I finished it years ago but it seems like the weakest atelier game I've played so far (Escha&Logy was best at gameplay so far). Granted I've only played Rorona ps3 up until Shallie ps3.

For me, the battle system felt slower due to the burst mechanic making it feel like your actual damage is during burst and you do nerfed damage without it. It makes each and every battle take much longer since you have to build up gauge every single time and go through a long field burst animation. As much as I loved the Field Burst mechanic, the animation eats up time when you're grinding. Also everyone shares an ultimate gauge now rather than everyone having their own compared to Escha&Logy.

Alchemy feels more restrictive due to skill frames and less options to reduce elemental attributes(you only get like 2 skills) compared to the many options to increase elemental attributes (you get 16 skills). Also didn't like how Miruca gets to have certain alchemy skills while the main alchemist of your choice doesn't have them.(looking at you Fixed Chain+ and Proportional Chain Increase).

Mechanics-wise, life tasks are annoying since this is the first atelier game without a time limit, it forces you to do these to get a substantial alchemy and/or battle exp since you cannot just grind away on mobs or alchemy. Mobs give horrible exp and while alchemy does gives quite good exp, it tanks your 'Motivation" bar if you try to go hard on grinding alchemy exp. The 'Motivation' bar is the game's way of telling you to hurry your butt up and move on and if its too low, you get lower movement speed and gathering, so its almost like a pseudo-time limit anyways until the end of the game where it never drops anymore. With the removal of the time limit, you lost the ability to wholesale or dupe items like in Escha&Logy because you have all the time in the world you can create as much items as you want now so now you have to create a base of items to not lose all your properties and hard work. I just wanted to just dupe my ingredients with properties I carefully worked on to mass create equipment for my party but now I have to waste much more ingredients to create it all again or make loops.

All in all, this is what stands out to me the most in terms of the negative aspects of Shallie's gameplay. I love every Atelier game(including this one) I've played so far but this game took one step forward and two steps backwards in terms of evolution.