Exploring Time Progression And Friendship In Atelier Sophie

With each progressive Atelier game, Gust seems to reduce the impact that the traditional time limit has on how you progress and similar to Atelier Shallie, Atelier Sophie has abandoned the time limit as well as the in-game calendar. Instead of set assignments or specific goals to reach, you progress by discovering new recipe ideas that restore the memories of Sophie’s alchemy companion, Plachta.

Recipe ideas come to Sophie in various ways and you’ll be given brief hints on how to proceed. The inspiration for new ideas can come from simply finding a new material in the field, speaking to a certain character to spark a certain event or recreating a recipe you’ve already learnt with a new property. Since Atelier Sophie measures time by the hours rather than days, you’ll find that you can accomplish a lot in a short amount of time. Most items only take a few hours to create, while a journey to a location far away from Kirchen Bell might be only a two day round trip, something similar would have taken a week in previous titles.

While having the ability to freely set your own pace has it’s benefits, in that there’s need to panic over any approaching deadlines, by consequence of this, the way the story flows becomes disrupted. The deadline system meant everything continued at a consistent pace: the way the story unfolds, coming across new characters, upgrades to your party’s abilities, these came no matter what you did. Now you’re in control of what you do, you can go long stretches of gameplay without feeling like you’re making much progress. Some of the hints you’re given can be painfully vague, especially when you need a specific item you haven’t discovered before either it’s in the field or an enemy drop. As well as going by hourly time, introducing day and night to the series, there’s also different weather conditions implemented as well. Some items can only be found through specific conditions whether it’s night or raining and when you’ve got a lot of fields to look through, it can be time consuming to find the right area to go.

Time itself has become almost irrelevant and only really plays a part with character events that are dependent on your friendship with that character. The world of Atelier Sophie runs on a five day week and the last two days make up the weekend. There’s no longer any direct indication that you can trigger an event like the red exclamation marks in Atelier Escha & Logy, though you’re able to make some informed guesses. When looking at the town map, you’ll see heads of characters indicating where those characters are. If you see a character in an area they’re not normally in or a group of characters in an area together, chances are you’ll be able to trigger an event in those areas. Occasionally you’ll get an event where a character will mention meeting up within a certain time frame but these are pretty rare. Later in the game, you’ll be able to gift characters presents to increase your friendship level and characters will return the favour as well, bringing a present to your atelier. It’s good to see some extra effort put into the friendship system, even if it’s not a huge addition or overhaul.

If Gust wants to truly adopt a timeless system, they would be better off moving towards a more traditional RPG format, similar to their Atelier Iris games. Time limits or assignments fit the current Atelier format well and Atelier Sophie isn’t big enough of a departure from that to really feel like it fully fits in.