Aterlier Iris really wasn't that good of a game. I suppose I have only myself to blame, then, for playing the sequel, which is, in fact, even worse. I actually almost turned the game off before I had gotten ten minutes in. The game follows what is becoming a disturbing trend, setting the opening animated sequence to a terrible, terrible pop song that makes me think twice about playing the game every time I hear it. The beginning of the game itself features an extremely clumsy, totally nonsensical, and entirely bewildering set of vignettes which I assume are supposed to introduce the player to some of the characters and the world? As far as I was concerned, it was a series of random events and completely random dialog involving random people.

The game then got briefly into combat, which I could scarcely believe was for real. There have been plenty of RPGs in which I wished I could put combat on fast-forward by halfway through the game. It is entirely odd to finally be given such a combat system. Aterlier Iris 2's fighting plays like regular RPG fighting on fucking speed. It is possible to complete a battle involving your three member party and five enemies your level in about five seconds. It feels rather clumsy and amateurish, in practice. The whole game does, really.

The backgrounds are so low res that they're blurry, and it can be extremely difficult to tell what shit is even supposed to be sometimes. The pseudo-3D nature of the levels is pretty poor as well - it can be quite tough to determine where things are supposed to lie in space. The character sprites aren't much better, and some of the animation is fucking embarassing. There is one stage in which a fish swims in a cirlce in the background. There are precisely four frames for this animation. One where the fish is on the left, then down, then right, then up. Four. Fucking. Frames. I don't think I need to tell you how shit that looks. It does not look like the fish is swimming, it looks like he is magically disappearing and reappearing in four different spots. This shit is so poor it makes GI Joe reruns look big budget.

The localization appears to have been done on about the same amount of money as the background animation, too. Voice acting is solidly terrible, and I do believe I caught a few untranslated Japanese words. The sound effects, for monsters especially, are quite blatantly some guy making what he thinks are cat-monster noises into a microphone. At times very enthusiastically, and for far longer than it takes the cat-monster to attack. Far, far longer. It is awful.

As far as I'm concerned, there really is only one reason to play this game: item creation. I don't know why, but I love crafting. I loved tradeskills in World of Warcraft, and I love making items with Aterlier Iris's invitingly complex (but inadequately explained) synthesis system. The ability to customize the properties of my items - and potentially discover and create new ones - is somehow fun even when the combat system they're used in really isn't. I don't claim to understand it; I just find what joy in it I can.

Even that has been downgraded from the original Atelier Iris, however. In the first, there were two stores that you essentially created items for. The quality of those items determined how popular they were with customers, and so on. The stores stocked a lot of non-combat items, which significantly increased the number of items you could create and modify overall. I enjoyed that a great deal more than making items for combat use.

Really, I wish they would just put out a game that's purely crafting based. Fuck the stupid Japanese RPG plot, just give me a couple people trying to get rich off of making awesome items and selling them at stores. Let the overworld and combat be there to allow me to find new items and recipes with which to craft a silver-sequined gogo suit. I don't give a shit about the rest of the standard RPG trapings. Atelier Iris, you are fucking terrible at every aspects of the game save item creation. Focus on what you can do well. Please.