Finished Atelier Marie. It's amazing how much of the franchise's foundations are essentially complete way at the beginning of the series. Alchemy is fairly simple, with no traits or item quality, but otherwise the interface and mechanics are a very clear and not-too-distant predecessor to Atelier Rorona. Gathering items is extremely streamlined, but the same basic idea of "get a bunch of stuff and maybe run into monsters" applies. It's really easy to lose an hour or two in Marie, just like later Atelier games.
The main issue I had with it is that there's very little hand-holding. At the beginning of the game, Ingrid tells you you're in danger of failing out of alchemy academy, and that you have five years to shape up and make an alchemy item worthy of a graduate. She leaves you a bunch of notes about the core mechanics of the game. And that's it. What's the item you're supposed to make to convince Ingrid of your worth? This isn't made clear until very late in the game and only if you satisfy certain conditions that are never telegraphed. Why do you keep dying so often at the beginning and what can you do to get stronger? Not really obvious. Hell, it's not even clear what areas are relatively safe to go to and what areas are super dangerous. Distance from town turns out not to be a good indicator, because you seem to be expected to go to the Siegel Waterfall pretty early on despite it being one of the furthest dungeons from town.
There are also times when the barebones nature of the game's systems becomes more of a drag. Sometimes you're just waiting for certain events to happen, and you'll go to all the spots in town only to discover there's nothing for you to do. Sure, you can always synthesize something (and actually you can spend a ridiculous amount of time synthesizing things if you're not careful!), but besides that you may find yourself twiddling your thumbs more than you'd like. Later games got a lot better at weaving in skits with the various characters in the game. Marie locks a lot of these interactions behind seemingly arbitrary walls. For example, I know Enderk is a prominent character because of Nelke, but in my playthrough of Marie I never once got to recruit him into my party, despite being maxed out in both fame and knowledge as well as being max level. What do I need to do to befriend him? Beats me.
Despite all this, Marie's pretty good if you can get through the rough spots. This is one Atelier game I'd maybe recommend looking at a guide for, if only so you know about certain calendar dates that can make your life way easier. For example, there's one item you may need to make later on that requires an ingredient you can ONLY buy from a fairy that drops by between the 6th and 8th day of every even month. Yeah, that's super obvious. But once you've gotten a basic idea of what's expected of you, it's not too difficult to succeed. I ended up getting what I think is the second-best ending with eight months to spare.
In terms of real time, Marie only took me about nine hours, which is kind of surprising. I'm going to try to play Elie without a guide to see if it takes me significantly longer, but somehow I kind of doubt it.