So I got this in the mail today:
Atelier Rorona Plus: The Alchemist of Arland - PS3I was surprised that the game cover and manual are entirely translated in french and the manual is very complete, a nice effort was made to compensate the lack on ingame french localisation - I always play my games in english anyhow.
The cross save feature works wonder, too bad it's the only "+" game that is cross platform..
Graphic comparisonThen I decided to make my own comparison between the two versions. Considering this is technically the 4th episode they released on PS3 and the 3rd on PSVita I may assume this should be well representative of the other games in term of engine performance.
I did a bunch of
comparative screenshots, here's an extract below, you can see the full set here:
https://imgur.com/a/mfscWThe big ones are PS3 of course, all the images are raw:
So
on PS3 there are several improvements to be mentionned:
- The game runs in 720p60, even if it rarely keeps a solid 60 FPS, it's always above 30 where the PSVita version struggles between 20 and 30. The game experience is way smoother on PS3
- The texture quality is higher, on characters and on 3D environments
- The higher vertical resolution makes the artworks more detailled
- Loading times are around three times faster
It seems from what I've read that the performance on PSTV is worse with even lower framerates and the obvious blurry upscaling that you can guess from watching the screenshots above.
Price comparisonCurrently the prices of the PSVita "+" versions on the store are locked to 39.99€:
- Atelier Totori Plus - 39.99€
- Atelier Meruru Plus - 39.99€
- Atelier Ayesha Plus - 39.99€
All the DLCs are included, the 2 last games have not yet been released on PSVita.
Comparing with Amazon physical PS3 versions:
- Atelier Totori - 25.90€
- Atelier Meruru - 29.49€
- Atelier Ayesha - 24.15€
- Atelier Escha & Logy - 42,73€
- Atelier Shallie - 32.73€
The DLCs are not included in the PS3 versions, the store indicates that there are ~50€ worth of DLCs available for the 5 games. So the Amazon prices + all the DLCs makes a round price of 41€ per game. Considering there are a bunch of DLC that are swimsuit costumes that I don't care about, that makes the PS3 versions + DLC cheaper than the PSVita "+" versions.
I may document on a later post my findings about the "+" bonus content that is no DLC, but from what I've saw here and there it's really not much to be concerned about.
For now the balance is way more in favor of the PS3 version, I'll keep you updated!