Atelier Ayesha: The Alchemist of Dusk DX Reviews

Nice and easy RPG, I've had a lot of fun with it as my first Atelier game. The time limit is pretty forgiving (unless you get like I did and don't realize where you're meant to go for too long with a specific quest to advance things), and the New Game+ mode really helps you to speed things up so you can unlock any events you missed in maybe a third of the time your first play through takes you. I also appreciated that it gives you the option to skip the initial areas, letting you bypass about 90% of the tutorial bits you've already seen the first go around. Fun characters, and the alchemy system is enjoyable enough for me to want to come back and try to make better and better items. I'll be looking to continue the trilogy once I've played it a second or third time. Despite the store listing it as unsupported on the Steam Deck, I had zero issues playing it on mine, with the only quirk being that you need to use the touch screen in the very first menu that comes up.

I've been torn about trying the mainline [i]Atelier[/i] series. I've played some of the spin-off games before, but the mainline games have always had me wavering from a distance and not pulling the trigger on investing into one. On the one hand, I really like the idea of an alchemy RPG, I am always here for dense and overcomplicated crafting systems in games. On the other hand, I just feel so strongly that these games are made and marketed for a specific kind of person and I am definitely not that person. And my experience now having played one for 40+ hours is that that impression I had was mostly correct. I went through this game pretty much without any attachment to the characters, the setting, the dialogue, the plot, pretty much everything. It was all pretty dumb and in the postgame I decided to just sleep through months of time to get to the ending rather than do a bunch of quests for characters I didn't care about. I was drawn to this entry because of the dying earth setting and the supposedly higher stakes story, and that was probably a mistake because the saccharine tone and the hollow slice-of-life episodes where a bunch of women written by men who have never spoken to a woman repeatedly have boring conversations about sweets would at least not be so jarring if they weren't in a world that is currently falling apart under some form of magic climate crisis. But you know what? The other half of my impressions was right too. In terms of gameplay, I really enjoyed the loop of crafting and exploring, figuring out the fine points of both, and even the management aspects of the game. I decided to play on hard difficulty hoping for some challenge. The combat proved not up to snuff in that regard until the endgame, but in the middle of the game I felt genuinely pressured by the deadline and the money pressures that dictated whether or not I could afford bombs to fight with. I still managed to kill the final boss with a year to spare, but I was surprised the game could create that feeling of friction with its systems when it shied so far away with it with its story. I feel the combat system is sort of sloppy and they could have refined into something much more, it has some good ideas. The synthesizing though is very absorbing and seeing your weird creations come to life is rewarding. I love the bomb that keeps dropping garbage on your enemies, I attached a quality to it that debuffs every stat and seeing those debuffs popups as I wasted the endgame bosses was great. So my final impression is that both this game and probably this series is okay. I'm not racing out to try the next one, but I'm also not sworn against the series forever. A chill and light RPG experience. It was fun.

Have to be honest: Ayesha is such a frustrating experience that it simply cannot be recommended. But it's buggy, freezing and crashing at least three times, corrupt maps, plus the game itself...so much potential, just not quite there. The alchemy engine is excellent though. Things are easy to craft and understand and it's not the convoluted mess that older games were in the series. Battle seems like an afterthought (Which isn't a bad thing necessarily). Very few fights after the first few hours; a lot of exploration and backtracking. A bit of an issue with the constant "team building" - having to stop and seek out people for cutscenes. Firis had something similar, but it didn't feel as frequent as Ayesha does/did. There's a better story here than in the Arland trilogy. A missing sister, mysterious hints about flowers, Ayesha not realizing that she's got the chops for alchemy (and had basically been doing it all along), etc. Roughly 30% of stuff was voice acted - not unexpected but a bit disappointing, since the characters were more interesting here. There was more voice acting in Meruru, at least so it seemed. Can't say it's a terrible or unplayable game. But the bugs made it a no-go for recommending.

this game is so great i just forgot to finish it and its draining because you have to use a guide otherwise its stressful because theres a time limit.. other than that its lovely the world and music is so dreamlike this whole game is like when you got sick as a kid and laid in bed all day having a weird fever dream about being an alchemist in a medieval fantasy world or was that just me.. and ayesha is so sweet as well i love her design its all flowery and REGINA this game is worth playing just for her her relationship with ayesha is so cuteee and regina is actually gay for ayesha but ayesha is actually homophobic yeah it gets pretty messy no i dont know what a "run-on sentence" is honestly i just wanna get through this game so i can get to the other 2 in the trilogy which look even better but the main plot of this one was actually randomly generated so you have no idea how to finish the game without a guide which is like, not cool dude..