Are Atelier games really long / hard to platinum? I've never played any "real" Atelier yet (only Mana Khemia, which I absolutely loved) and they appeal to me a lot, but I'm on a "completing games" kind of mood recently and I'm wondering if it's a nice challenge or an awful one
I think it depends on which game you select. If you are looking for something like Mana Khemia (great game, btw. You have excellent taste. But you already knew that. I’ll close the parentheses now) then there’s the sequel and/or the three Atelier Iris titles: Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana, Atelier Iris 2: The Azoth of Destiny and Atelier Iris 3: The Grand Phantasm. I haven’t tried Mana Khemia 2 yet, but the three AIs are relatively easy to complete fully. AI2 happens to be one of my top ten games of all time, so I always recommend that one even though it will have more meaning if you play it after the first.
The only one that would take the longest to complete would be Eternal Mana since there are (IIRC) 400 items to create. You need to make all of them to unlock the extras. Grand Phantasm has more than one ending, but it's easy to see them all with proper saves.
Now, the traditional Ateliers are a different beast since all of them (except Shallie) have a time limit. To earn their platinum trophies, it means you need to see all of the character events, all of the endings, defeat certain bosses and get your levels to a certain number. Throw in some other random events and that's the basic formula.
The original Atelier Rorona is the most difficult to fully complete unless you keep a guide handy. The general trend is that they get progressively easier as they get released. So Totori is easier than Rorona, Meruru is easier than Totori, Ayesha is easier than Meruru and so on. You could jump around, but I recommend playing them in order.
If you want to get a small sample of what you’d be getting into regarding the traditional Ateliers, you could always check out Atelier Annie for the DS. It has the elements of a traditional Atelier, but the difficulty isn’t as strict as Rorona or Totori.
Does that help? I tend to ramble when this series gets brought up because I <3 it so much.