Atelier Online: Alchemist of Bressisle

» see atelier-online.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The Atelier series started with Marie's Atelier on 23 May 1997, and by 2017 it had been going twenty years. At the anniversary event on 7 June that year, Koei Tecmo announced that the present was a phone game. NHN PlayArt would plan it, build it and run it, with Gust's people on the design and Koei Tecmo publishing.

A press release on 21 September 2018 set the official service for Monday the 1st of October and noted that pre-registration had already passed five hundred thousand. It did not open on the Monday. It opened on Wednesday 3 October, with an apology and a free ten-pull ticket for everybody, which is the standard Japanese currency of saying sorry for two days.

You played a seventeen-year-old second-year alchemy student at an academy on an island called Bressisle, with a fairy named Peppermint along for it, and you could pick whether the student was a boy or a girl. There was no stamina meter, so nothing stopped you playing all afternoon. Rorona came as a pre-registration reward, and Sophie and Ryza turned up as guests in the second season update on 29 November 2019.

Seven months in, the people who built it handed it over. On 27 May 2019 both companies said that from the maintenance window two days later, development and operation would pass from NHN PlayArt to Koei Tecmo Games. The announcement that the service itself would stop came on 26 January 2022, and the servers went down sixty four days after that.

~ the case file ~

~ the synthesis ~

Famitsu's launch coverage called it a 調合オンラインRPG, a synthesis online RPG, which puts the series' alchemy at the front of the sentence where it belongs. Combat ran on a timeline, and you played it alone or with other people, which is the part the console games had never offered.

The calendar stayed behind. Every mainline Atelier game of the era is built around a deadline: you have so many in-game days to finish the assignment, and the tension comes from spending them down. An online game cannot really have a last day until it has its last day, so the series' defining mechanic was the one thing that could not come along.

~ the second service ~

On 8 July 2021 Boltrend Games put out an English version, the same publisher that handled the overseas builds of Arc the Lad R and Idola Phantasy Star Saga. That was nine months before the Japanese service closed, which is an odd direction for a game's life to run: the localization arrived while the original was already in its last year, and the Japanese closure notice said nothing at all about what happened to it.

What happened to it, according to the one outlet that reported it, is that the English build came off Google Play on 3 August 2022 and stayed playable until the 17th. Thirteen months, start to finish. The soundtrack album outlived both services: Koei Tecmo announced it on 8 April 2022, eight days after the Japanese servers stopped, and shipped it that July.

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