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Atelier Meruru director, Yoshito Okamura, has a new post up on the Gust blog, reporting that the Alchemist of Arland trilogy of games — consisting of Atelier Rorona, Totori and Meruru — has shipped 400,000 units, including their “Best” versions.
As we reported last week, the Alchemist of Arland trilogy’s debut sales have been on the rise with each successive game. Okamura is thankful for this. He points out that in the case of Atelier Rorona, the game had a very hard completion rate, as a result of which Gust received a lot of fair criticism from fans. Okamura jokes he was half-crying as he read criticism and compliment mails alike.
Okamura’s been at Gust for about 10 years. Ever since the PlayStation 2 era, he’s tried to create interesting games, although sales of these [PS2] titles were consistently not good. His philosophy, faced with this, is to create games that grabs the player’s attention and gets them to pick it up. Once they get their hands on it, they think, “This is interesting!”
This strategy, Okamura feels, is the best for a small company like Gust, so they’ll continue to publish games in this manner. With everyone’s support, he says, they’ll put those feelings into their next project. Finally, Okamoto closes out his post by hinting at more Atelier news to come this month.
