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Marie no Atelier (or Atelier Marie) is a game for Sony's
Playstation released by the japanese company GUST in 1998. It was highly
successful in Japan, at times even reaching #3 in the Top 10 of the best
sold games (just behind FF VII and some Beat'em Up whose name I forgot).
The game, as far as I understood it, centers on Marlone (called Marie), an alchemist-in-training in the town of Salburg (the whole gamesetting has a decidedly 'Medieval Ages in Germany'-flavor). With her teacher Ingrid gone, Marie has five years, not only to get accepted into the mighty Academy, but also to cater to all the alchemistic needs of the town. People ask you for help of all kinds, and Marie has to get ingredients and recipes for various alchemistic mixtures. Aside from that, there's a lot of personal interaction, as the various other characters in the game follow their own agendas, sometimes to help Marie, sometimes to tease her, or even to get her out of the way.
The game plays like some fairytale from the Medieval ages (just haven't found the Knight-in-shining-armor yet), being definitely an RPG, with no action sequences whatsoever. The design is really well done, using conventional isometric 3D and chibi-versions of the characters for moving around in houses, towns and for combat scenes, if talking to a character you get a partially animated full screen picture and *lots* of speech output (which is, thanks to the seiyuu, exceedingly cute, for example, if Marie asks you what you wish to do in the Game Setup Menu...).
This could be one great game to play, if only it wouldn't use such complicated Japanese (an English version is rather unlikely).
NB: There is a lot of merchandise for Marie no Atelier around, among it two Garage Kits made by Kaiyodo. One is a Diorama Set (1:8 scale, 56 parts), the other one shows Marie alone (1:8, 12 parts). Both kits are of the highest quality, and really worth a look.
Description and images supplied by Christof Weber.
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