Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land Reviews

Gameplay is solid, and I love run around and finding things.

Finally a good game in the Atelier series, and it has come to permanently kill the past of the Atelier franchise once and for all! It fixes the series by completely turning its back on turn based combat and replaces it with good combat. Action is the future, and there's no turning back now with a sequel in the works titled Atelier Karia. I couldn't be more excited. Thank you for listening to your customers and supporters and fans! It makes sense that the best selling Atelier game to ever exist would get a sequel, but I did not expect one so soon without hesitation! The music in this game is also godly! I already bought the OST! Well done Gust for disowning your troubled past and finally acknowledging you were wrong and just how much the future depends on Yumia. Atelier Yumia is the perfect game!

I enjoyed Yumia quite a lot. There were some issues (no challenge in combat, poor scaling in created items), but part of these games is making overpowered weapons and steamrolling everything. I do feel that they could have limited the truly broken items to purely endgame content, but I liked it all the same. The characters were fun, story was somewhat interesting (though some of the drama was a bit forced), and the world itself was lovely. It was a cozy way to spend my evenings after the kids went to bed, and I've since decided to try other games in the Atelier franchise.

(I've been playing these games since the original PS2 Atelier Iris) Not bad, it has it's issues but it is a fairly decent game. Thankfully not having time limiteations. I don't particularly enjoy action button mashing combat (which is one of the reasons I waited for a sale) or the DLC farming that this franchise has pulled since the PS3 releases. It also has issues running at 4K resolution (screen goes mostly a shadow white during combat)

Atelier Yumia review 5/10 I enjoyed the Atelier Ryza series, and was hoping for more like that. However, Atelier Yumia is quite a bit different, and my experience with it was not great. It passed the time though, and I was able to finish it, so I'm giving it a bare pass. Pro: === - The story is reasonably interesting and coherent. - The playable characters each have their own story that relates to the main story and the party's journey. - I rarely found myself short of synthesis materials. - On Easy mode, combat was indeed easy. I did not die once (although I came close a couple of times). - Late in the game, I discovered that one of the buttons gives you a guided path through the world for the current main story quest, so I was actually able to finish the game. - Very few bugs (although there are several questionable design choices that can lead to situations that feel like bugs). Neutral: ======= - There are 3 types of Synthesis: 1) the atelier-based synthesis found in all of the Atelier games. 2) a set of things that are synthesized and used on the fly on the field. 3) a huge variety of things you can learn to build at bases you discover in the world; most these items are purely decorative, but some have important functions. - There are multiple ways to duplicate items, depending on the type of item, each requiring different facilities that cannot all be in the same location. Con: === - The tutorials are inadequate. Although there is a fairly extensive in-game manual, important details about how things work together, and what button to press when, are missing. You have to discover these by a trial and error, or use online resources from other players. - My biggest complaint is that, while the world is nominally open, most paths that look straightforward on the map are actually not. The world is full of insurmountable barriers, and there is often only one very indirect and non-obvious way to get where you want to go. Even those can require a triple jump from a precise location. As the game progresses, you acquire fast-travel points that help, but even those are rarely where you want them. - While alchemy is what the Atelier game family is all about, the actual rules are quite different from game to game, and this is especially true for this one. In the end, I did what many other players did, and depended mostly on automatic synthesis. While this eliminates a lot of boring gameplay, it also bypasses most of the interesting aspects, but I could not summon the patience required to explore them. This could have been avoided if the developers had taken a progressive and tutorial approach, rather than tossing players into the deep end. - A similar thing happened with combat: I ended up using a simple approach of rotating use of buttons that worked most of the time, so I never was tempted to explore the more interesting details of combat strategy. - Lots of content is locked behind specific discoveries. While this is common in RPG's, and not necessarily a bad thing, in this game a fair amount of content is locked behind discoveries that you are unlikely to make in the course of normal gameplay, so you have resort to online resources from other players to enjoy these. This is just bad design. -- Example: [spoiler] 1) Discover and collect 4 things in a location that you have no quest-related reason to visit. 2) After searching in vain for the needed 5 instances of that item, progress an aspect of the game that allows you to duplicate one of them so that you have 5. 3) Use these to complete a task that allows exploration progress in one region to complete. 4) Only then will you be granted an ability that allows removal of some specific barrier types that block access to other important stuff. [/spoiler] None of this is laid out directly. - Camping is mystifyingly weird. While in essence it is more or less what you would expect, in detail it is bizarre: by trial and error, you discover that you can only camp in certain types of terrain, and you cannot camp at camp sites !??! In fact, although you can do limited building on them, camp sites seem to serve no useful purpose in the game at all, other than being another type of fast travel point. So in the end I was able finish the game, but a LOT of time was spent doing fairly boring and repetitive things while wandering around being confused and trying to make progress. If, unlike me, you enjoy discovering the complexity of synthesis, combat, and the world the hard way, ignore this review. If you are looking just for a time filler, sure. Otherwise, if you have not yet played the Atelia Ryza series, do those instead. -----

It's my first game from the Atelier franchise. At the time of this review, I'm at the beginning of the game, but I already have a blast playing it. Is it the prettiest and most beautiful game out there? No. Is it well optimized on the PC version? Not really, but nonetheless it's playable. That said, I obviously can't say if it's a "good" Atelier game or not, but like I said before, I have fun playing it and love the characters so far, and that's the only thing that matters to me right now.

When I heard that Atelier Yumia was going to be open world and have a grittier story, I was really excited. I played the demo, and from what was in the demo, I really liked it. I preordered this game thinking I was going to enjoy it. I was sadly mistaken. I really tried to give this game a chance. I wanted to love it like I loved Sophie, Lydie and Suelle, Firis, Escha and Logy, Ayesha, Ryza etc. I've played quite a few Atelier titles, and I have to say this is the most disappointing title in the series. It doesn't feel like an Atelier game. It plays like a modern gacha game, which for $70 is abysmal. The crafting doesn't feel rewarding, the lack of a cauldron (a staple in every Atelier game), the characters in your party don't stand out to me AT ALL. They just feel like archetypes of any anime character that ever existed, and I feel that a key part of what makes Atelier special is the characters. The game constantly distracts you from the story at hand by having these little pathways that show up every 5 seconds that only lead to materials that I could've collected without it. For an exploration based game, exploring is not fun. You are constantly interrupted by those pathways that take you to basic materials, and the sheer amount of monsters in the area makes it to where I'm not sticking around in one area for long. I don't normally complain about the character models, but some of them are so off-putting. The characters that come to mind are the siblings that are in your party. They look like someone edited their oc into the game, which is a shame because all the other characters have gorgeous models, especially the villains. And there is no reason why this game should perform so badly on my PC. Monster Hunter Wilds runs better on my PC than this. Now for the things I did like. The exploration tools are fun. While I did get interrupted by many things, the times where I actually used the tools were nice. The black sheep lady has a really good story compared to other characters in the game, and she might honestly be one of the most complex characters I've seen in an Atelier game. From what I've seen of the story, it does meet my expectations for something darker. I like the combat system. The environments are pretty, even though they're cluttered. I really enjoyed the addition of housing. I'm glad they at least kept the barrel tradition going. Overall, I can't recommend this game unless you reallyyyy like gacha games for their gameplay.