Atelier Annie™: Alchemists of Sera Island Main English Trailer
16Once upon a time, there was a lazy girl named Annie. To straighten her up, her Grandfather sent her over to an island where a development project was beginning. Annie must participate by using alchemy, which she's never tried before. What kind of life will she face on Sera Island!?
Atelier Annie: Alchemists of Sera Island (アニーのアトリエ ～セラ島の錬金術士～ Anī no Atorie ~Sera Tō no Renkinjutsushi~?) is a role-playing video game developed by Japanese developer Gust for the Nintendo DS.
The game was released in Japan on March 12, 2009 and in North America on October 27, 2009. It is the first to be released in North America to have the gameplay and structure of the "main" Atelier series, having less emphasis on RPG elements and more focus on item creation and resource management.
Annie was just a simple girl who lived in a town located within the mainland. However, all she did was sleep and fantasize about becoming rich and famous someday by marrying up. Worried about their daughter, her parents consulted Annie's grandfather, a great alchemist, for advice on what to do. After a moment of thought, he decides to send her to Sera Island to take part in a large resort project in order to teach her to overcome her laziness. Thus, in the middle of the night, his homunculi steal Annie away to Sera Island; across land, across river, and across sea.
The gameplay is similar to both a strategy RPG and a simulator game. As the game focuses much more heavily on quests and character interaction rather than battling, the battle system is simplistic at best with basic turn-based combat featuring front-and-back positions that not only affect offense and defense, but changes a character's special ability - usually from offensive to supportive, respectively. Enemies have elements assigned to them which can be exploited using synthesized colored weapons, but it is not at all necessary. Battles occur at random as Annie wanders around gathering materials outside town. Materials at first are basic, with no hidden quality, but in later areas, a player can get variations of the same material possessing, for example, a 'big' trait or a 'blue' trait among many other possibilities. These become significant as the latter part of the game tends to home in on what specific qualities are required in a synthesized item.