Atelier Iris 3: Grand Phantasm

[Demon Cleaner]

Out now.

[Harrison]

English release?

If so that this is great. The Atelier Iris series is really nice and well worth playing. Shame only the three main Atelier Iris games have only been translated, the other games released in this branching series never translated or released outside of Japan.

[Demon Cleaner]

English release?Of course. I'm not going to post the japanese releases, as I'm not gonna get them, if there will also be an US release.

[Submeg]

It's going to be cool, I am getting the Japanese down, will be able to play Jap games eventually :)

[Demon Cleaner]

Now that is great, wish I could play Japanese RPGs, as there are a lot not released in US or EU, but nowadays a fair amount of RPGs also get released here.

[Harrison]

I wish I could too for the same reason. And that includes most popular gaming formats back to the MSX and NES days, as well as the Saturn, PS1, Dreamcast, PS2, NGC, etc...

[Submeg]

Hmm, maybe I could make a living by providing scripts to the games...

[Teho]

Many games never released outside Japan receive fan-translations. At least the old ones, where people hack the roms and replace the original text with the translations. Most are pretty well done I hear, I don't have much experience with them myself.

[Submeg]

I was thinking more along the lines of just translating it, writing a guide....I dont know how to do anything like that

[Demon Cleaner]

It would take an eternity to translate a whole RPG, as some are very text based.

[Submeg]

Yea I know
thats why I would charge big bucks! Lol

[Harrison]

I doubt you would be able to get anyone to purchase a translation. All I have seen to date have been free and done by fans in their spare time. You have been able to get fan made transcript translations for most games for years. A Chinese friend of mine use to get all new PS1 game releases from a friend of his in Japan and used to use freely available English transcripts to play through the games. He did that for titles such as Silent Hill, so got to play the games months, sometimes over a year before an English version was released.

[Submeg]

Damn. there goes my idea :p

[Harrison]

I've now had a quick play of this game and it follows exactly the same style as the previous games in this Atelier Iris series. Sprite based and hand drawn with side on turn based combat as before.

I think fans of this series should like it just as much as the previous titles and from what I've quickly seen it should be just as good. The initial part quickly leads you into the main controls of the game including the job board, but the quick tutorials are a bit too basic and patronising.

[Demon Cleaner]

Burnt it, not tested yet, but I don't await an eye candy here ;)

[Harrison]

Visually it is very traditional and follows the graphical hand drawn style from this series nearly identically to the point that it could probably have been coded to run exactly the same on the original PS1. But with a traditional and long running series like this that isn't always a bad thing. It is nice to see a series sticking to its roots and continuing to offer an RPG style like this. It would be sad if all RPGs moved into full motion 3D.