YMMV / Atelier Totori: The Adventurer of Arland

• Animation Age Ghetto: Quite possibly the only reason this got an R18+ rating in Australia, when you think about it. There have been films released there that contain actual sexual violence that are rated lower, so it's likely the ratings board just thought people would see the bright, colourful graphics and assume the game is for kids, so they slapped on an R rating with flimsy justification to be sure.
• Contested Sequel: Modern players will usually pick up the Plus versions of the Arland games via the DX bundle and play them in chronological order... not knowing that the first game in the set actually came out after the fourth Atelier game of the PS3 era and was essentially a complete overhaul that included a massive amount of Anti-Frustration Features taken from both Meruru and Ayesha that had been missing from the original PS3 Rorona. Then you get to Totori which is basically a slightly updated version of a game that still maintains a lot of the awkward elements of the original version of Rorona and it’s much simpler combat and alchemy systems. While Totori is a massive improvement in every way over vanilla Rorona, modern players will never know that. Hence new players to the series often find this game to be the most frustrating to play in the entire Arland series even if it’s accepted that the story and characters are great and the wide open exploration theme is a big upgrade over its highly structured and simpler predecessor.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Gino/Totori for het fans and Totori/Mimi for yuri fans.
• Heartwarming Moments: Gino declaring he'll protect Totori from a dragon that's as big as the two combined. Though it was Mel playing a prank, she quickly says that was pretty cool of him.
  • Many of the endings that aren't moments of funny are these, but the two greatest examples are the True End and Melvia's end: In the former, Gisela returns home. In the latter, Mel and Totori take the rest of her family to visit Gisela's grave.
  • Totori's friendship with Gino in general. Gino was the only one who encouraged Totori to become an adventurer, and she never even once mentions her desire to become one, but Gino just knows and eventually convinces her to get an adventurer's license with him. If it weren't for him, Totori might not have ever become an adventurer.
• Memetic Mutation: High Impact Sexual Violence! ^Explanation Due to Australia's ratings board giving the game an infamous R18+ rating and slapping said tag out of implied sexual implications, the fandom was quick to pick this up and memed the hell out of it to mock Australia's flawed rating system. The Australian government eventually backpedaled on this decision and changed the tag to "references to sexual violence", but the meme lived on to expand across the entire Atelier Series as well as other anime-related works.
• Moe: Totori.
• Narm: The scene where Totori finds her mother's grave is ruined by the incredibly short looped soundbyte of Totori crying.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The entire ending system, while still less painful than the original version of Rorona, is impossible to work out without a guide. Each of the multiple endings has a "priority" when you unlock it, but you're not told when this happens. If you meet the conditions for one of the endings, it will check against the priority list and if you unlocked one with higher priority, it'll overwrite any other ending you've already met the conditions for. This means forcing you to juggle between possibly dozens of save files, or replay through New Game Plus several times with absolutely precise micromanagement just to get 100% Completion. The requirements themselves are often esoteric at best and often require you to do things like bench Gino early in the game so he doesn't get past level 25, tracking the total number of pies eaten by every single Chim and turning them all off before they eat too many, or avoiding synthesizing items in Atelier Rorona when you hit Alchemy Level 50. Compare that to the Updated Re Release of Atelier Rorona: The Alchemist of Arland, which due to being released after Ayesha simply borrowed its very forgiving system which conveniently lets you choose any ending whose requirements you've met. At least you can skip the credits.
  • New Game Plus is extremely barebones - you only keep your equipped gear and money. Neither is all that useful in making second runs more efficient as the biggest obstacle in Totori is the massive amounts of time every action takes... and you can't carry over your gathering items that would, say, allow you to take less time on harvesting or cut down the number of days needed for traveling. Obviously being able to beat up enemies quickly speeds up your gameplay in real time but combat always takes the same amount of in-game time. One-shotting every low level boss and minion isn’t as helpful as you’d hope. Both the money and gear prep only come into use when you tackle endgame content and you won’t have needed to waste time making the gear the first time nor will you worry about being able to afford the wholesaled items you’ll want for the dungeons.
  • Wholesale shops actually have a cap on how powerful your traits can be and will even delete a trait if it's considered to be powerful. This means you either need to waste precious time making lots of copies of your ultimate items, have the Chims do so very slowly, or deliberately nerf your items to not possess traits that can’t be wholesaled.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The Chims are adorable but a bit of a mixed bag over Hom from the previous game. They can only improve by simply working a lot, they require a consumable resource to continue working, and they can only gather or craft copies of items you already have in your inventory. On the other hand, the latter change makes certain tasks simpler since they will duplicate a powerful item or rare material perfectly instead of creating random versions. This is great for getting free ingots or cloths with perfect stats (especially since the wholesale shops don’t stock them!). Furthermore you can have up to five by game’s end, making a small army of duplicators vs only one Hom. They still have a lot of use, but clearly enough players preferred the simpler Hom system because Hom was brought back for Meruru (though now with a pair.)

---