Atelier Lydie & Suelle ~The Alchemists and the Mysterious Paintings~ Reviews

The worlds and landscapes were interesting, but I didn't really like any of the new characters, and it relied heavily on the reappearance of past characters. Also, I don't know why they decided they needed to make the alchemy mechanics so convoluted. It was alright, but I preferred the past two games over this one. At least I got to see the end of Corneria and the Weissberg's stories. I missed Kald though. He was my favorite. Too bad he didn't appear in this one.

Great game. The alchemy/synthesis is as fun as always. Its been further optimised from Sophie and Firis. Blocks are actually important now and are how colour strength is now measured. Adjacency bonuses and percentage bonuses have been replaced with tile bonuses which take a little getting used to but are a great new system. There are now enhancers which help you to achieve your goals too. Weapon crafting has changed again. Weapons no longer have their own abilities. Instead they have core and sub attachments so you can reuse old stats in new weapons. (Weapons and armour are no longer used in any synthesis). For the game world, it is back to being like Sophie rather than Firis. Not an open world anymore, but individual stages instead. The game also has quite a number of tweaks and optimizations. Stamina is gone, map exploration is gone and when there are events with characters, there is now a notification ("!?" means an ongoing main quest) Story-wise, it moves along at a nice pace. Great to have returning characters and some of their interactions are great callbacks to earlier games, my favorite was seeing Sophie drinking at a bar (Compared to the opening quest in Atelier Sophie, where she was still too young to drink and wanted to know what it tasted like)

You're always going to enjoy a game like Atelier Lydie & Suelle if you're a turn-based jrpg fan. So far, its been a wonderful experience and the plus points I see in the game are: -Cute characters and beautifully drawn cel shaded graphics. -Alchemy and turn based system is pretty engaging and fun. -Game runs fine except a few frame drops but they are negligible especially in a turn based game where quick actions are not necessary. -Some people say gameplay has not improved from Atelier Firis but since I have not played that game, it does not concern me much.

50+ Hours in and gotta say was worth the $60, I didn't think I would have so much fun. Only issue is a few drops in FPS but im sure that is because of my rig. At least for me i'm giving this game a 9/10. The $60 price tag might be hard to jump on, but you should just wait for a sale. Sue is best girl.

Now that im near the end of this game, well i think i am, who knows, I decided to write a review for this game. Now i am a simple man, i see lolis, i buy. But boy oh boy, i got more than what i expected. Overall the story is fantastic, honestly they have a way of making weak characters. Instead of everything being rosy, this game has some really impactful story. At times you will laugh, other times you will get angry, and in many instances you will be on the verge of tears. I dont rally want to talk much about the story since i feel that it might give a bit of a spoil overall the whole game, so you can nitpick what you can find through the store page pictures and video and description. Gameplay is advancing. By this I mean, compare to atelier sophie where all you ever did was gather and avoid monsters like a big puss even on easy mode, in atelier twins you can start the game out on normal and advance throughout the whole story with relative ease. Its not super easy, yet it is not super hard, the game knows how to keep you engage and in most instances you have to defeat monsters for the drop, so why not do it early on? Now be forewarned that there is not really THAT MUCH gameplay, there is a lot of side interactions that basically encompasses the whole game, sometimes there is just so much dialogue that i just start feeling sleepy. However with each new interaction you have, you end up learning new things and receiving new recipes, which overall keeps you engaged, unlike sophie (as far as i can tell) speaking to characters will not allow you to unlock new areas. By areas i mean new places to gather, sometimes you can revisit old places and open up a secret location. The music is great. Honestly i bump to the music while i am gathering and fighting monsters, sometimes i revisit places just for the music. Art is fantastic. There is a high difference when you explore an area on the outskirt map than exploring a painting, you can tell a lot of effort went into the "go inside paintings" aspect, they went completely all out. Now midway through the game the dialogue gets all funky, you can see some grammar errors here and there, sometimes you have to put your thinking cap to guess what is the true structure of the sentence. I stilll have my thinking cap on because i keep confusing promise 5 and promise one altogether, im not sure if they are the same promises or if they are different and theres a grammar error. The dialogue is feasible though, theres an error in like every 1/ 10,000 sentence, or some stretch like that, i barely even care except for that promise thing. plus the errors are not tied to the actual main story, just side information. I think this will be the "con" aspect of what i believe to be the game. The 3d Models. Honestly i hate it, but not so much that i get mad over it or anything, i just dont like it. At points throughout the game, you can see the polygonal model of certain things like the clothes or hair, just pass through things. like hair penetrating through clothes, or a hand warping itself inside the clothing of the person. It is probably just me, it doesnt cause any errors or anything but i think thats poor designing or something. Sometimes theres a cute scene i want a screenshot of, but then i dont want to because one model would just overlay itself over another, and i dont want to go to potoshop or anything to fix it to be honest fam. Then theres the models expression. It is completely stale. The voice acting shows a lot of passion in the action they are trying to invoke, but the model is just there doing the minimal amount of expression it can possibly can for five different emotions that are in the same sentences. It lacks that drive that is crucial for their expression, and it feels like they recycled the same movement for different emotions, I.E. Suelles fright motion and her shocked emotion. And that is all, i still really enjoy this game and hope to 100% complete it, i love the voice acting and everything but i hope they do fix some of that minor detail, like i said i dont really much care for it, but some people might be completely grossed out by it or whatever, and just never finish it, like how most people never finish atelier sophie or even got through the halfway point.

So...already at Chapter 7 and judging from the recipe list i'm kinda 1/3 of the way through? so i think i know well enough for a review. Pretty bias tho since i'm a long time fan of the series. *A pretty good port . Better than Firis. *We're finally back to the town hub like Sophie was instead of it being open world like Firis. *Battle system and progression feels a lot better than before. You dont get to be too OP too quickly. Enemies always feel scaled to yours as long as you're up to date on your crafting even on hard difficulty. *6 party member in battles instead of just 4. *Character events and sidestories are more easily found . And feels like theres a lot more than there was in FIris. *No more having most events occur in your tent lol *Alchemy and weapon crafting in general is a bit more complex than before * Story is also more focused imo with a clear goal in each new dungeon/area you visit instead of just to farm ingredients. And... thats all i think. Yeah... cant really think of any negatives since i like this game so much XD. Oh probably the price but ehh i saved up for this anyways >.<. Come to think of it lets add that we dont get the previous titles bgm's until its available later as a DLC which kinda sucks. Oh well thats it i guess.

[i]No issues running the game at 60FPS on a 1920x1080 resolution.[/i] [b]Atelier Lydie & Suelle is, far and above, the most satisfying Atelier title to date.[/b] I've completed [i]every[/i] Atelier released in the West, and as far as I'm concerned, Gust deserve praise for what they have accomplished here. Atelier titles are character-focused, crafting-heavy, comfy adventures. This has been well-established over the years. L&S improves upon these core traits by introducing a hefty helping of humor that has been scarce until now. I'm fairly difficult to please on that front, but found myself regularly entertained by the interactions between the sisters and the supporting cast. Speaking of which, the secondary and tertiary characters were all an absolute pleasure—from Roger to Lucia. Returning characters like Ilmeria, Sophie, and Firis have really come into their own, and we're fortunate enough to witness the evolution of their relationships. Oh, it is worth mentioning that the legendary Hagel is back. The protagonists, Lydie and Suelle, are a pair of striking, endearing personalities, each unique in her own right, who are oftentimes the centerpiece of a great skit. Firecracker Suelle with her straight-shooting (sometimes scathing) honesty, amusing phobias, and aversion to studying. Assiduous Lydie with her quiet rage, romance novels, and hands-on-cheeks goofiness. Both manage a formidable deadpan, and are delightfully flippant. What's more, L&S has the trappings of a slightly more bleak narrative. It is still very much a light-hearted game. However, the journey of Lydie and Suelle is underscored by a sort of grief the likes of which we haven't seen since Totori, and with a far greater presence in the story. This never struck me as heavy-handed, but lent to the sincerity of the sisters' ambitions. It is bittersweet at times, uplifting at others. Sometimes, a new title will attempt to innovate or improve upon series mechanics and fall dreadfully flat. This is not the case with L&S. Mechanically, it is the culmination of those that came before. It seems to me that Gust tossed out problem ideas (such as Firis' recipe unlocking) while introducting interesting and player-friendly advancements. Synthesizing, which naturally makes up much of the game, is as smooth as ever, and has finally found the sweet spot for the grid system. The Battle Mix mechanic, a sort of simple mid-battle synthesis that augments existing items or uses materials to create impromptu items, works swimmingly. Typically, the areas in an Atelier game aren't worth mentioning. L&S approaches them a bit differently by inserting the more fantastical zones into paintings and keeping the more mundane in the overworld. I think this makes those zones stand out all the more, and the zone design for paintings is better than I'm accustomed to besides. The animated brush stroke frame was a nice touch, too. Gust is going to have a hard time topping this one.

For fans of the previous games, if you, like myself, liked Sophie (the main hub being one town, no time limits) you'll most likely like this game. If you've never heard of the Atelier games, a lot of these reviews on all of the games sum it up pretty well. Relaxing gameplay and fun storytelling. If you, however, don't want to pay 60 euros for this then I'll recommend Atelier Sophie, it's only 30 euros but still a very very good game (it also was my first Atelier game).

I've been playing Atelier games since A11, but this one is [u]hard to recommend in its current state.[/u] [h1]Performance: [/h1] Atelier Firis is already a very graphics card taxing game, but at least I can manage 60fps at 4K with a 1080TI. For Lydie&Suelle it's another step up: in the introduction map my framerate dropped to 40-ish fps with a highly overclocked 1080Ti. Just to be sure I've also overclocked my CPU and memory to no avail. For me this has moved from borderline acceptable to unacceptable. It's true the graphics are slightly better than its predecessor but they also ditched the large open-world maps for smaller ones. No way should an anime JRPG be this demaning for processing power, we are talking about FFXV levels here. Also you can't adjust the graphics settings, so I wonder how a consumer-grade PC would perform in this. It's time to seriously optimise your game, KOEI TECMO/GUST. [h1]DLC:[/h1] Another let down is the DLC. Usually DLC are just optional costumes and map expansions, but since Firis they've introduced paid characters, and this time they introduced new recipes which will significantly facillitate gameplay: Adventurers' Tales DLC which allows you to craft items that give you ~30% faster movement speed and send gathered items to your container directly. Even though it's just £1.69, those things should not be sold separately, the movement speed item used to be a part of the base game! I paid £49.99 for this game and I don't care about spending an extra pound or so, but it's about the fundamental ethic and discipline I have problems with. KOEI TECMO has been an awful influence and I hope the upcoming A20 (Update: Confirmed to be Lulua)- the 20th anniversary game- does not turn into a DLC sh*tfest [h1]Update:[/h1] Took me 60 hours to finish the story, the longest of all Atelier games; and an extra 10 hours for all achievents and ultimate gear. The story is rather weak, instead of one main storyline you are introduced to chapters, but most are just fillers with no significant meaning. It's nice to see Sophie, Firis and Ilmeria making a return, which leads to problem of why there is only 6 [b]permanent[/b] party members in this game: The fewest ever and a large reduction from Firis’s 10. Not because of the cast is smaller, they did it just so they can sell Ilmeria and Lucia as DLC characters. Unlike the previous DLC characters, Ilmeria and Lucia actually play a big role in the story and I totally expected them to join the party at any moment had I not known beforehand. Want the other DLCs too? The season pass is £62.99

Note: Most of my playtime has been on the PS4 version, but I double dipped to support the developer. (and so that I can replay it with g-sync later) This is easy the best game in the Mysterious series, and a huge step up from the disappointing Atelier Firis. The game returns to the zone style of exploration found in Atelier Sophie and is considerably more attractive as a result. The combat is also greatly improved and the overall flow and story are excellent. I certainly do not agree with people saying it is overpriced, considering that most "AAA" games are over in 8 to 12 hours. You will easy get 3 to 4 times that here. It is absolutely worth every penny. (unless we're talking about non-US pricing, which I'm told is out of whack in many countries) As always, you do need to be a fan of anime style RPGs for the price of admission to make sense. But if you are, then know that this is among the very best titles in the genre you can get on Steam. Highly recommended!