Atelier Marie Remake: The Alchemist Of Salburg Review (Switch eShop)

The Atelier series has expanded at an impressive rate over the past couple of decades. The most recent game — Atelier Ryza 3 — is the 24th mainline entry in a series that has had a new release almost every year since 1997. However, due to the franchise's more niche appeal, not every entry has made it out of Japan due to localization costs.

Atelier Marie, the first entry in the series, was one such game that remained Japan-exclusive until now, with the release of Atelier Marie Remake: The Alchemist of Salburg finally bringing it to the West for the first time. Though it’s clear that this remake has been built on the foundation of a simple game released for the original PlayStation, Gust has nonetheless done a stellar job in modernizing its more antiquated components while enhancing its strongest features. Atelier Marie may not have set a new high-water mark for the series with this return, but it’s an impressively enjoyable RPG adventure that no fan of the series will want to miss out on

In keeping with series tradition, Atelier Marie follows a low-stakes, slice-of-life kind of narrative that’s mostly focused on the titular character’s personal plight. Marie is an aspiring alchemist currently enrolled in a university program offering her a comprehensive education in this arcane art, but… well, she’s not very good at it. In fact, Marie is so bad at practicing alchemy that she’s ranked at the very bottom of her class and faces expulsion from the program if her performance doesn’t turn around soon. The headmaster gives Marie one last chance and sets her up with her own atelier and tells her that she has five years to produce something truly excellent. If she fails, she’ll be expelled and her dreams will be crushed.

It’s not a particularly exciting premise, but what it lacks in depth it more than makes up for in charm. Marie’s bemused and anxious demeanor plays well with the characters she interacts with, and while there isn’t much to dive into regarding plot or character development, this remake did add in a handful of events scattered throughout the five-year term that help to better build out the relationships between Marie and the various potential party members. Those of you who play RPGs for the plot will likely find Atelier Marie to be rather thin, especially when comparing it to the more in-depth entries that came later in the series, but the overall atmosphere it creates is nonetheless quite welcoming.

The gameplay loop in Atelier Marie is kept extremely open-ended, which can feel a bit overwhelming at first. Day to day, there’s nothing specific that you have to do, leaving it up to the player to determine what their goal should be. Typically, a day is best begun by taking a trip down to the tavern to pick up a few randomly generated requests for certain items you can craft, and fulfilling these before their deadline passes will net you a bump to your reputation and some extra cash. Otherwise, you can wile away your days collecting materials and battling monsters in locales outside town and using your spoils from these adventures to craft new items and mixtures.

There aren’t really any ‘wrong’ answers about what you should do each day, and for this remake, Gust has helpfully added some ways to give you some direction. The main way it does this is via the occasional introduction of assignments from your headmaster, which tasks you with objectives like visiting a certain number of locales or crafting particular items. These only come around every few months, but they provide a decent gauge of where you should be at points throughout the year. Between these, you have access to a list of broader, more time-consuming objectives that grant you permanent stat boosts for hitting certain thresholds in exploration, combat, and crafting, which helps make it a little easier to make decisions on what to do when your quests run dry.

Something that’s central to all the interlocking gameplay systems in Atelier Marie is the concept of time management. That five-year deadline isn’t just a plot device for the story, it permeates almost everything you can possibly do. All activities have a time cost to them, which can range anywhere from a single day to more than a week. For example, if you want to head to a nearby forest to collect materials, not only will it take you a few days just to walk there, but it’ll cost you a day literally every time you gather from a collection spot or battle an enemy. Then when you get back, it’ll cost another few days when you synthesize the materials in a new mixture.

Weeks and months thus melt away in just minutes if not seconds of real-time, which can be a bit of an adjustment when deadlines that are ‘only’ a month or two away are imminently looming over you in no time at all. At the start, we found ourselves failing a few quests because their expiration dates sneaked up so quickly. After a while, we started to develop a sense of how long it’ll take to complete various tasks, and it got easier to plan out an agenda and better optimize time. Those who don’t like feeling the time pressure can play in an unlimited mode that removes the five-year deadline if they so choose, but you’re still always going to be scrambling to meet deadlines for quests that you accept.

Despite time management being a critical part of the experience, we were impressed by how laidback Atelier Marie feels to play. Even when you’re playing with the five-year deadline, it feels like the game is extremely forgiving in how strictly it expects the player to adhere to a schedule; this isn’t like Persona or Stardew Valley where there’s a constant, more intense pressure to get everything done. Missing a quest will only dock you a few reputation points that you can easily gain back, and the more important projects like your headmaster assignments are revealed to you well in advance of their deadlines. You’re always conscious of the passage of time, but not in such a way that it induces anxiety or takes away from the fun of the gameplay.

Combat has received some noticeable polish for this remake, and while it’s clearly not intended to be the centerpiece of the gameplay loop, we still appreciated what it brings to the table. Marie is always your lead, and you can have up to two additional party members that you hire from town, with their wages being dictated by the distance you have to travel to a location. When you’re out exploring gathering areas, enemies will be lazily roaming around and can be avoided or confronted. Battles play out in a turn-based style reminiscent of the Conditional Turn-Based Battle system in Final Fantasy X; characters and enemy turns are staggered on a timeline according to their speed stat. Party positioning plays an important role as you can have characters on the front, middle, or back lines, with each position giving boosts and cuts to certain stats.

Aside from a few boss encounters, most fights are over in a matter of seconds and require very little strategic planning; they do just enough to meaningfully break up the crafting grind without diverting your attention strongly. To help you blow through them a little faster, Gust has added an auto-battle option and you have the ability to triple the battle speed. With these features both turned on, battles are effectively over before they even start, but it’s nice for those times when you’re grinding low-level Punis and just want to get some drops.

Given that this is the first game in the franchise, the crafting system here is pretty simple, but that’s not to say that it isn’t engaging. Elements like item quality and traits don’t feature here and you don’t have something like that Tetris-like puzzle for placing ingredients from the Mysterious games—making a new craft is as simple as having the ingredients and pressing the button to make it. There’s still a slight bit of risk to it as you’re always spending however many days it takes to make everything and there’s a small chance you might fail if Marie is too fatigued. Later games certainly expanded the crafting system for the better, but what's here in Atelier Marie is still solid, if a bit unspectacular.

Another key feature of this remake is the introduction of some new mini-games to mix up the gameplay a bit. The requirements for each one are pretty rare, but these mini-games prove to be a simple and delightful surprise when they pop up. Each one is timed and scores you in some way, with the outcome potentially netting you some helpful rewards if you perform well. We encountered one instance where we crafted a wheel of cheese in the atelier, only for it to be stolen away by a mouse. This pulled us into a Bomberman-style maze where we had three minutes to catch the mouse, with greater rewards being offered for pulling off a quick capture. These mini-games are fairly fleeting, and they don’t have a ton of depth to them, but they nonetheless provide interesting distractions from the main gameplay loop.

Later games doubled down on the complexity and length common to JRPGs, Atelier Marie comes in at a very lean ten hours for a full playthrough, maybe fifteen if you’re really taking your time with it. You can always replay it to see if you can get an alternate ending, but in some ways, Atelier Marie feels more like an appetizer than it does a main course. Whether this is a positive or a negative ultimately depends upon your tastes, but we appreciated the opportunity to engage in a concise and focused RPG experience. At any rate, just bear in mind that this one likely won’t occupy you for very long.

Regarding visuals, Atelier Marie’s presentation seems to have taken inspiration from the art styles of games such as Bravely Default II and the Link’s Awakening remake. All the characters and enemies have a squat, chibi design with a sort of plasticky look to them, paired with modern lighting and depth-of-field effects that give environments an extra degree of realism. This is coupled with some impressively sharp, hand-drawn character art for dialogue sequences that give each character a little more detail than their chibi model allows for. It’s not the most visually stunning game on the Switch, but that diorama-like approach looks great in motion and feels fitting for the overall tone.

For the soundtrack, you can pick between the original music or a remastered soundtrack made for this remake, and both are great options. The remastered music adheres quite closely to the source material, but it has a slightly more playful aesthetic that fits well with the toylike look of the visuals. Meanwhile, the original music has been cleaned up a bit and gives everything a slightly more retro feel. Either way, it’s a chipper and bouncy collection of tunes that do a great job of feeding into that friendly atmosphere.