I have been playing Atelier Meruru , the third title of the Arland trilogy of the Atelier series and making some headway. I'm in Year 3 now, and basically met the goal of building up the town of Arls.
Meruru is clearly the most polished title in this trilogy. It very cleverly reduces the focus on time limits on all the goals you need to meet, as well as for requests. The story is also far clearer in its structure, compared to the weirdly open ended Totori. Overall a fairly polished experience, and yet I can't help but feel that this game is just wasting so much of its potential. Clearly, the slice-of-life idea of the series with a focus on a real life calendar that slowly progresses day by day would lend itself to so many obvious ideas. Like, why aren't there actual seasons, like winter, spring, summer and fall? Why are there no yearly events, like your protagonists birthday, or holidays and other special days that give you a sense of the passage of time, as well as some nice world building. It's all so simplistic and barren. I guess these games are developed on a shoe string budget and likely on a very short time frame too, because I can't explain this complete disinterest in making this wold richer and more interesting.
Do future Atelier games get better about world buildling and just general depth of writing? I'll probably still play them, the overall game loop is addicting, but it's just a shame how little the dev seems to care in making more with its franchise.
EDIT:
on a not-so-minor note, I also can't believe how terrible the PC ports are. Every time you open up the menu on the Steam Deck, there is a 2 second lag, where everything freezes. And this is someting that all three titles of the Arland trilogy have. Just so fucking terrible