After taking a bit of a break since posting about Atelier Totori, I now finally took the time to play a bit of
Meruru (about a year and a half in right now).
And it feels like a pretty interesting game from a historical perspective. While both Rorona and Totori were pretty experimental in their own ways (and as a result were very different from other Atelier games I've played), Meruru feels like a sort of prototype for what the series would look like going forward.
Basically, it shifts the focus from interesting time management and alchemy and instead focuses more on character stories, while also introducing things like requests that boost friendship for specific characters.
In the time management aspect, it feels like it tried to combine the aspects of both Rorona and Totori. Rorona gave you a fixed set of missions to complete for every 3 month period. And while this had the advantage of always letting you know just how close you were to success/failure, it also made the game pretty linear, because you were always just doing the things the game told you to do. On the other hand, Totori was the exact opposite: you were given complete freedom to do whatever you wanted, but it came at a cost of always feeling like you weren't progressing fast enough and were falling behind.
So Meruru kind of tries to combine both of this, but somehow manages to take the worst of both systems. You now get periodic lists of requests like Rorona so you feel railroaded (except it's even worse here, because you have to finish all of the requirements to unlock the next tier, unlike in Rorona where you could skip some of them). That means that if you get a boring mission like "gather 2000 items", you can't just ignore it.
On the other hand, the game gives you a fixed requirement of making your kingdom reach 100000 (I think) population in 3 years, similar to the way Totori gives you a point requirement. Except that in Meruru, the points you earn from requests don't directly translate into progress for that mission. Instead, you use the points you get from requests to build buildings, which then increase population. But the thing is, the points don't map 1-to-1 with the population. For instance, a level 1 house might give you 1000 population and cost 100 points, while a level 2 house might give you 5000 population and cost 150 points. This means that you have no idea how close you are to hitting the population goal. For all I know, the next tier of housing might give me 50000 population or something. And since this means most of your population is going to come from late game buildings, you almost always feel behind. The game does give you yearly guidelines that you should be hitting, but those only slightly bandage up the core issue.
So yeah, basically you get the railroading from Rorona and the feeling of being rushed from Totori, but with none of the benefits of the two approaches. This sort of being unable to come up with sensible time limit systems seems to be something that will plague the franchise from this point out, at least from the ones I've played. It's kind of sad that Totori got the time limits so right, only for the very next game to screw it up.
Okay, it's actually not that bad, because you still do get some freedom, and there is at least the point chasing aspect from Totori still present here, which means you still have a reason to be as optimal as possible with your time. I just don't get the design decisions behind it.
So the other part of the game is a much bigger focus on story. There's a ton of characters here, both returning and new. And all of them seem to have way more story events than in previous games. There's even a huge amount of party members (I think some were DLC on consoles, but the PC version seems to include all of them by default). Okay, the previous games weren't exactly light on story, but this is the first time it feels like it's more important than the actual gameplay.
And in and of itself, that wouldn't be a bad thing. Atelier games usually aren't anything mindblowing, but they're still nice and relaxing. But the problem with Meruru is that, since it's the end of a trilogy, it decided to bring back almost every character from the previous two games. And this sadly includes the worst Atelier character ever made: Astrid. Except she's actually worse here than in Rorona.
Basically, being the terrible person she is, she decided to create a potion of youth that would permanently turn Rorona into a 14 year old. Which she describes as her "ideal age", which feels wrong to just type here. But it doesn't work, and makes Rorona 8 instead, so it's even worse. It's just probably the worst thing I've ever seen in Atelier, and the worst part is that nobody even seems to mind. At least Rorona had some sort of a reason for putting up with Astrid's bullshit (since she was the only alchemy teacher available). Meruru is literally a princess of her country, she shouldn't have to put up with this.
But the worst part of this plot point is that nobody in Atelier ages anyway (well, the female characters anyway). Totori in this game (19) looks basically exactly the same as she did in her own game (13). Rorona will probably look exactly the same in Lulua as she does in her game. And this is what a 40 year old woman looks like in this universe:
Other than that though, the story is fine, and I actually like the characters here a lot more than in most Atelier games. Meruru herself kind of sucks, but the other new characters here are much better than the ones introduced in Totori.
So yeah, overall, I'm kind of glad I played this, since it seems like such a landmark for the franchise. And it's still fun enough and better than a lot of the later games, so I'll still play through it. I'd even put it above Rorona, simply because it isn't super easy (and Astrid was in Rorona too, so I can't hold that just against Meruru). I just really don't get what they were thinking with that plot development or with the time limit system.
And finally, the game just feels really polished in a way most Atelier games don't. From the sheer amount of content to actually good looking models, and a lot of small touches like combat animations, it just feels much less like a budget product than the previous two games. Although I think a lot of that might be because I'm playing the remake version.