TVTropes Now available in the app store!
Open

Follow TV Tropes

Atelier Totori: The Adventurer of Arland

Go To

  • Contested Sequel: While Totori Plus had given the game very few changes, Rorona Plus was a complete remake, making things awkward for people getting into the series with Plus or DX since they would start off with a game that had Meruru levels of quality of life only to hit a massive downgrade with Totori. This thus led to the question "is this enough to recommend that people play the games out of order?", since some people felt Rorona Plus had improved enough to make Totori feel like the downgrade instead, while others felt Totori still had enough improvements in its fundamentals made it worth the tradeoff to continue playing in story order.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse: While Rorona is generally treated as the face of the Arland subseries and one of the major representatives of the franchise as a whole, in terms of actual fan popularity, Totori consistently ranks higher than her own mentor and still performs very highly among all of the series protagonists.
  • Even Better Sequel: Prior to Rorona getting an overhaul in Rorona Plus, Totori was generally seen as a flat upgrade over Rorona in almost every way, adding Anti-Frustration Features to address some of the roughest parts of Rorona and featuring higher complexity in its game system and story writing. Even after Rorona Plus made things more contentious in regards to recommended play order, a large percentage of people will still argue that Totori improves on the core gameplay loop enough to offset the awkwardness that would otherwise come from the quality-of-life downgrade.
  • Fan-Preferred Couple: The game shows a clear attempt at pushing Totori and Gino Ship Tease, with them being Childhood Friends depicted in a parallel to Rorona and Sterk's own Ship Tease. While Gino/Totori does still have a fair share of popularity, Totori/Mimi ended up being overwhelmingly more so to the point Meruru and Lulua stopped having any interactions of significance between Gino and Totori at all while Mimi started being consistently portrayed as Totori's partner.
  • Memetic Mutation: "High Impact Sexual Violence"Explanation
  • Narm: The scene where Totori finds her mother's grave would probably hit a little harder if the soundbyte of Totori crying wasn't a loop that can come off as more jarring and annoying than anything else if you let the scene run for too long. The best way to avoid it the problem to set the dialogue to go on auto so you can get through it at the right pace.
  • The Scrappy: Fans of the Arland games hate Peter for being an annoying, creepy lech and a Lazy Bum.
  • Scrappy Mechanic:
    • Wholesale shops have a cap on how powerful your traits can be, and they'll 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.
    • Certain things that were improvements over the original Rorona are painfully difficult to deal with if your only experience with it was Rorona Plus:
      • The entire ending system 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 Multiple 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 replaying 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", "track 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". Hey, but at least you can skip the credits.
      • New Game Plus is extremely barebones, since 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.
  • That One Boss: The Flauschtraut, which isn't necessarily That One Boss if you synthesized well but is much harder than anything you'll have faced off before. Combined with it also being a normal ending requirement, it goes beyond the level of your usual Wake-Up Call Boss and all the way into being an easy run killer for anyone who isn't sufficiently prepared, something especially likely to happen with Atelier newcomers who aren't used to preparing for these kinds of things.
  • That One Level: The boat. There are a lot of things to be keeping track of and putting together in order to make it, and making it is so time-consuming that it can easily make or break a run because even if you don't run out of time to make it (something that'll happen if you underestimate how urgently you need to make it), if you make it too late, you won't have enough time to do everything that comes after the boat. Since it's required in order to not get a bad ending, it's probably the most frequent culprit behind players (especially Atelier newcomers) failing out of the game. This resulted in even the word "boat" becoming associated with a sentiment of dread among the fanbase, which wasn't helped when later games Escha & Logy and Firis added more to the line of cumbersome and potentially game-breaking large vehicles, making Totori come off as a pioneer of synthesizing hell.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The Chims are adorable, but they're a bit of a mixed bag over the 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. They still have a lot of use, since they can duplicate a powerful item or rare material perfectly instead of creating random versions, and you can have up to five by game’s end, but clearly enough players preferred the simpler Hom system because Hom was brought back for Meruru (though now with a pair), and Lulua upgrades Chim Dragon to a Hom-like position.
  • Values Dissonance: Much like Rorona, newer players to the Arland series are taken aback by the game's sexual humor in comparison to later entries as they usually involve jokes about women being sexually assaulted that have aged very poorly. There's a follow up to the similarly controversial scene from Rorona where Tiffani gets drunk again and molests both Totori and Filly, which is again played completely for laughs as the girls are traumatized. Melvia constantly asks if she can massage the other girl's breasts to help them grow more, with the "joke" being that Melvia has no sexual intentions but everyone would assume she does (and her excuse isn't... helping...). Finally the scene with the giant octopus groping both Sterk and Totori clearly is shot to emphasize a Panty Shot for Totori, though at least this time both genders are, at least in the narrative, equally traumatized by the experience. This scene seems to have been enough of a problem for even Gust themselves that when Lulua has a callback scene with a child of the same octopus, the sexual content is far more toned down.

Top