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

NIce ending to this series

The game is quite imaginative and I like the creation process in the game

I pray Koei Tecmo keeps GUST going strong because this was a lovely game to play from start to finish… I wasn’t slowly going crazy from the sheer size of the game. They really stuffed a lot of things into this game which led to multiple moments of just going “oh god what do you mean there’s more to see?!” Oh and the barrel check was done and the barrel was indeed a barrel! I do believe some areas could be improved, some on the technical side and some on the general game side but before getting into any of that I can honestly say it is a good RPG. It builds on mechanics and ideas from the first two games and makes decent attempts to expand on them with the majority doing a good job. I do feel on the technical side of things they could have spent some more time fine tuning some things because I found the game to be a little unstable as it got closer to the end of the game with multiple crashes after cutscenes.. At least the auto saves are well timed so if a crash does happen you likely won’t lose a ton of progress. Graphically i’d place it the same as Ryza 1 & 2, good but a little less compared to them because mannnnn they went a little hard on things like bloom in some areas (I had to turn it off because it made some areas feel like a flashbang went off) I did catch in some areas textures not stretched fully and resulting in being able to see out into the void a little bit, the ones I caught were minor and weren’t big enough to squeeze into the void so at least there’s that. I will forever have a few issues with a lot of visual FX in games recently where it just gets so heavy it becomes hard to really see anything going on at times, I don’t hold it against the game itself but I do wish a lot more modern games had better options for how heavy visual FX can be. Music is a solid high grade as usual in Atelier games, it has a good variety and doesn’t make tracks so overloaded that it becomes a nightmare to listen to after a couple times. I do wish there was an extra battle track and boss track in the sound track however but that’s a personal thing I prefer, I do feel it would be a good idea to reduce character voices in battle because they do talk a fair bit as battles go on and as the game went on it slowly became noise to me I’ll be honest. Heck as I think about it they could have snuck in battle themes from Ryza 1 & 2 in some areas of the game and I think it would have been a welcome thing to experience again. Gameplay wise it’s pretty much Ryza 2 with a couple bells and whistles added on top, more variety in some equipable tools, a skill tree filled with a lot less passive abilities and more recipes to feel better progression wise and combat is really just Ryza 2 with some more moves and polish worked in which works fine. I do have a couple issues with the gameplay side of things and that partly due to the length of the game itself…. A lot of areas in the game contain a lot of the same ingredients outside of a fair number of unique ones but it results in a fair number of ingredients being harder to get sometimes because of how little there is of it at times. Some ingredients just feel so rare it becomes a pain using them because you don’t know when you’ll manage to get another one… it could of been improved with the shops because outside of Romy the traveling merchant you don’t really see shops expand much in terms of stock like in Ryza 2 and that could of been a good way to get rare items to become easier to obtain closer to end game. I am happy I played Atelier Ryza’s trilogy, it’s a good set of RPGs in a pretty good franchise. I hope GUST continues to make good games and avoids any company management hell like layoffs. I happily recommend the trilogy but of course I always suggest waiting for a sale because Koei will forever make their products a bit high in the initial price range…. Oh and Barrel!

Not a lot of difference in the alchemy system from 2 to 3 the only thing that got added is the Key function, If you have played 1 before you might get a bit of nostalgia on the first map (not if you played the whole series recently though), combat is also somewhat similar to 2 with a few addition to the existing mechanic. but still same as always I have fun synthesizing that it took me quite some time to progress the story

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.