Atelier Marie

Overview

NOTE: Everything in this guide is for the remake version of the game, not the original, though there is a lot of overlap

This is the first game in the Atelier series, or at least a remake of it. It all started here. Mythological rent stabilization the game. This is a much simpler interface than any modern Atelier, so long time fans of the series may find it somewhat stunted in a lot of ways. It has the same art and humor and overall themes and designs, but the crafting is not the adjustable, optimizable system that it became later on. Here it’s “put in 2 X and 3 Y and get 1 Z” and that’s it. No traits, no effects, no quality. Every bomb is the same, every sword is the same.

This is a timed game (unless you’re un Unlimited mode) and the focus is entirely on keeping ahead of your immediate future goals, triggering events, exploring to gather materials, and managing your time. Every action like collecting one spot, or doing one battle, costs one full day. Most syntheses take 2 or more days, up to 10 or even 20. You have 360 days per year times 5 years and that’s it.

Since this is quite a simple crafting system, I’m not going to be providing charts or a recipe finder, as there’s only a couple dozen items total, and no traits to transfer. Instead, I’m going to focus on some clarifications, hints, and tips that I wish I knew, or ran into directly with my face, so that you do not have the same brick wall experience.

Firstly pick a goal. Are you going to blindly mess around and not bother with trying to maximize anything, or get a Platinum in the least number of playthroughs? If you’re not hyperoptimizing from square one, you can stop looking now. It’s not a tremendously hard game, you’ll be done most of your goals halfway through and just figuring out how far you want to go with an ending requirement. It’s nearly impossible to get the bad ending, really. In fact it’s extremely likely you’ll get the true ending, the other ones are the ones that require finagling. The only thing I’ll say is that if you think you’ll eventually want to do all endings, then leave the Stardust recipe never synthesized ever, it will help in NG+ ending hunting later. Other than that, explore and do anything you want, everything can be cleaned up with NG+ later.

Still reading? Yeah, I gotcha, fam. The game is mostly self-explanatory, but several menus and features are badly internationalized or just plain vague, and it can drive those of us that want specificity up a wall.

Mini Guide

Overall Game Loop

• Check the fast travel map for red (!) marks, you want all of those. Rumors either start quest lines or open up new areas to gather in, always gather rumors, and always look in town on a major event day and one day after major events for date-specific rumors
• Vendors are also people to talk to, and may not have a (!), so chat each vendor up once a week as well
• Talk to every person if you want, occasionally you get free items, but usually not good ones, so this has low return on time invested
• Check the Sky Tavern to see what craft quests there are – there are no kill quests in this game – you want gold and reputation and knowledge points, all of them unlock things
• If still early in the game, buy utensils and books whenever you can afford them (and go back for one more utensil after you craft cheese)
• If you have Fairies (which are the crafting Homs of this game, they craft and gather but don’t dup), check them to see they’ll be doing something useful for a while – they charge a monthly fee, so try to have one working on something to sell that at least pays it’s own room and board
• Going directly back to your Atelier will eat up 1 day, so at least go to the Nearby Forest with your team, even if you do nothing and return – that will also eat up exactly 1 day, but your team members will get 1 friendship point… and also cost you money, as most characters charge you a fee to adventure with you. Going to the forest and doing nothing and returning just to grind 1 FRD point is going to be the boring grind of the game

Game Mechanics

• There’s an (L1) Agenda menu and a (triangle) Main Menu
  • Agenda has Quests (self explanatory) both Normal and Vital – Vital don’t have deadlines but are generally critical for a questline, not just a crafting quest
  • Objectives are checklists that grant stat buffs – this many gathers or battles equals more HP
  • Fairies are your helpers. Create and Gather are obvious – you can only Create what Marie has made once. Relax means do nothing. Return means fire the help. Yes this is the way you make them go away, in case you want a replacement.
• Main Menu – mostly obvious except for a few things
  • Equipment – this is both weapons and armor, and also items. You can duplicate armed items across people. If you have a stack of bombs, you can arm the same stack of bombs on all three characters and they all draw from the same item pool. Might as well always have some items in there – everyone can use everything.
  • Story – you’ll be spending a decent amount of time in here. Events is just a history, but Event List is a future history. It’s a list of all possible events and what their prerequisites are. Some prereqs are hidden or ??? but for the most part it will tell you if there is an event on a very specific date or week, so plan ahead, the data is there. Note that the location trigger is at the top, so you have to go to a specific store or room to trigger an event, and some are unfortunately labeled with 50% or similar, that’s the chance of it triggering. Unfortunately some events are not absolute. Save and reload until you get what you want.
• Event Clarifications – some of these are terribly worded
  • “(Not) Befriended X” does not mean that you have or have not ever had the character in your party, it means at that moment. So some events won’t trigger unless they’re specifically in, or not in, your active party right now
  • Do X 2+ times… this may or may not mean >=2 or >2. In some cases it means 3 or more. Again a typo or mis-internationalization
  • Saw “XXX”, these are chained events, where one leads into another
  • “Lowest FRD is with X”… this one is complicated but important. It means that, amongst the characters Kugel, Mu, Natalie, Schwalbe, Ruven, and Hallesch only, which one has the lowest friend points. You get a special event with your least-friend on 6/28 each year. Critically, if your least friend out of those 6 already have the event, it will still pick them and waste the event. When you do get it to trigger, buy at least one thing from them, and you’ll get a cool 20 FRD (which is way better than grinding Nearby Forest 20 times, ugh 😛 )
• Vendors
  • Talk to Hagel periodically for some unlisted quests but mostly you’ll just be upgrading weapons occasionally. Eventually you’ll find Glasen Ore in Wieland or Meyer… sell it to Hagel, and with 4 and 8 (iirc) pieces sold he’ll upgrade his stock
  • Aula in the Academy also has some unlisted quests and sells a few useful materials, plus utensils and books. You want all the utensils and books eventually. After you make cheese for the first time, a new utensil becomes available, so go back for it. New books are never printed, tho you do find new references via events that trigger in the library
  • Flair sometimes has an outdoor vendor location later in the game. She sells home decor items (which only restock the next higher once per season) and a few other items, including Megabombs and a few top end synthesis items
    • Make sure to actually use your decor, they actually have effects! I used all “Familiar” ones because they made all adventurer fees cheaper. But cheaper fairies might be a good choice, too.
• Battle
  • Very straightforward, some characters have an MP skill or two. Up and down on the d-pad is for changing formation or running
  • Speed up exists. L2 L2 L2 use it
  • Marie will get a “kill everything” relatively cheap, very powerful spell linked to a weapon you get from helping out the Hagel-prototype weaponsmith with his baldness, at lvl25. It won’t help much on bosses but it’ll clear everything else mostly in one swipe
• Gathering
  • Most spots just refill when you go off screen and come back, which doesn’t take a day by the way
  • There are some rare spawns though. They always occur in the same place and glow brightly, so you can go back and forth until they appear and you can get 2-3 collections of them, but they seem to limit to that much
  • Rare gathering spawns cannot be gathered by fairies
  • Rare spawn materials are seasonal, they differ in Spring-Summer from August-Winter, at least some of them do
  • Some items cannot be found until you’ve read a book that identifies the ingredient, case in point the 6/18 eclipse one in the Nearby Forest, it just won’t be there the first year, don’t bother looking for it
• Crafting
  • Feels weird in an Atelier game to have such a small section for this but really just put A and B in a bucket and select how many you want. Note that a lot of recipes take 0.8 of something, so by making a few at once, you can finagle the time and material cost to not waste too much getting rounded up
• Fairies
  • Save before you leave for the fairy forest and only hire “Navy” fairies. Only. If one isn’t there, reload and try again, it’s random. You only want those ones (or Gold on NG+ are better). There seem to be two permutations of fairies on any given day, if you reset and retry and get a second bunch without a navy/gold, then you’re not going to get one that day at all. Do something else for a day and try again later

Missables

• Obviously there’s some spoilers in here though I’ve tried to keep them somewhat light and referring to stuff you’d find if you read the upcoming event menu anyways
• There are several events that you can miss by killing a boss with the wrong person or missing a specific date, but if you’re paying attention to those, then here’s the main set to watch out for that are less obvious or badly explained
  • All the bandit enemies disappear after a while, perhaps a year or two, so they become “have to do another run” if you’re not careful. You can get all of them as early as immediately upon unlocking Meyer Cave, so save, run to the cave, kill things, run away from the boss, repeat, until you have everyone but the Chief. This is the easiest way to collect those on a NG+ if it’s all you’re missing
  • Can ONLY be done on TIMED mode:
    • When the Rose Vanishes – the hard one to get – Kill the tower boss with Kirie but make absolutely sure she’s 75 and no more and make absolutely sure she never hits 80 friendship. You may need to use her once more to go to the castle for an item for her, but be careful with the friendship points. 
    • Familial Places – max out Ruven’s friendship before 5Y12M1D – the trophy guide says to not use him and not do his quests but this is flat out wrong. Use him all you like, just don’t take on any random quests from him that you cannot finish
    • Marie commenting on the endgame near the end
    • Make sure to get Ray of Light 1-2 on a first run, as you can’t get it in an Unlimited continued run from there because you’ll be ignoring Schea’s 3Y arc on a Normal Ending run
  • Can get screwed up in unlimited mode if you’re zipping along sleeping for months for event and ending cleanup and not paying attention
    • Ray of Light 1 with Schea on 4Y11M5D and the follow-up, though you really should have done this before, or you’re going to get stuck with another full run from day-1
    • Recruiting Kirie – once you start the questline you have to finish it in 190 days or she’s permanently unrecruitable for that playthrough
    • Mu’s flower event on 4Y8M1D that you must have heard a specific random rumor beforehand
    • Hagel’s second quest arc 3Y2M10D which also requires the first hair tonic quest to be done
    • A royal encounter on 2Y9M1D, technically this isn’t missable but it becomes unavailable while Schea is in her 3Y arc and you might get tangled with quests stemming from this. The rest of the quest chain also requires the incredibly annoying triple occurrence of 10% proc events of running into the Prince
    • Killing the tower boss or the dragon with the wrong person missing from the party
  • Other than those, everything else is “date X or after” or is “10+ days from the previous event” and there’s no sticking points other than the main deadline if on timed mode
  • Do note that if you don’t specifically need a given event in NG+ unlimited, you can just let it run by and gray out in the Events menu, it’ll look scary but as long as the name is visible and isn’t ??? then it counts towards the 100% events trophy

Endings

• You’re probably following the PSN Trophy Guide, which you should… but… the ending guide is wrong or missing info, so here’s the skinny
• Definitely do a Timed run first and get all the timed-exclusive events, try to get every single event you can, honestly, but especially do not miss the Ray of Light ones, because the NG+ Unlimited run the guide has will have you skipping over helping Schea and this will make Ray of Light impossible, you’d have to do another full run
• Also, arm everyone to the teeth before making the clear save. Only weapons and armor that are on a character get carried over to NG+. They appear in the inventory, not on the character, in NG+. Beware doing NG+ but forgetting to re-arm everyone, for the bad end run, and then doing a clear save again… the second NG+ will not have those juicy weapons because they weren’t armed (I did this, whoops)
• Also on the timed run, try to get the 6/28 for Natalie and Schwabe out of the way first, because Kugel, Ruven, Mu, and Hallesch are available from the beginning and don’t require unlocking, so you can immediately friend them and finagle their FRD so that you get the events you want
• Also get all rumors on the first run, you don’t want to have to track those down again, the one that’s always and only the day after the tournament is a big missable point
• If you can, get all enemies as well, the bandits are only the first year or so. Gold Puni is on the way to the waterfall, Forest Elf is on the way to Berenburg or the mountain; just reload, move a day forward, retry, reload several dozen times
• And critically make absolutely sure you have not crafted Stardust or Aroma
• The guide is also wrong saying that you should always select continue, this would leave you at 6YM9D1 which is not what you want – your first NG+ will be unlimited but select restart instead
• Do your bad ending run and get your remaining 6/28’s and then restart again on unlimited mode (re-arm everyone with their super weapons before the clear-save!)
• This time you have to be a bit more careful, you can’t just race through. You don’t have to do everything, but make sure you clean up getting all items except Stardust and Aroma, all monsters, all remaining events
• You need to get the fairy charm, the mystery nuts, the books and all utensils (don’t forget the mousetrap), and the castle access card again, and you probably did not get the “other” event for Kirie that the timed-only one was avoiding. Therefore you still need to pay attention to Kirie’s unlock events, running into the Prince 3x, and the scream in the night event with the fertilizer
• When you have the castle card, then you’re pretty much good to go. Just make sure you’re less than level 45, preferrably 40 to be safe, because you must not reach 50 until a later ending, or you’ll blow the requirements for the lower priority endings
• First is the Normal ending. Don’t do anything else, don’t make the Philosopher’s Stone, don’t kill the demon in the tower, don’t level to 50 or get Schea to 50, don’t craft Stardust or Aroma. Just make sure to make at least one rank-6 or higher item and get to 6Y9M1D and talk to the bulletin board in the Academy to end the game and save in a new slot and continue this time with NG+
• Next is Philosopher’s Stone ending. You have to kill the dragon for the tongue, make the elixir and cure Schea with it (the trophy guide says not to but you need the Spirit Tears), get the Dunkelheit, and craft the Aroma. Do not kill the demon in the tower, do not level to 50, do not craft Stardust. Craft Philosopher’s Stone and end it at the bulletin board. Continue.
• Local Legend ending. Kill the demon in the tower but do not level to 50, this is where it could get close, I squeaked by at 49 because I was doing too many quests to maintain my nasty fairy habit. Bulletin board. Continue.
• Living Legend ending. Level to 50 but do not level Schea to 50. Bulletin. Continue.
• Craft Stardust. Bulletin. Continue.
• Done. If you’re platinuming then go to the title screen, select Extras –> Arcade and beat all the mini games again for the final 7 trophies.

Hints and Tips

• Make a Mystica Leaves asap as this is the trigger for getting Fairies. The grass you can buy, but you’ll need to kill some punis in Lake Hebel for Puniballs, while stocking up on water there too. Only buy Navy fairies (or Gold on NG+), if you don’t get one, reload and retry; you might need to advance the day to get the fairy selection you want
• Make sure to do the weaponsmith hair tonic quest asap, it gives a staff that at lvl25 turns Marie into a goddess of destruction, wiping the entire battle single-handedly for everything but bosses and gargoyles
• Flair is the pink-haired girl that occasionally runs the Sky Tavern, always talk to her when you see her, she’s rare and random and you have to speak with her a total of 3+ times (it says 2+ but it’s wrong) for an event
• Quests give a surprising amount of XP, you can probably max out your level just on crafting. Those multiple Megacraft ones are not a tease, those are actually the ones to aim for because the ingredients are dirt simple. If you have 3 fairies, have one gathering at a place for Nuse, one making Craft, one making Megacraft. You’ll never wont for money (or rep or knowledge) in the entire game. This only doesn’t work if the Megacraft quests have a dry spell, which happens sometimes, but you can never have too many to help with some high end battles
• Kreis’ events pause until year 4, this is a hidden prereq, also Schea can’t be in her 3Y health arc, it seems
  • The Living Broom recipe is collected earlier but you still can’t make it until you get another reference later, which you can only trigger by having made the Elixir and Tonic of Life, yet another hidden requirement
• Save up 2 golden apples and make the Tonic of Life as soon as it’s available, just making it once unlocks a few things later, and it’s too easy to lose those seasonal-only apples by selling them or something
• Enemy spawns on the road are positioned per destination chosen and do not reroll for the location or type of encounter on a given day with a reload – you may get a different number of gargoyles but you’ll get gargoyles in that one place no matter how many times you go to that endpoint destination. Only moving the date forward or picking a different destination will get different encounters. This is critical for getting a few of the rare ones like the Forest Elf, Gold Puni, and the bandits that you’ve definitely all gotten before the cave boss in early game right right?
• After you meet fairies, try to be in your atelier crafting small things between the 6th-9th each month so they drop by and sell you milk and puniballs; clean them out every time, there’s no other way of getting milk
  • Never let the Fairy clean your atelier, you need it messy for a couple events. It’s not the end of the world tho, it will at worst delay some things
  • Crafting or finding some items will trigger a mini game where if you lose the game you lose the material. I hate this mechanic but don’t be surprised when it happens. The gold puni game doesn’t count for killing a gold puni in the bestiary
  • By all means have the fairies also making core helpful items like neutralizers and what not, or working on stuff for you to sell while you focus on something else or go out gathering
• If you want to take advantage of the +20 FRD that the 6/28 events offer, spread out your friendship on characters up front so you have a clear pick for who’s going to get each successive 6/28 lowest-friendship.
  • Try not to peg everyone at 100 before you’ve gotten what you want out of them for that playthrough, as the next 6/28 will pick one at seemingly random (not save scummable) including people that already got an event.
  • However if you don’t care, then it’s extremely easy to grind this on NG+. Start the game, get a FRD point or two on the first few characters you want to reorder, and then sleep til 6/28 a few times, sleep til the end, get the bad ending, clear save, restart, done. This is only easy for Hallesch, Mu, Ruven, and Kugel, though, as Natalie and Schwalbe require at least a little interaction to unlock their characters. So Make sure to get those latter two on a first run at a minimum. They start really low FRD so if you unlock them and never use them, you’ll probably get them anyways.
• For bosses, have two megabombs and use Marie’s enhanced throw. That will kill or nearly kill any of them.
  • In fact, Flair’s late game shop sells megabombs for about 1500. Expensive but better than having to craft them. Buy. Lob. Win. There’s only 4 bosses so you really only need 8 of these ever in any run.

Community Documentation

• Walkthrough and Guides
  • https://psnprofiles.com/guide/17169-atelier-marie-remake-the-alchemist-of-salburg-trophy-guide
  • https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps4/396040-atelier-marie-remake-the-alchemist-of-salburg/faqs/81007/introduction
  • https://www.neoseeker.com/atelier-marie-remake-the-alchemist-of-salburg/walkthrough
• Wikis
  • https://atelier.fandom.com/wiki/Atelier_Marie_Remake:_The_Alchemist_of_Salburg
  • https://atelier.wiki.gg/wiki/Atelier_Marie_Remake:_The_Alchemist_of_Salburg