorona fails any assignment. The atelier is closed, a factory is built where it used to be, and Astrid and Rorona are forced to leave town and never come back.
  • Normal Ending: Obtained if Rorona receives a high number of stars on her assignments but has a low popularity level. Rorona will keep the workshop but be unable to turn it into a profitable business out of not getting enough customers, and she refuses to do the few that she does get because they aren't challenging her enough. She decides to go off on a journey instead, and either Tantris or Lionela can join her.
  • Good Ending: Obtained if Rorona received a low amount of stars on her assignments but had a high popularity level. Rorona will be swarmed with customers at her workshop due to her popularity, but her low alchemy skills result in her blowing up her assignments on a regular basis. Sterk (having been told to "take care of Rorona" by Astrid) may move in to help her, or Rorona may close the workshop and work for Iksel's restaurant instead.
  • True Ending: Obtained if Rorona receives a high amount of stars on her assignments and had a high popularity level. Rorona will be unable to keep up with the huge amount of orders she receives from the city's populace. Cordelia may take over as the workshop manager to help stem the flow, or Gio may appoint her as the royal alchemist so that she can work in peace.
  • Pie Master Ending: Obtained if Rorona synthesizes all of the pies with 80 quality or higher. Rorona feels unfulfilled and decides to do what she really wants to do: open a pie shop instead. Half of the pies are still made with alchemy.
  • Adventurer Ending: Obtained by finishing Cordelia's events and having both of them reach Adventurer level 50, defeating the Iron Giant and Demon, and flagging all of the True Ending requirements. Rorona continues working as usual, but she and Cordelia seem to be more preoccupied with slaying huge monsters than anything else.
  • Rich Ending: Obtained if Rorona collects over 1 million cole (something that will most likely require being on a New Game Plus run). Rorona decides to take a break and lie around all day in her giant pile of money. Everyone else is concerned but decides to let her rest after all the hard work she'd done. The narration says that she'll eventually get back to work... probably.
  • Astrid Ending: Obtained by finishing every character's event chains and flagging all of the True Ending requirements. With Rorona's business booming, she and her friends continue with their daily lives until a rival atelier pops up in town. The atelier turns out to be run by Astrid, who'd returned from her journey after her business had done better than expected, and she and Rorona have a tearful reunion. Totori confirms this to be the canon ending.
  • Plus also has two endings for Overtime, one where the alchemists succeed at making the True Dragon Hourglass and one where they don't.
• Medieval Stasis: Defied. The game's story revolves around the fact that it's in a transition period between eras, and things like the monarchy, nobility, and knighthood are starting to be treated as outdated. Rorona's job is to make sure her atelier doesn't go the same way.
• My Name Is ???: Every character other than Astrid is called ??? before their names are given, but special note goes to Sterk in the opening cutscene: "???" knocks before entering the shop, but doesn't give his name before his business is concluded and he leaves, and it takes him introducing himself for the ??? to change, instead of the second ??? giving his name as "Sterk".
• New Game Plus: After beating the game with a cleared save, the player can start a new game with all of the money from the last game. In the original game, this only applied to money and functionally only served to make the early game easier and contribute to building up for the Rich Ending, but Plus allows the player to transfer equipment and decorations as well, saving the player a lot of time (both in-game and in real-life playtime).
• Noodle Incident: If you miss the deadline for an assignment, Astrid will bail Rorona out by having her show Sterk an old letter Astrid had been holding onto. We're not told what the contents are, but they're apparently so embarrassing that upon recognizing it, Sterk panics, fudges the results, and tells Rorona that he won't let her do that again. Based on the context, it's inferable that it was probably a Love Letter he'd sent Astrid in their youth, an implication that's further reinforced in the 3DS version's "Atelier Astrid" scenario.
• No Antagonist: Technically speaking, there's Meredith, but he's such a Harmless Villain that it's hard to see him as a driving force behind the plot, especially since it's acknowledged that Gio could technically just call off the order to shut down the workshop if Rorona really wanted him to. The story ends up being more about Rorona's struggle to meet the demands of the people around her.
• Parental Neglect: Rorona's parents are constantly traveling despite the fact their daughter is working by the skin of her teeth to not get run out of town, and if she does get kicked out, they do absolutely nothing about it. One has to wonder how her parents can go on so many trips without showing any concern for her well-being. Despite Astrid being the epitome of Brilliant, but Lazy, it's clear she's doing a much better job raising Rorona than they are.
• Passing the Torch: In fact, Astrid's "laziness" was actually her plan to put Rorona in a position where she could run the atelier all by herself, allowing Astrid to fully transfer it to her and leave town to rebuild her own career. The first major hint towards this is at the beginning of the final year, when Astrid suddenly asks Rorona "do you like alchemy?" out of nowhere as if wanting to confirm Rorona would be happy with continuing with it as a career, but it's not until the very end of the game when she reveals the truth outright.
• Playable Epilogue: Overtime in Plus basically serves as this, since the only concrete goal over a whole year is to make the True Dragon Hourglass, and the schedule is significantly more lenient while there are only a few scattered, non-plot-impactful character events. It's also not possible to continue character event chains that were left incomplete in the main game.
• Production Throwback: Being a game made for Revisiting the Roots, Rorona pulls very strongly from the original Marie in terms of how it handles its format, party structure, and calendar system. In particular, the final assignment is for Rorona to show the palace the greatest item she can come up with, the same as Marie's overall goal in her game.
• Revisiting the Roots: The game was intended to be this for the Atelier series. After the more standard "save the world" style of the Iris and Mana Khemia games, Rorona returns to the Time Management Game gameplay and Slice of Life storytelling used by the first five games. The result was successful enough for the rest of the series to follow, thus re-solidifying the series' brand as a Slice of Life series.
• Schizo Tech: A little bit, and justified by the backstory: the engineers of Arland have begun to comprehend the technology left behind in the ruins of an ancient civilization which dot the kingdom. You can find a few odd bits of high-technology that have been made to work in the city, such as the holographic bulletin board in the city square.
• Schmuck Bait: At one point, Hom gives Rorona a bottle with a label saying not to open it. If you follow the warning (which, of course, you really should), Meredith lampshades this by commenting that most kids would do the opposite of what they're told.
• Ship Tease: Rorona is given a mild amount with most of her party members: Iksel is a Childhood Friend who's commented as being Like an Old Married Couple with Rorona in his ending, Tantris is implied to have feelings for her, Cordelia and Lionela can be argued to possibly as well, and Rorona is hinted to have a Precocious Crush on Sterk in his ending, which involves him moving in while he's at it. Gio is the only one whose treatment is completely neutral, since he's basically just a Reasonable Authority Figure who cares about Rorona for perfectly understandable reasons. Future games shift the Ship Tease focus entirely to Sterk.
• Shown Their Work: That scene where Rorona discovers to her horror what homunculi are supposed to be made from? The recipe is based on a real-world alchemical text by Paracelsus.
• Street Urchin: Lionela starts the game out as a homeless street performer with only the (relatively ragged) clothes on her back and her puppets for company. She's also heavily depressed to the point she's projecting split personalities on her puppets and magically animating them because she doesn't have faith she can make actual friends. The player can, of course, decide how much they wish to interact with Lionela and help her out of her situation.
• Suicide Attack: The Tera Bomb is an incredibly powerful weapon that can make the rest of the game into a cakewalk if made well... but if you don't make it carefully with a range-narrowing trait, it'll kill your party too.
• Super-Deformed: The original release of the game has all of the 3D character models in this style. The 2D art used for the talking sprites and character stills use normal proportions, and Plus updates all of the models to be full-scale.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: At one point, Rorona asks Sterk if knights like him do things like saving princesses and slaying dragons, to which he replies that she must have read too many fantasy books... before telling her that it's also why he wanted to be a knight in the first place, only to be disappointed when it turned out to be a lot of paperwork, dealing with higher-ups he doesn't like, and not getting to use his battle skills much during peacetime. Nevertheless, he's still very attached to his job and devoted to the fundamental principle of protecting others.
• Taking the Bullet: Near the end of Sterk's event chain, he ends up shielding Rorona with his own body when she lets her guard down around a dragon. He ends up in the hospital for three months while Rorona is deeply remorseful, but he treats it as something to be proud of because it means he got to be a real Knight in Shining Armor by protecting a girl with his own body. This incident ends up coming back with a vengeance in Lulua, and by that time, it's not treated as funny anymore.
• Tiered by Size: Effects are tiered by size, X being a contraction of Extra and S being a contraction of Small. For Health Recovery:
  XS: Recovers target's HP by a very small amount.
  S: Recovers target's HP by a little.
• Time Management Game: After five games of its absence, Rorona restores the in-game clock and spans the course of three years. The calendar of events is noticeably more complex than that of most Atelier games, and it takes such a Wide-Open Sandbox approach to its events that a large fraction of events will be inevitably missed on a given run.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Rorona loves pies, and there's even an ending that has her becoming the best pie chef in Arland. That said, many of her pies are... not what would normally be considered food, and she even tosses the Philosopher's Stone itself in a pie!
• Underwater Ruins: The Lost City. Like with the Deep Sea Ruins in Mana Khemia 2: Fall of Alchemy, the player needs to make Air Drops so that they'll be able to breathe underwater.
• Vague Stat Values: Effects are described with general adjectives. For example, the tiers of HP Recovery as described in Details:
  XS: Recovers target's HP by a very small amount.
  S: Recovers target's HP by a little.
• Victorian Britain: This is the general model for Arland's atmosphere and architecture.
• Warp Whistle: Eventually, Rorona will be able to create and wholesale a Wind Rider from one of the recipe books. This item will allow the player to leave a dungeon without taking up the days it would normally take to travel back, which will end up saving a lot of time the player could use for other things.
• Work Off the Debt: This is the reason Rorona's livelihood depends on the atelier surviving even though it's technically Astrid's: Rorona is working for her in order to pay off a debt she'd incurred when Astrid had cured her parents from a near-fatal disease, so if the atelier is shut down and Astrid is run out of town, she's going to take Rorona with her. The 3DS version's "Atelier Astrid" scenario reveals that Astrid won't consider the debt repaid unless Rorona works for "three thousand years", basically making Rorona her slave for life. At the end of the game, Astrid reveals that her real plan was to use the ordeal to transfer the atelier to Rorona entirely, meaning the entire thing was just a pretense.
• You Lose at Zero Trust: After Lionela first arrives in town, if the player doesn't immediately get her friendship level high enough, she will move on to another town and never return to Arland.

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