The Atelier Series - Addictive alchemy RPG

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The Atelier games are extremely my shit. I have more than I will ever complete and I still get excited when new ones come out.
 
General rule of thumb when looking for hard to find weeb games. Eurostan will usually have them in stock more frequently because there are no real weebs that exist there. I've gotten quite a few odd ports like this, the ESRB rating just jacks up the price a billion percent compared to the PEGI version that has no differences in content. Also the boxes may be multilingual where as the US version only has english on the back.

You'll get cases like that from amazon occasionally if they ship out near Canada because Canada has to have French on the back cover. Same game content is on the disc tho.
 
Was curious, did a search, Ryza was not published by Fatlus. Thought that sounded weird.
agility_ said:
I can't find Ryza for anything lower than $70, dunno if it sold out instantly or Atlus just bothered to print twelve copies.
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I suppose it did well?

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Fuck. ValkyrieAurora set her Atelier video to private. It was a great look into the franchise.
 
Hmmm, I've been looking at this series for a while now but never played any of the games.

I'd love to play one of them on my switch though. Which one would you guys suggest? I'm really at a loss.
 
soft breathing said:
Hmmm, I've been looking at this series for a while now but never played any of the games.

I'd love to play one of them on my switch though. Which one would you guys suggest? I'm really at a loss.
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Start with Ryza it's getting a direct sequel this year.

Out of the The other trilogies that are available, Dusk trilogy would be the next ones to play.
 
I heard the UK version of Atlelier Ryza on the Switch is still on Amazon, but I think it might be for a limited time. It was one of the games that I wanted to get on the Switch last year, and I happened to see it at a GameStop in one of the malls I used to work in.

Alas, I never did get it :(

But I’m interested to getting the sequel to it by the end of the year :biggrin:
 
Marissa Moira said:
Out of the The other trilogies that are available, Dusk trilogy would be the next ones to play.
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I just ordered Ryza off of Amazon but it seems like getting my hands on the Dusk trilogy below almost 150euros on eBay is impossible. Damn.
 
Ryza 2 is out in the west now. I just started it up and the graphics, music, etc all got way better. The battle systems feels smoother too.

I'm not one to get very hyped but this game seems to be going in a good direction.

EDIT:
I'm a good few hours into the game and yes, it is still good. The mascot character is my least favorite part of the game since I hate mascot characters out of principle but it isn't super annoying. I'll probably end up picking up the DLC for extra areas since I got some eShop giftcards for Christmas.
 
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AbyssStarer said:
Ryza 2 is out in the west now. I just started it up and the graphics, music, etc all got way better. The battle systems feels smoother too.

I'm not one to get very hyped but this game seems to be going in a good direction.
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Fuck me, I forgot about it completely. Thanks for the heads up.
 
About 30 hours in, I'm sad to say it's a step down from the previous game. The only improvement is the battle system being faster, though even that turned into being way too easy considering Alchemy is now so easy to cheese you can easily make incredibly powerful equipment from the get go.
The first Ryza game was good because it had a great coming of age story for the characters who felt like somewhat real friends rather than a disjointed cast that only interacts in cutscenes. Ryza 2 doesn't manage to expand on the characters of the first game with new developement besides a single exceptions, and it falls back on the previous Atelier series fault of making the characters feel disconnected from one another. The new story also fails to give any interest and the mascot character might be the worst mascot I ever seen in a game.
The pacing is also not great, the events aren't synced well with the player progress so you'd have times where you'll go on a short dungeon run or do some alchemy and then be forced into literally dozen of events that were queued one atop another.
It's still fun but it's a shame that Gust doesn't capitalize on what made Ryza work.
 
wtfNeedSignUp said:
About 30 hours in, I'm sad to say it's a step down from the previous game. The only improvement is the battle system being faster, though even that turned into being way too easy considering Alchemy is now so easy to cheese you can easily make incredibly powerful equipment from the get go.
The first Ryza game was good because it had a great coming of age story for the characters who felt like somewhat real friends rather than a disjointed cast that only interacts in cutscenes. Ryza 2 doesn't manage to expand on the characters of the first game with new developement besides a single exceptions, and it falls back on the previous Atelier series fault of making the characters feel disconnected from one another. The new story also fails to give any interest and the mascot character might be the worst mascot I ever seen in a game.
The pacing is also not great, the events aren't synced well with the player progress so you'd have times where you'll go on a short dungeon run or do some alchemy and then be forced into literally dozen of events that were queued one atop another.
It's still fun but it's a shame that Gust doesn't capitalize on what made Ryza work.
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I'm about 50 hours in and I'm at a point where I have gotten no new alchemy items or recipes worth making in entirely too long. I usually like sitting in the menu crafting for hours on end and I'm disappointed with it.

I miss turn-based combat too.
 
wtfNeedSignUp said:
About 30 hours in, I'm sad to say it's a step down from the previous game. The only improvement is the battle system being faster, though even that turned into being way too easy considering Alchemy is now so easy to cheese you can easily make incredibly powerful equipment from the get go.
The first Ryza game was good because it had a great coming of age story for the characters who felt like somewhat real friends rather than a disjointed cast that only interacts in cutscenes. Ryza 2 doesn't manage to expand on the characters of the first game with new developement besides a single exceptions, and it falls back on the previous Atelier series fault of making the characters feel disconnected from one another. The new story also fails to give any interest and the mascot character might be the worst mascot I ever seen in a game.
The pacing is also not great, the events aren't synced well with the player progress so you'd have times where you'll go on a short dungeon run or do some alchemy and then be forced into literally dozen of events that were queued one atop another.
It's still fun but it's a shame that Gust doesn't capitalize on what made Ryza work.
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I gotta agree with all of this.

I beat the main story a while ago. I'm glad I'm not the only one who felt it wasn't... satisfying, so to speak. Exploration is still as fun and great as ever, except when all the cool new movement features are just excuses to pad out the levels (looking at the fucking Mirage Forest). I was making 999 quality items before I'd even finished the main story.
I wasn't a big fan of the formulaic structure. Do part of a dungeon, get a new recipe, make recipe, finish dungeon. Repeat over and over again. If Ryza 1 was formulaic, I certainly didn't notice it as much.

Battles are fun... except that your allies are terrible at guarding, which on higher difficulties will force you to somehow predict who the enemies are going to target. God help you if the enemies use AoE. It's also ungodly annoying when every non-boss battle takes 3 minutes even on lower difficulties because your allies would rather give party-wide buffs, which are worthless in random encounters, than deal more damage. (I kept Klaudia in my party permanently once I found out that her attack is actually-- gasp-- an attack!)

At least Tao actually wants to go on the adventure this time. Now I can actually tolerate him! I also like the idea of Lent becoming world-weary and feeling like he's becoming like his abusive drunkard dad.

I do like how you can now see notable spots on the minimap and what items you can gather from each point, things you needed high-level items to do in the past games. Still a fun game. I just have to wonder if Ryza 1 set the bar too high.

Pro tip: Enemies will always run away from you when you're riding the spirit beast. This saved so much of my sanity.
 
Starting to play the original Salburg Atelier 1 and 2 collection for PS2. The difficulty is a little bit wonky, just like the original Rorona, but I like it a lot. Atelier games with time limits are really my jam.
 
Exbein said:
Starting to play the original Salburg Atelier 1 and 2 collection for PS2. The difficulty is a little bit wonky, just like the original Rorona, but I like it a lot. Atelier games with time limits are really my jam.
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I'm kinda curious about those, I only played the non-timed ps2 games.
The time limit added a lot to the series, since it makes resource management more of a factor. While the non-timed games made resource gathering just a bother.

I'll add another thing I dislike in Ryza - Varying quality value. It makes a lot of resources gathered pointless if they are below the threshold for a higher elemental value. The traits were enough to make a difference between ingredients.
 
Okay I finished Ryza 2 and it might very well be the Atelier game I most disliked and I'm not even sure it's much better mechanically than previous iterations. The only real thing going for it is thicc elf ladies. I'll make a short review:

Story: 3 years after the first game, Ryza gets a gem-like egg and goes to the capital city. She meets her friends, the egg hatches for the mascot character Fii and Ryza and friends explores ruins to find about alchemy. That's really about it for 80% of the game, suffice to say it's not very engaging and the other 20% of the game has an actual motivation, but one that's somehow worse since it ruins the plot from the first game.
Fii needs to use one-use artifacts within the different ruins to stay alive since it's originally from the Elf world. You discover too late that the artifacts just so happen to seal the bug creatures from the first game, that were apperantly always aggressive, despite the plot of the first game being about how it was the alchemists fault that the bugs went feral. The party beats the bug people and Fii is sent back to elf world (why exactly can't Ryza conjur a gate to a place in Elf world not populated by super bugs is beyond me). The plot does the original sin of having the character not doing anything having the exact result of it going on a journey. Seriously, Ryza staying at the island wouldn't have changed anything. I'll also add that it might have been interesting if the revelation that those artifcats seal the bug world came earlier so it would have an actual decision of whether to let Fii die or risk the entire city, though Ryza needs to be a psychopath to do the latter. It is also revealed that Fii is responsible for some of the new alchemy abilities in the game, but it has no bearing since Ryza have done god tier alchemy before this game so who cares.
The plot should have either gone on a larger scale with the elves or had a more personal story, but it tries to do both and fails.

Characters: Probably where the devs really dropped the ball. Ryza has no character, everything about her revolvs around Fii, there is no developement, only talking about the fucking critter. Fii is one of the worse mascot character I've seen in a game, it's useless, has no real personality and it doesn't do shit over the course of the game other than saying it's fucking name. The other characters aren't terrible, but they don't feel tethered to the plot like in Ryza 1, only Lent and the thicc elf lady have some interesting character, everyone else basically have no real plot until the final event where a sudden conflict appears or the devs outright tell you what their issue is rather than show it in either past events or in gameplay.

Combat: I played on normal and it's a slightly faster version of Ryza 1, though it still a nightmare when you start a battle. At least items are now spammable and can be used immediately on the start of a battle with no need to ration them. The game was very easy and I had to upgrade equipment only twice in the 2/3 of the game and the last area.

Exploration: The game has a lot less exploration items than Ryza so while on one hand, you don't need to wait until you get a large container for grinding materials, on the other hand there is very little motivation to get new exploration items, with the new items in the game like going underwater being actually useful only like 3 times. The game has a new gameplay part of exploring the dungeons for clues and it is terrible. You need to do random tasks, then you need to backtrack to find clues, then you can continue only to reach a wall, you need to use the clues to get an alchemy recipe and then you can go again in the dungeon to get to its end. The worse thing is the clues, you have a grid with keywords and you need to put each clue into the correct slot, it's just time consuming and doesn't require any thought, and worse, make you not care about the actual lore you assemble. A much better alternative was unlocking clues with specific alchemy items, which brings us to the next point.

Alchemy: It's just broken. There was never an atelier game where it was so easy to get 999 items. Even traits are easy since the game has a literally 2 item loop to get all the traits you want into a single item. The game also gives the player a big allocation of items to use in alchemy to get pretty much every item ability he wants. Ironically though it is the least alchemy oriented game in the series, you need to make something like 8 items over the course of the game. New alchemy skills and recipes are gained through a grid a' la FFX, but I got every ability and recipe hours before the last dungeon.

Visuals: Not so different from previous games. The rain effect is plain bad, and some areas are either boring mazes or have so much going on it's hard to know what you are looking at.

tl;dr hard not recommend. Play Sakuna instead, which is more of an Atelier game than this.

Edit: typos.
 
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I actually just finished up the game and yeah, it doesn't feel like so much like an Atelier game. Alchemy was like an afterthought and was so damned easy it wasn't as satisfying. The amplifiers were totally broken and item rebuild got more broken after I already didnt care for the addition of it to the series' formula. It's kind of just something to make the game easier and so you dont have to actually do alchemy, which is kind of the point of the game.
I think they're trying too hard to appeal to a wider audience, and particularly to people who don't like games like Atelier in the first place. Ruin memory fragments are utterly pointless and just make you backtrack and blah blah blah. @wtfNeedSignUp said it well.

I liked playing it but it wasn't as good as others. They want Atelier to appeal to more people and I dont like the gameplay changes. Will have to see how the next comes out to see if I keep following the series. I want to finish playing the Arland Trilogy, I already have less time for vidya than I used to anyway.

Edit:
Adding some more thoughts.
I finished the SP skill tree thing 90+% by 45 hours in the game and finished the game with 50,000 points of SP I could literally do nothing with.

Video game stories are pulp fiction crap with a handful being actually good, Ryza 2's story is below average. I don't really care since the bar for game stories is so low but if you do care just know that.

Easy and normal difficulty should be cut and hard made normal and or unlock the hardest difficulties from the get go. This game is so easy it makes having easily obtained god items feel not worth it to work for.

I stopped getting alchemy items and barely any recipes around 45 hours in. This is like an atelier game that doesn't want the player to do alchemy because it wants to appeal to people who dont like sitting in menus. (Which is what I like about a good atelier game.)

My favorite game of the ones I've played was Escha and Logy or Rorona. Both available on Switch (and probably PS4) for $40. They're better than Ryza 2.

Would consider making a SOUL v SOULLESS meme with this game as the soulless side. If you see one float around it might have been me. That said, I still didnt hate this game, it's very average, but I'm annoyed that I saw it be called the best Atelier game by some review rags.
 
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