Has anyone played this series and if so are they good games?

Atelier Iris 2 looks very good.  Whats the gameplay, combat and story like?

I've gone on about this series being a fun, if niche, rpg that is not too shabby. That said I have only played Atelier Iris 1 and 3 (so I cant tell you much about AI2)

According to people who have played all the games though, the first in the series (Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana) is the best of the bunch, and looking back at some of the colourful characters I'd have to agree that it has its strong points over Atelier Iris 3. AI3 feels a lot more compact with its mission structure, and with less sound/graphic clippings the game feels a whole lot smoother than the first.

The alchemy system is the main point of the Atelier games, and its a blast to create new items/weapons/armor and to experiment with different ingredients to see what you will get. If you can get over the Nippon Ichi quality visuals and change the voice track to Japanese (JRPGs have this strange way of finding voice actors with terrible timing in their deliveries) you should have a blast playing any of them. Best place price wise to pick them up would be EB since they games are usually half price in sale periods, but since most stores wouldn't have the games in stock you may have to look to eBay and such, and as a result pay $50 for each game.

Its not a card battle system. If anything, you would be best to compare it to Final Fantasy X battle system. The line of cards at the top are listings of the order of attack for your party and enemies. And much like FFX you can delay your opponents, do special quick moves that let you act again quickly and such.

But aside from that little change in AI3, both are fairly traditional in their battle systems. The first game has random encounters and turn based combat with any normal functionality you would find any any other generic RPG. And aside from the timeline of attacks in AI3, combat is identical for the most part, only now random encounters are replaced with blobs on the level maps that you can avoid or engage much like in Mario RPGS/Lufia 2/Earthbound.etc