Atelier Online hails from the Atelier series of RPGs by Gust, which has been running for a long time. To call Atelier Online an MMORPG is not the most accurate description, as there are usually only a few players in every room, and it is structured more like a traditional single player RPG with instanced rooms.
The closest analogy the writer can think of is Lord of Heroes, except you have to do the walking yourself. The combat system works well on a mobile device, being akin to old-timey turn-based RPGs but with autoattacks on a timer, and an attack order dependent on the speed stat of the characters and their enemies.
You are a young alchemist studying in the Royal Academy of Sciences. One day, you find a piece of a shattered stone tablet, a small glimpse of the recipe for the much vaunted Pyroxene of Wisdom. Naturally, as a curious alchemist, you set out on an adventure to find the rest of the recipe and make this item yourself! You bring three of your friends with you. Sorel, a boisterous wizard with a large appetite for both food and adulation.
Anise Hyssop, a shy bookish Sage who studies relics. Cresson, a dumb but spirited Guard who acts as the team’s muscle. With Ms. Bergamot’s blessing, you will travel across Bressisle Island. You will meet friends and weirdoes, and beat up enemies with everything from swords, lances, and magic spells, to cute Puni Puni plushies, spiky fruit, exploding barrels of wind and giant apples falling from the sky.
Atelier Online: Alchemist of Bressisle is a gorgeous game on iOS and Android, with excellent art direction and detailed texturework fooling your eyes into thinking a lot of the flat trees in the background are in 3D. The characters’ art and lovable writing will also make you want to go in the gacha to get them.
And don’t worry too much about the reviews saying character rates are abysmal, they recently mitigated that by adding low star level versions of characters into the gacha pools. Just hope you get some Limit Candies for them!
Start reading below, and prepare for your adventure as an alchemist of the Royal Academy of Sciences! And don’t get robbed by bandits, crushed by giant Puni Punis, or confused by marked barrels while you’re at it.
1. WALKING INGREDIENTS
As an alchemist, you need materials to do your job. One way to get materials is by gathering them from the land. While this works for plant material, fancy rocks, and other such things, what do you do when you need stuff like meat or already-stitched together cloth? Why, you shake down the local wildlife, goblins, and bandits!
By necessity, alchemists will get into fights very often. That goes doubly for your protagonist, as they have a big fat case of Chronic Hero Syndrome, and they love to help people with their problems. Those problems usually being monsters trying to eat them. Here are some tips and knowledge to make combat and cave diving go more smoothly.
Sticky Sickness
Debuffs like poison stick to your party even after combat, though they have no effect outside of it. This can be dangerous even then, since being poisoned at the start of a fight is a great way to waste healing salves.
Before entering dungeons, whether it be for quests or for grinding, stock up on debuff-clearing items like Tonics, Medicines of Awakening, and Detox Medicines. Failing that, avoid needless battles in dungeons when debuffed, especially if you’re just trying to get to the end or only need materials that aren’t monster drops.
That way, the poison spends less time actually hurting you, and you only feel it during the bossfight you’re running after. That stinks, but at least you’ll have enough salves and HP to tank it if you forgot to bring Detox Meds.
Puni Puni? PUNI PUNI!
The silver Puni Puni? with the question mark in its name is one of the more annoying type of monsters to fight. Simply put, they take a fixed number of hits to kill, depending on their level. They have very little HP, but take only 1 damage from all attacks.
A level 1 team carrying old junk and a level 60 team with the most powerful equipment in the entire cosmos will both take 4 hits to kill that lv2 Puni Puni? standing outside the Academy.
Unfortunately, you’ll need to kill these little jerks early on for their drops. If the Puni Puni? appears in a mixed team, they will happily tank many shots for their deadlier teammates. Make sure you kill his friends first before him by using the target select function on the right side of the battle screen, and never ever waste skills on them.
Pick Fights Carefully
In dungeons, you have to pick battles carefully, even if you’re overleveled. Early on, simply going on a big fat killing spree tends to result in your character getting whittled down by the time they make it to the dungeon boss thanks to your comparatively poor gear hampering your hilariously overleveled character.
And later on in areas where the enemy levels have caught up with you, not only are there enemies who can put a dent in you, they can also give you very debilitating debuffs like Sleep. As we’ve explained before, debuffs stick to your team outside of combat.
You’ll spend a lot of time running away from strong enemies and going after only those that drop items you want, or those who block chokepoints and can’t be avoided. The only time you would want to kill everything in sight is if you’re not after the dungeon boss at all and just want some monster materials.
Come To Others’ Aid
If you see a fight (indicated by a cartoon cloud of violence), you can jump in to help your fellow player and share in the spoils. This is usually some kind of bossfight, especially in the earlier zones, since bosses tend to be the only foes to last long enough for you to see such fight clouds. That or you just ran into someone early into a battle.
If you see that their team is in danger, they’ll appreciate a healing salve coming from you, or if your team leader brought a healing weapon with them. Take note that only your team leader will appear along with the other player’s team, and you will only be able to control your character. Still, 5 fighters is better than 4.
Overkill is Overrated
When using skills, make sure you’re targeting an enemy who won’t get overkilled by it. Your skill cooldowns last between fights in the same room, so saving them up if you’re expecting a boss (Say, a Disastrous Monster Quest) means you get a strong opening attack.
You can also take the option of simply bombarding the enemy team with skills as early as possible since your HP also persists through dungeons, and even the many small dings you get when going maximum anger in a cave add up eventually. Hitting a monster with a skill while it’s nearly dead is a wasteful move.
Bullying For Cooldowns
Speaking of skill cooldowns, a good way to make the most of them is to avoid strong enemies if you’ve just entered an area through fast travel from the Academy, and bully the weaklings first with autoattacks.
Since skill cooldowns persist between fights, you can treat weak monsters like walking skill refreshers. Go after a couple of Puni Puni teams and Goos first before taking on nastier foes like those fat AOE debuffing spiders in Gooru City’s mines.
Doing that allows you to start the fight against those spiders with a big ol’ skill barrage, which may either kill them outright or at least leave them crippled enough to clean up without too many problems. If you finish and your skills are ready, you can do it again!
Bring A Healing Stick
While certain characters might be pegged as healers, damage dealers or whatnot, whatever role they have depends on their weapon since that determines what main combat skill they get. Always assign at least one person (preferably the tankiest person on your team who can equip rods and staves) with any weapon that has some form of healing ability as a skill.
This will make it so you last longer in dungeons, since you only autoheal once you’re back in the Academy. Healing spells are the only free healing you get outside of that, and even the bog-standard Apprentice Sage’s Staff lasts long since it has a percentage heal based on the receiver’s max HP.
2. ON THE ROAD
As an alchemist, you’ll travel from location to location, seeing new places across Bressisle Island. You’ll be looking for the most exotic ingredients, meeting new people, and making tons of free stuff for them because you’re an alchemist and dang it, making stuff is what alchemists do! There are a few things you can do to keep your travels going smoothly, and a few mistakes to avoid early on.
Runic Landmarks
If you find a large stone tablet covered in runes, inspect it immediately. It’s a fast travel checkpoint for the map. Keep an eye on these things when traveling. This seems like an obvious tip, but the game never points these out to you until you interact with them for the first time.
We put it here so you don’t have to wait until you’ve seen five of them in different places to realize they’re something important. These things will make quests infinitely quicker to finish.
Eye On The Minimap
In your journey, you’ll often find what looks like walls or obstacles blocking the way that you can easily walk through. You can see them more easily on the Minimap rather than the screen, since the Minimap exposes areas you can walk on.
This can be handy in areas like the Rosa Maze, and to find extra gathering spots, also marked on the minimap. The minimap also shows you enemies further away than your screen can, so you can plan your movements accordingly before moving through a room full of them.
Road Safety’s For Nerds
If you see a carriage rush by on one of the dirt roads in the game, don’t hesitate to jump in front of it like you’re trying to commit insurance fraud. If the carriage hits you, it’ll get rocked and drop some of its contents, which you can then claim for yourself.
This is totally legal and allowed by the law, and the materials dropped tend to be fairly rare and of good quality. Finders keepers!
Cole Shop Scams
The Cole Shop is full of fairly good deals that work best if you find yourself in an emergency or spot a big opportunity. 10 Healing Salves for 10 coles? It can save your life, since Morning Dew can be hard to come by unless it’s in your Commissions or you’ve been playing a while. Fairy Powder and Fairy gathering tools also pay for themselves in a hurry.
But as with any shop in a multiplayer game, there are a fair bit of noob traps in it. In particular, the bombs, neutralizers, and the majority of the material section in general are a waste of money. You’ll eventually get the recipes for them, so just play a bit and you’ll regret having spent coles on them. The only things worth buying in the material section are the armor crafting material sets, as that’s 50 coles for a guaranteed 4 star item.
Even then, the Gacha gives it extremely stiff competition since it comes with a chance for new characters at 30 coles a roll, and 10-rolls often have some form of special guarantee coming with them. As for the Beginner’s Set A… Let’s just say it’s best if you want that gear in your cosmetic slots. Otherwise, it’s a waste of inventory space.
One More Floor
So you just finished a line of chapters and beat down the local area boss. Usually, chapter story bosses hide in the area’s resident dungeon, usually in the fifth floor, halfway to where you would normally fight a boss without a quest. Don’t rush to your next objective!
Go down one more floor and you’ll find a checkpoint tablet. Use it, so the next time you go down that dungeon, you can skip the first five floors. This way, you can make it to the 10thfloor boss more easily. And after that guy, there’s a checkpoint on the 11thfloor!
Commission Quests, A Fancy Word For Material Exchange
If you’re missing a certain material from your inventory, check your Commission quests if they have the material you’re looking for. A Commission trading anything for Morning Dew Drops is always a good find since you need a ton of them for spamcrafting Healing Salves.
If you’re crafting a material to trade for a Commission Quest, make sure you set the Quality to Low so you don’t end up wasting the good stuff on 4 star quest fodder. These quests give out the same reward regardless of the quality of whatever you’re submitting, and it’s a great way to trade a few space-clogging 1 star junk mats for a 3 star material or so.
A Fairy’s Touch
If you want some higher tier materials, it’s worth blowing a few coles on Fairy Powder, Fairy Picks, Fairy Gloves and Fairy Fishing Rods from the Shop. When using any of the Fairy gathering tools, chug some Fairy Powder along with it.
The chance for rare materials stacks, resulting in 3 and 4 star materials dropping left and right when mixed with the added drop numbers from Fairy tools. Now you can get some 4 and 5 star stuff for your team!
3. UNCLOGGING THE BACKPACK
At one point, on your second or even first day of playing, you’ll run out of backpack space. Most likely clogged up by all those Unis you haven’t been throwing at the enemy. In most MMOs, this is extremely annoying, but Atelier Online has some ways to make emptying your backpack a bit more rewarding, or at least cheap and easy. Here are some inventory management practices to take note of.
No Space? Enhance!
If you run out of space then find new items, you will be forced to discard items to make space for whatever new shiny thing you got. This is not a good way to offload excess gear since other ways of getting rid of items come with some form of reward.
One of them is to enhance materials to upgrade their quality and star level. Enhancing materials is much the same as enhancing gear, in that you use duplicates of said material to improve its quality. Two golds make a rainbow tier, but it takes a metric ton of browns and greens to star up anything. If you’ve got too many of a material, and it isn’t Morning Dew Drops (You’d rather have a ton of those things, poor quality or not, to spam craft Healing Salves), this is a good way to make some space. And if you craft anything with the enhanced materials, the gear you make will also have a higher tier.
You can also sell the materials for a small amount of Ether. While you won’t need to do this early on, you’ll start burning through your Ether once your Alchemy habits start picking up pace.
Container Dipping
Have you found yourself constantly moving materials to and from the container and backpack to craft things? That likely means you’ve never paid a visit to the Settings menu, located in the lower left of the screen if you tap the Menu button. There is an option to allow your character to take items straight from the container.
This means you can just dump as much stuff as you can into the container with no worry. Of course, this only works if you’re in the Academy, so you’ll still need stuff in your backpack if you want to do field crafting. You might also want to turn off the gathering animations while you’re at it so you make the most of your Fairy Powder’s 5 minute effect.
Buy Pockets Before Closets
Before upgrading container space, upgrade your backpack first. Each backpack upgrade gives you 50 slots for a measely 10 Coles, compared to the 100 slots for a hideously exorbitant 100 Coles with the container.
This makes the container a later game goal for when you run out of backpack upgrades. You’d want to save as many Coles for the gacha as you can, so you don’t want to waste them on immensely bad deals like container space.
4. GETTING STRONGER
Any alchemist worth their salt not only needs to be tough themselves, but also have a strong team to help them cram the local wildlife and riffraff into their item synthesis cauldron. There are a number of ways to do this, namely levelling up, starring up, and getting better equipment. We hope this section will help you do this in as smooth a manner as possible.
Oily Swords
Always enhance your weapons once you get some Universal Growth Oil, usually from the Gear Enhancement Quest event or any other event or quest that may give them out as a reward.
Even if your character level is way, way higher than your opponent, you’ll really feel unlevelled gear when you get into enough fights in a short amount of time. Go to the Enhancement screen and oil your gear, and maybe cram in some dupes while you’re at it to raise their star level too.
Save The Fat Potions
On your first day of the game, you’re going to be inundated with EXP potions. Save some of the EXP Potion Ls for when you get a full party, which will likely happen on the same day if you check your Side quests religiously or get the world’s luckiest gacha 10-roll.
Dumping all of them on the protagonist before meeting anyone else is a fun way to have your teammates struggle once you get them, so give them just one of the L-sized potions. That’s enough to bump a character from nothing to a level high enough to trivialize most of Albus and give Ribrum a run for its money.
Once you do get new teammates, feed them one of the large potions each to bump them up to roughly even levels. Thankfully, you can get an EXP Potion L once a day, and three on Saturdays, so if you get a new character on the team it can be relatively easy to bring them up to standard.
Knowing Your Friends
When a character you own hits a level threshold, one of their Character Quests become available. This is a good way to gain an insight on your character and get into some fun shenanigans with them. These also give out Limit Candies once you finish the final objective, at least for characters earned from the storyline. Limit Candies allow a character to go up a star level, increasing their maximum character level by 10.
There is no need to rush these quests unless your character hits max level, or you made it to Chapter 15 and you need a lot of Academy Points in a pinch. While star level determines maximum level, only their actual level affects their stats, so a 5 star character at level 20 is just as strong as a 2 star character at level 20. That being said, these quests are mandatory for character progression and should be finished at some point.
As a side note, characters that you unlock from the Gacha don’t give out Limit Candies in their Character Quests. Instead, they give you Coles and EXP Potion S’, and are reliant on the gacha for their Candies.
Not-So-Useless Old Junk
Not only do you have a Main Gear set for your party, each character also has slots for Sub Gears. Sub gear slots can take any item, and give a small stat bonus depending on what you put in there.
This is a good place to put old or weak equipment if backpack space is no issue for you. You could put strong gear in there too, but you’d probably want them in your main gear slots instead. This is a cheap way to make your character stronger.
Several Gallons Of Leek Soup
See that Cuisine option in the Synthesis Screen? That lets you make food for your characters. These are important to character progression since they work far differently from what you’d expect with RPG food items.
Unlike the usual temporary stat buff, food in Atelier Online gives characters permanent stat increases. You can do this a limited number of times. Unfortunately, your partymates are very picky and will ask for a specific, different food item once you feed them.
You’re gonna lose your temper if they ask for Leek Soup, since fishing spots are a bit rare if you’re bumrushing the story. Though there are three fishing spots right outside the Academy. Keep coming back to that area for some quick fish.
And here is the end of our Atelier Online: Alchemist of Bressisle beginner’s guide. If you have your own tips, don’t hesitate to put them in the comment section below! And one last thing: The barrels that make your character say “Taru!” don’t do anything. You probably already know this if you’ve played previous Atelier games, but if not, this will save you a headache.