Marie no Atelier GB (Game Boy Color)

 I've been vaguely aware of the Atelier series since the PS2 era, though they've been around a while longer than that, but this is the first one of them I've actually played (well, I did play the spin-off Mana Khemia on PSP many years ago, but they're different enough that I can call this the first). With that in mind, I don't know all of the dfetails, but I think this is a sequel to another Marie no Atelier that was on consoles, and has you playing as the eponymous alchemist in her post-adventuring days.

 

Marie now runs a little alchemy shop (or Atelier, if you will) in a nice walled city with European-style buildings, making the whole affair somewhat reminiscent of Kiki's Delivery Service. One day, she's given custody of a little fairy boy, who she's going to teach alchemy and generally look after for four years. So, rather than a traditional RPG, this is, like the in-game alchemical syntheses, something like a combination RPG, business management, and even a tiny bit of Princess Maker. There are dungeons and combat, but you just send the fairy out to do those things (you can hire bodyguards and buy him better weapons and armour to help him though) and fetch back items for you.

 

So what do you actually do, if you're outsourcing the dungeons and combat? You go to the bar to accept requests for items, then you either have to get the required items from a dungeon, or synthesise them in your Atelier. Despite Marie presumably being a veteran of the business, and the one you're controlling, you can only syntheise items up to the skill level of the fairy. This is advanced by making the recipes to which you do have access, by handing in requests, and by buying textbooks from the local university.

 

Sometimes certain special events happen, like Marie's birthday, or the fairy going off to celebrate fairy new year with his family. There's also more unique and dramatic events too, like the fairy nursing an ill Marie back to health, or the fairy becoming depressed and surly, gradually being brought back to his normal cheery self through the aggressive application of love and care from Marie. Those descriptions might sound a little cynical and dismissive, but those moments were actually really nice, and I feel like this kind of emotional warmth isn't something you often see in videogames, especially ones on 8-bit hardware.

 

This is a fun and engrossing little game, that's definitely worth your time. You can tell the developers really tried their hardest to get the best game they possibly could out of the Game Boy Color, and their work totally paid off. This is easily one of the best games on the system, and while it's understandable why it never got an official translation on its release, it's still a shame that that didn't happen. Fans have, of course, stepped in to correct that mistake more recently. At the time of writing, I've only played through three of the game's four years, and once I'm finished, I'm probably going to look into the series' main entries too. It's especially recommended to those kinds of people who talk about wanting "cosy games", as it's definitely one of those.

Team Innocent: The Point of No Return (PC-FX)

 For years and years, there were rumours of an English patch for this game being in the works, and a lot of people (myself included) were excited for it. It was another actual exclusive game for the PC FX that was about to become playable! But there had been no news on it for a long time, and a lot of people (myself included) had mostly given up hope of it ever coming out. Until December 2024, when it finally did! 

 

If you don't already know, Team Innocent is an action-adventure game where you movie a character around various fixed-camera pre-rendered screens, picking up items and using them to solve simple puzzles. Like an Alone in the Dark (Resident Evil would be a better refreence point for most people, but Team Innocent predates it by a couple of years!), but with the main difference being that because the PC-FX isn't a system with great polygon-pusing power, your character (and the rarely-appearing enemies) is a 2D sprite, that scales larger and smaller depending on their distance from the camera. I can't remember any other game that uses sprite scaling in this way!

 

The setting isn't a horror one, but instead you're a member of a trio of special agents of the Galaxy Police sent to investigate a series of abandoned space stations. All three of you also happen to have been grown in the genetics lab of the game's main villain, Dr. Chronos Enhancer, who, despite being presumed dead, seems to be behind all the strange incidents going on now. Since the places you're investigating are abandoned, you don't meet other characters while you're there, but you do get to see a bunch of video recordings via the various magno-optical disc video players that are lying around. There's recordings of news broadcasts, captain's logs, last will and testaments, and so on. There is combat in the game, and while it's not very exciting, it's also pretty rare, and very brief when it does happen, so it's not too much of a dampener on the rest of the game.

 

The presentation is generally excellent, the only thing that really stadns out as not being great in this department is your character's low resolution sprite, and the way it constrasts with the very sharp high resolution backgrounds. But that's more than made up for with things like the aforementioned video players, which make use of the PC-FX's trademark high quality FMVs, the interfaces of the various computers you'll use for controlling various aspects of the stages themselves, and the cool little specific full-screen animations that play when you die in certain situations.

 

Like I said earlier, there's been a lot of anticipation for this translation of Team Innocent, and in my opinion, the wait has been worth it. I've played through about half of the game so far (I think), and I've been loving it. It's a little slow, and very short on the action, but it's also very charming and surprisingly gripping. If you're able to set up a PC-FX emulator, I definitely recommend you do so to play this game.