It’s no secret that NIS America likes to translate Gust’s various alchemy-themed, anime-style RPGs for western audiences. They’ve done several, but this one is different: It’s not just an RPG, you also have various sim elements to it by also devoting time to developing an island resort. When a Japanese RPG merges with ’Sim Island’, the result is actually pretty good.

Atelier Annie splits most of its content between four activities: typical RPG play (go questing with a small group of characters and beat up monsters for loot), alchemy crafting of various items you need, island development, and plot/characterization. Any one of these on their own might be obvious, but this game brings them together into a fairly coherent whole. The RPG segment is relatively simple, but kept interesting through the variety of characters you can recruit. And aside from plot-mandated crafting, you only really need to bother with alchemy as much as you want to; you get some excellent items this way but it does take a while to gather ingredients. Island development mostly consists of choosing structures to build, assigning staff to them, investing in their ongoing improvement, and things of this nature. Finally, the plot is mostly light-hearted and silly, similar in tone to most other Gust games NISA has released.

With so much to do, the game keeps you on a time limit. Virtually everything takes some amount of in-game time to do, and you often have deadlines to meet. This means devoting too much attention to any one aspect could cause you trouble, since you’re graded and rewarded both for quality of service and how prompt you were about it. In other words, it might be okay to take a one day detour to level up your new character, but spending a month trying to ’power level’ your whole party may be a bad idea. This generally ensures you have something interesting to do at any given time, and aside from minor snags it’s well done.

Perhaps the only real slam against Atelier Annie in terms of game design is its scope; it isn’t quite a full RPG, nor quite a full ’island sim’, instead providing moderate takes on both ideas. This isn’t to say they’re bad, but instead a little limited in a few areas you would normally expect each genre to cover. It’s anyone’s guess as to why this happened, but it is also ultimately able to be forgiven.

As far as presentation goes, this game is typical NISA/Gust material. The world is a bright, exaggerated anime one full of expressive characters and usually upbeat music. Some people will like this and find it hilarious as it’s intended to be, while others may quickly tire of almost every character having no emotional control whatsoever; they tend to flip out over even the most minor things. Still, there is some decent writing to the plot, and it gives you a reason to keep playing.

The sound and graphics bear further explanation. While this is an anime style world, this works both for and against Atelier Annie. The graphics during plot cutscenes are excellent, holding their own alongside many PS2 RPGs well enough... but the same cannot be said of the ’in the field’ graphics while you’re exploring. Here, everyone is an ’anime super-deformed’ blob, with most characters looking pretty similar to one another aside from their hair and coloration. It looks like a particularly generic and bad Asian MMORPG, but this can be overlooked on the principle of gameplay over graphics. Sound on the other hand is pretty good all around; the music hits a variety of moods despite a leaning toward upbeat themes, and the voice acting is decent so long as you’re fine with it being in Japanese. Fortunately, most of the voices are subtitled during plot segments, and when they aren’t it’s mostly generic party chatter that isn’t important; things like "Well, where should I go now?" and so forth.

Despite terrible ’in field’ graphics and various minor design flaws, Atelier Annie manages to combine two genres fairly well. The idea of mixing a conventional RPG with an island development sim is an odd one, but it seems to work out fine in this game. If you’re looking for an engaging DS game, give this one a shot.