Even though you’d think the Atelier series would be smack dab in my wheelhouse, I’ve never played any of them.  It’s a combination of (a) being afraid of time limits, which were a Thing in the earlier titles and (b) their reputation as being cutesy girly games for manly spreadsheet enjoyers.

As a side note, to test that last theory, I spent some time looking up reviews of Atelier Ryza after finishing it, and every one I read (sample size: four) was written by someone with XY chromosomes.  I can’t speak to their fondness for Excel, mind you.

Anyway.  Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & The Secret Hideout.  It’s the 21st game in the series, has no time limits, introduced a main character so popular that she got her own trilogy, and is generally considered a good place to jump on.   I bought the first two games during a PSN sale last year and just got around to finishing the first.  Nine months later.  For me, that’s actually a decent speed.

It’s a good thing I bought two games, because the pacing in Ryza drove me crazy for quite a while and I might have dropped it if I hadn’t already spent money on the sequel.  I’m glad I didn’t, and I’m glad I played it to completion as it was a lot of fun, but WOW does this game spend a long time spinning its wheels before the plot kicks off.  If you’re reading this and considering trying it out, I figure you’re forewarned now.

Part of the reason that the game doesn’t really get into the Stuff Just Got Real phase for quite a while is that, well, it’s got a bunch of characters and they’re all pretty fleshed out and interesting and you get a lot of talking-heads-style cutscenes while you’re learning about them and their backstories.

There are also a ton of systems that I had trouble wrapping my head around at first, which resulted in quite a few nasty and brutal deaths to bosses.  In fact, I don’t think I hit any boss that didn’t wipe me out at least once or twice, which in most games would mean that you needed to go grind levels for a bit and come back.

In Ryza, it means that you need to go Do Some Alchemy, which you would have thought would be obvious but which took me a while to realize.  It also took me hours and hours until I realized that the game wasn’t going to hold my hand and tell me WHAT I should be alchemizing.  I just needed to take every new recipe I got, make it for the first time and then look at what else I could make with it.

Honestly, I’m not entirely convinced that’s on me.  It felt like there were a ton of quality-of-life features the game could have, like letting you know where you had collected an item before and what tool was needed to collect it from which sort of gathering node.  I’m not going to say definitively that it’s a subtle way to push you to buy a guide book, but I will say that alchemy gets considerably less annoying if you have a drop locations table open on a second screen at all times.

One late-game alchemy synthesis, in particular, involves collecting components from flowers in a certain zone.  There are only 3 or 4 of the flowers in the zone and they give different materials based on which tool you use to harvest them, so I wound up having to make several passes through the zone with different tools.

On the other hand, you can simply run around enemies to avoid combat if you don’t feel like it, so farming really isn’t much of a chore.  Ryza runs at a pretty good pace, you can make items to make her run faster, and there’s even a sprint button that you can keep activated more or less 100% of the time as there’s no stamina loss associated.

Sprinting DID wind up giving me motion sickness after a while, though, so mostly I kept that off.

Once I got the hang of where I could find things, and how to efficiently gather them, and how to use the fast travel system to instantly reload the zone I was currently in, I had a lot of fun with the alchemy system.  I didn’t get into it to the point of discovering infinite loops that could be used to completely break the game, but I did enjoy the going out and farming for just the right materials to make cool gear for all of the characters.

Well, the three characters I used.  There are six characters, you can only have three in your party at any time, and none of them are particularly worse than others so you really get to pick whichever like the most based on looks and personality.

You have the titular character, Ryza herself, who is sort of a brat who thinks there must be more than this provincial life really doesn’t want to inherit the family farm. She eventually evolves into… well, sort of a bratty Tony Stark, always inventing new things without knowing quite what they’re going to do.  Some of them explode.

She has a pair of childhood friends, and I will forgive you if you just call them “brains” and “brawn” but their real names are Tao and Lent.  They mostly get exist to get sucked into her crazy misadventures.

She picks up a traveling merchant’s daughter, who represents the barely veiled actually not veiled at all love interest.  Ryza herself appears to be completely clueless that the party’s token buffer/healer is crushing on her.

…well, at first.

LEWD.

She also gets an Alchemy mentor who teaches her the subtle tricks of the trade.

…and the alchemy mentor comes with some extra muscle.

In this screenshot, you can see her eyes.  That isn’t necessarily always the case.

Some cutscenes are less than subtle with the camera angles, is what I’m saying.

Lila’s ample… tracts of land and some moderately-inappropriate bouncing on the 17-year-old main character aside, there’s really nothing objectionable about the game.  You could probably play this around friends or a spouse without more than the occasional eye roll.

Well, my wife did say a couple of things about Ryza’s Daisy Dukes, but there were several other outfits I could pick from.

I realize I may be sounding a bit negative at points in this, but I think most of the things that annoyed me were simply me needing to learn how the Atelier series works.  There were 20 games before Ryza, after all, and presumably there are a bunch of long-time fans who don’t need to be hand-held through the alchemy bits.  While I’m not going to jump right into Ryza 2, I’m expecting a lot of the stuff I learned from Ryza 1 to simply carry over when I do.

Overall, it was a nice comfy RPG with lower-than-average stakes and characters I didn’t mind hanging out with for 30 or 40 hours.  You’re not trying to save the entire world, you’re just trying to help the village and the people you grew up with, and you’re making friends along the way.

Well, and blowing stuff up.  FOR SCIENCE.