Atelier Ryza 3: Alchemist of the End & the Secret Key Reviews

TL;DR feels like a cash grab of the popularity of Ryza 1, very hastily thrown together, outright bizarre or incompetent game design by a studio with this many games under them. - open world at points for no reason, looks absolutely terrible with flat textures and endless popin at maxed settings - Graphics in general are worse than the previous games, weird lighting that doesn’t always work with the 4 times of day - Level scaling in a JRPG? And HP scaling? So you’ll never feel strong - Skill tree obscures important abilities like item rebuild, alchemy level was better - Reuses all of 1 map with basically nothing added, just padding - All chests contain 1 random material you can get elsewhere, excessive amount of chests - Story is a mess, again, but is outright confusing to even understand what is going on - Money isn’t really needed, you can sell mats to the actual best girl, and she will then stock somewhat low quality ones, to buy, but you can grind these materials anyways - Terrible key system that is poorly explained - UI scaled to 4k despite this being a Switch game? The subs are tiny - Nothing to actually do in the open world, just waste time running through it - Character models lack shading in areas you’d expect it, which causes them to look oddly flat at parts - Still no EN voices despite basically every Japanese studio now doing EN (and CN sometimes), Gust it’s not 2015 anymore - Runs poorly, this is their 3rd Ryza PC game now and we still have 75-80% GPU utilisation issues, I bruteforce it but this game does not justify even half the performance cost - Weird UI design in general, excessive DOF applied to mission marker in the top right, no up/down indicator for waypoints - Way too many invisible walls that aren’t clear, navigating things like The Mine is just annoying - Still the same 6 enemies with a ton of recolours, enemies also are everywhere and tend to get in the way when gathering materials - Alchemy list is needlessly bloated with lot’s of recipes just being needed for 1 or 2 other recipes, morphing is mostly no longer stacked so you can get stuck wondering when you’ll unlock a recipe - Trait system still a mess, bloated again with traits ranging from useless to OP - Combat is not very good, 3rd game now doing ATB weirdness instead of just doing turn based like nearly EVERY JRPG - No playable Romy (cmon Gust, do me this at least) The music is generally excellent but I can’t recommend this, even at a deep sale there’s not anything here that wasn’t done much better in other games or Ryza 1/2.

Atelier Ryza is a series with ups and downs, but each game overall achieves at being a fun game, despite some questionable gameplay and story designs. It takes all of the good from the previous games and adds to it. Story is wonderful as always, and I cried at the end. Still have tremors thinking about it. Although it does slow down near the end when you have to revisit previous areas, but it still keeps the impact at the height of the climax. The only things I really dislike is the skill tree. You can't figure out what you're gonna be getting, or what skills lead to what, and the skill tree is really important, yet you don't have the knowledge unless you use a guide. Still, lovely game. One of my favorite JRPG games.

With the latest updates runs really well on steam deck! Great ending to a great series, hope everyone gives the trilogy a chance at some point it has some of my favorite characters of all time in it and watching them grow has been a joy.