Let’s talk about Atelier Resleriana. No, not THAT Atelier Resleriana. This is not a mobile game, there’s no gacha here, it’s a pure, traditional JRPG experience that just happens to take place in the same world as that mobile game. It’s separated from that by a ridiculously long subtitle in the grand Atelier tradition: The Red Alchemist and the White Guardian. Now, I never played the mobile game while it was still active over here, so you won’t hear any sort of comparisons between the two from me. I’m sure there’s plenty of info out there about that, but I’m going to be presenting my thoughts as someone relatively inexperienced with Atelier, but someone who’s also very open minded to what it’s trying to do.
The Premise
Atelier Reslierana isn’t just hard to say – it’s also the latest in an incredibly long-running series of games. We only got on board with them back on the PS2 with the Atelier Iris trilogy, but they were cooking before that generation. At a very high level, these tend to be relatively lighthearted stories about a character, typically a lady-type nowadays, who becomes an alchemist. An alchemist, in case you’re not up on ancient lore, well it’s basically somebody who takes a bunch of random things and turns them into something else. Kind of like cooking, except it doesn’t make much logical sense. But you’re not tuning in for logic, you’re here for a good time, and if you’re buying what the Atelier games are selling, then you’ll definitely have a good time. What it’s selling is chill vibes, fun combat, and honestly some of the best music in video games. If you’re someone who’s into fanservice-y type imagery, these games tend to serve that up, too. Though, I have a few thoughts about that, which I’ll get to at the end…
Atelier Resleriana features dual protagonists for the first time since I think the PS3 era, with Rias being the cat-eared lady alchemist and Slade being the explorer with a tragic past and an even more tragic rattail. Seriously, his design is great, except for that hair. He needs to cut that off and burn it. Burn it with fire. I chose Slade as my protag, because, as we all know, boys rule and girls drool. But honestly, it doesn’t matter. Within the first fifteen minutes I met Rias and you can quickly and easily switch between who you’re controlling at any time. The two of them meet while exploring some ancient ruins outside of their mutual hometown, and they stumble upon an old atelier. Alchemy is kinda rare in this world, and people able to do it even rarer, so they’re both pretty surprised when it turns out Rias has a real aptitude for it. Problem is, alchemy needs mana to operate, and there’s just not that much mana available. That ends up not being as big a problem as it seems, though, as this particular atelier is connected to a bunch of Dimensional Paths, which are these sorts of interdimensional shortcuts between places within their world. Those things are FULL of mana, and as the story progresses they’re able to unlock more Dimensional Paths to beef up the workshop.
The reason they’re doing all this is twofold. For one, the nearby town where they both grew up, Hallfein, went through a terrible and basically unexplained tragedy several years back, and Rias and her sister are working with the central government to revitalize it. Part of that revitalization involves Rias reopening her grandfather’s store, which in turn helps provide for the town via Rias’s ability to use alchemy. The other reason involves Slade’s father, who passed away, but not before giving him a mysterious book and a Geist core. It’s through the Geist core that Slade is able to open up the Dimensional Paths, which in turn allows Rias to perform alchemy, so there’s a lot of synergy between their two motives. So it makes sense that they team up.
As you can probably see, the stakes here are just a lot lower than in most JRPGs, right? Fixing a town pales in comparison to killing a god. But that’s not a bad thing. If every story we experience is all about escalating the stakes, we end up missing out on a lot of quieter stories, and the Atelier series really thrives at that. But even though this may be a “quieter” JRPG, that doesn’t mean there’s not still really flashy combat, because there definitely is. Unlike the most recent mainline entry, Atelier Yumia, Resleriana goes back to the more traditional turn-based combat the series had used before. But even though it’s not action-based, it’s still very fast-paced and cool. Let’s go ahead and talk about that while we’re on the subject.
The Combat
Like I said, this is pure, old-school turn-based combat, but it has plenty of features that make it stand out from the typical turn-based experience. First, let me talk about some of the smart things they’ve borrowed from other games. On the right side of the screen is the timeline, which shows the turn order for everyone involved in combat. Pretty common sight in a lot of JRPGs as far back as Final Fantasy X. But one element you don’t see very often is turn order bonuses, called panel effects here, which Gust is borrowing from the Trails series. These bonuses do various things, like restore your health for example. They advance up the timeline along with the characters, and enemies can benefit from them the same as your characters can. The strategy comes in either eliminating an enemy with a particular bonus adjacent to them so one of your characters can get it, or by interrupting the flow of battle to insert one of your characters next to a bonus. I love having this as an added element for turn-based games, and I’m honestly surprised more games haven’t taken it. Another borrowed element is timed button presses for blocking. This has shown up in other Atelier games, of course, but it’s most well known for showing up way back on the Super Nintendo in Super Mario RPG. Pressing the button before an enemy attacks will cause your character to block, obviously lessening the damage. However, if you’re able to time it just right, you can DRASTICALLY reduce the damage, so it’s worth it to pay attention.
You ultimately will have six people in your group, but only three are up front and attacking regularly. However, all six will always be present, and the way your front and back rows can interact is pretty cool. On any character’s turn, assuming you have enough points, you can team up with a back row character, or even two, so that you can all attack at the same time. This leads to big damage, of course, but it’s also a cool and flashy way of switching out your characters. Whoever acts last in a multi-character attack will be the person who stays on the frontline, so the whole system serves an entirely separate strategic purpose, too. There’s also the Unite meter, which counts up to 5 and fills up every time you do a basic action, like attacking or using an item. Once it’s at least at level 2, whenever you have at least two characters acting back-to-back on the timeline, you’ll get a bonus attack after every attack. It’s complicated. Essentially, if Rias attacks, then Slade attacks right after her, Rias will jump back in for a bonus attack. Then if Raze attacks after Slade, Slade will jump back in for another attack. At first I thought this would make the game too easy, but… it really doesn’t. It once again becomes part of the strategy, where you’re maximizing your string of attacks because the damage just really stacks up, and on the tougher boss fights, you’ll need it to. Getting the Unite meter all the way up lets you use superpowered Unite Burst attacks, though in my experience that usually doesn’t happen except on the more challenging boss fights. Alchemy being such a big focus of the game, you can bet there are naturally a ton of combat items you can make to help in battle. This can be of particular benefit once you have a back row of characters, because you can schedule them to interrupt the flow of combat in order to chuck an item at the enemies pretty much whenever you want to, so long as you have resources to do it. This is honestly one of the most in-depth and strategic turn-based systems out there. I played on Normal mode, but there are even more difficult levels, and honestly, I felt like normal was decently challenging. But naturally there are easier modes, too, so if you’re just here for the vibes, you can just vibe with it. No judgment. But anyway, despite how much I enjoy Atelier Yumia overall, I do think the combat system in Resleriana beats it. It’s a lot of fun. I wouldn’t be sad if this system stuck around in the series in some form. Just sayin’.
The Exploration
I’ll be honest, I was not prepared for the exploration in Resleriana. This is because my first big Atelier game in a long time, since playing Atelier Rorona on the PS3 a while back, was Yumia. Yumia with the giant open world to explore and all the little side things to find and do. Atelier Resleriana dials that WAY back to the old days, with a map screen showing you possible destinations and each area a self-contained map. The individual maps themselves are decently large, I’m not talking about tiny rooms or anything, but they’re not really built with epic exploration in mind. There are some caves, some greener areas, a coast or two. So not the biggest variety, either. You’ll still want to hunt down every treasure chest and resource gathering spot, because that’s going to be key to the gameplay no matter what, but the environments didn’t do much for me. Certain treasure chests will have recipes in them, which is helpful so you don’t have to just accidentally stumble upon new concoctions. Enemies drop ingredients, too, so it’s a good idea to at least fight a few of every monster you encounter to ensure you have a good variety of materials.
There are some areas where Rias needs to swing across gaps or launch herself up onto higher platforms. These are color-coded as a way of providing incentive for you to come back to earlier areas. You’ll gain the ability to use differently colored grapple points as you find certain items throughout the game. Likewise, there are some areas that are blocked off, and only Slade can bust through them, so you’ll need to be in control of him for that. In all honesty, there are FAR more grapple points than there are walls to break down, so I mostly controlled Rias in my playthrough, despite choosing Slade as my main character, just so I wouldn’t have to keep switching to Rias every time I wanted to grapple.
For better or worse, a pretty big percentage of exploration happens in the Dimensional Pathways. These are randomly generated dungeons with a few checkpoints along the way, and they’re full of enemies and gathering spots. They’re incredibly dull, of course, I mean just by nature of being randomly generated, right? It’s next to impossible to make something like that super compelling. You’ll fight through them a few floors, then face a boss, at which point Slade is able to fill in some of the missing text in his mysterious book, which in turn grants you access to Ancient Recipes, which are just like regular recipes… but older. The next section after a boss will be harder, and then an even harder section follows that. I described my experience with this to a friend as “boring, but also… enjoyable for some reason?” It’s hard to explain, but yeah, I can’t really argue that anything about the random nature of the Dimensional Pathways is exciting or cool, but the gameplay loop of fighting and gathering is really compelling, so I was engaged. In fact, I ended up pretty overleveled for the main story, because I kept diving into the Dimensional Pathways when I didn’t technically need to. Do with that what you will, I don’t fully understand it myself. The human mind is a mystery.
The Alchemy
A big part of the addictive gameplay loop is the alchemy, and if you told me I’d find myself hopelessly hooked on the alchemy in an Atelier game, I would have told you… Well, I don’t know what I would have told you. Probably that I didn’t believe you. I’d be nice about it, though. I wouldn’t want to hurt your feelings. But regardless, you would’ve been right. Once I got the hang of it, I was fully addicted to the alchemy. Like, I spent hours unnecessarily alchemizing things. I didn’t need to. I had so many items, I had pretty much limitless money. But I just wanted to make new things. In a nutshell, you find recipes and put items together from various ingredients. Items fall on various flowcharts, and adding certain optional ingredients to one item can cause it to change into a different item altogether. Effects are boosted if you can connect an item’s color to the previous item’s color. It’s a bit complicated to explain, but each item you find shows up in a little diamond, and the left half will be one color, and the right half will be another color. You input ingredients one at a time, linearly, so if the first ingredient you enter has blue on the right, then you want the next ingredient you add to have blue on the left. It sounds trickier than it is, honestly the game will tend to put optimal ingredients right at the top of your list. But where thought gets involved is in morphing recipes from one thing into another. Those catalyst items won’t necessarily be right at the top of your list, so you’ll need to keep tabs on your flowcharts in order to know which item to pick.
Some of the user interface in the alchemy could use a little work. Like sorting, for example. It wasn’t super intuitive to me to be able to find if I had a particular item, since the general sorting options they give you don’t really allow for you to just pick one type of item at a time. At least, it doesn’t allow it in any sort of obvious way. You CAN drill down and just see one type of item, but it’s like three layers down in the menus. But it’s a testament to how hooked on the alchemy I was that I stuck it out and figured that stuff out on my own. Still, I think the user interface could still use some work. I know Gust already has their Atelier fans hooked, but I think the series could really grow with some tweaks. More on that topic later, actually. But yeah, alchemy? Very good. Very sticky. Very, very sticky. I like it a lot.
The Presentation
From the get-go, I could tell this was sort of a budget title. It definitely doesn’t feel like the cream of the crop like Yumia did. Models aren’t all that impressive, the environments are small. Character animations are really good, though, and I love how animated everyone is. In fact, the game manages to avoid that sort of stale textbox thing that can happen in longwinded JRPGs by having characters actually animated throughout long conversations. Not in a sort of repetitive way, but by having them move like real people having a conversation might. That also means that, if you finish reading the text and click on to advance it without the animations having fully completed, you might find the scene jumping and jerking around as it moves instantly to the next key frame, but that’s a small price to pay for a much more enjoyable presentation. The characters themselves are interesting. Eventually, they’re great for the most part, but I’ll admit, early on, I did NOT find anyone particularly interesting. Slade was fine, but there wasn’t much to him in the beginning other than “I need to honor my dead dad’s wishes.” Rias was the sort of energetic annoying anime protag with a lot of goofy affectations in the way she speaks, who for some reason has MULTIPLE moments where she decides WHY she wants to be an alchemist, even though they’re the same reason each time. Like, she has this supposedly big character revelation more than once, and it’s presented each time as though it’s the first time she’s come to this realization for herself. But honestly, as the game went on, the characters grew on me. I think the biggest issue was that, the first new character who joins you is Raze, and he kind of has the personality of plain toast. I just felt like, if this is the trio they’re leading with, I’m not optimistic. But then you meet Wilbell and Totori and Sophie, and suddenly everything started to gel a LOT better. Seriously, if you start this game and find the characters boring, trust me, they get better once your team fills out.
Now, real quick, I mentioned the animations are quite good, but there’s one thing I need to talk about. It’s the fanservice thing I alluded to earlier. Okay. So, if you’ve played Atelier, you know that they’re big on… Let’s just say they’re fans of the female form. They particularly like the parts of the female form that jiggle, if that makes sense. I’m used to that, it doesn’t surprise me anymore, it’s been a thing since like the PS2 era for games to have that. Whatever. The issue here is, well, there’s two: One, I can’t imagine being a woman in the world of this game. The jiggling is so… deeply weird. The slightest movement causes, like, three DEEP bounces. I’m gonna go ahead and petition Gust to introduce bras to the worlds of Atelier, I think they’d all appreciate a little support. But honestly, it’s not the AMOUNT of jiggle that’s off-putting to me. It’s the WAY it LOOKS. Their… PARTS don’t actually jiggle. It’s just the clothes OVER their parts. The clothes go up and down, but the parts themselves… don’t? It looks very, very bad. Amateurish, even. Like, if you can’t do the jiggle properly, why even do it? I’m asking on behalf of the people that are into that, because like I said, I’m used to it, but I could live without it, if you catch my drift. Okay, that’s my jiggle rant. Thanks for your attention.
One final note on presentation, the music. Good god, I love the music in this game. In the whole series, honestly, and really Gust just knocks it out of the park in whatever they’re working on. I don’t have a ton of specifics to mention about it, just that it’s fantastic. I do like that you can customize the music in each area of the game pretty much however you want. For example, I LOVE the first battle theme, and I’m a bit less crazy about the one that takes over at the halfway point of the game. So I just went to the atelier and switched it to the other track. Easy-peasy. More games need to add that feature, by the way, it’s very nice. Anyway, that’s all for presentation, let’s talk a bit about one of this game’s biggest draws, the whole crossover aspect.
The Crossover
The whole conceit of this world is that people known as wanderers show up here. They’re people from other worlds, and from a practical perspective, they’re people from previous Atelier games. You’ll see TONS of previous characters here. Now, since I haven’t played many Atelier games, I didn’t recognize too many people. Some of them join your party, but most of them are just secondary characters that you interact with occasionally in cutscenes. Most of them will have some small quest for you to do, after which you can take jobs from them at city hall. This is how the typical fetch quest aspect is handled. You can also send THEM out on quests for you, which like in most games with this sort of feature is just a thing that activates a hidden timer and when it goes off, you get some particular item.
It is pretty cool, even for me, to run into some of these characters. Like Totori joining your party for example – I’ve played a bit of Atelier Totori on the PS3, so it was cool to get to see her in this new context. Ryza shows up, not as a playable character, but still cool to see her as well. There’s a big background mystery to the game surrounding the whole wanderers thing. Like why they’re being pulled from their worlds, and if it’s ever possible for them to go home. If you’re a long-time series fan, this is going to be fun for you. If you’re not, then it’s not going to hurt your experience at all not knowing these characters. Like I said, I only personally knew a small handful, and I still had a blast.
The Nits to Pick
I want to end with a few nits that I would like to pick. If you don’t mind. It bothers me how people clip through their clothes in this game. Like, this happens in other games occasionally, but here, it happens more and in much more noticeable ways than I’ve seen in other games. It’s so baffling to me, like, when you’re creating the animation, do you not have access to the finished model so that you can make sure Heiter isn’t putting his whole hand through his hip pouch?
The way the game works, when you reach certain points, you’ll unlock little bonus scenes that play out between the characters. These are cool and fine and all, but the way they’re implemented completely obliterates the pacing of the story. See, they trigger when you enter an area, automatically, and the game doesn’t bother to check if you are about to experience or have just experienced some big, pivotal story moment. A lot of the events happen in the atelier, and you go there a lot, so sometimes I’d find myself going to the atelier because the story requires me to only to be greeted by a scene that might or might not be the story scene I’m there to see. The worst is when a big story scene finishes, and then the game loads right into a goofy optional scene that’s just tonal whiplash compared to what I had just seen. This would be easily fixed by requiring you to trigger these scenes manually, by talking to a character with some sort of icon over them, for example.
Characters talk a LOT. There are SO many conversation scenes that play out. Normally, I wouldn’t mind this, I’d actually love it, but this does lead me to what is my biggest nit. I wouldn’t even call it a nit, really, I’d call it a potentially fatal flaw, and that’s the lack of an English dub. Now, the Atelier games used to have English dubs back in the day. At some point, I think Koei Tecmo decided their hardcore fanbase didn’t care and would be perfectly happy to play with Japanese and English subtitles, or maybe that they even preferred it. The reason I consider this a fatal flaw is this: While this will work to maintain your existing fanbase, it will not cause your fanbase to grow in a significant way. And if a series isn’t growing, it’s dying. A lot of nerd culture on the internet has grown up with anime in subtitled form, and they’re perfectly willing to accept a sub-only because it’s what they know and what they’re comfortable with. I will accept it only grudgingly and with an abundance of griping, because I’m a firm believer that media is best enjoyed in the language of your preference, and my preference is English, because it’s what I speak daily. I want to have the same experience the Japanese players had. If they experienced it with voiced dialog in their native language, I would also like to experience it in my native language. With sub-only, too, you lose a ton of dialog that doesn’t have accompanying text. All the battle dialog, for example. No translation provided for that. And when you’re running around and exploring, the characters are talking, but I’m not able to adequately pay attention to my surroundings and read the text popping up in the corner. It’s a lesser experience. If you enjoy the subtitles, good! But if you’re like me, we need to let Koei Tecmo know that we want the game fully localized in English. Keep the Japanese and subtitles in there, for sure, some people are always going to prefer that and that’s fine. But giving us the game fully in English will open doors. The Atelier series is pretty fantastic, and I don’t see any reason it should be relegated to a small fanbase. But it can only grow if it works on appealing to the Western market. Not by changing anything in the gameplay or story, but by giving us an option for the presentation to be in our language.
Conclusion
A lot of Atelier fans I’ve talked to say they prefer Resleriana over Yumia. That’s not me. I still think Yumia is an overall better experience, but we’re talking about an A compared to a B+. They’re both extremely excellent examples of Koei Tecmo at its finest. It could be now that we’re looking at the Atelier series running in two parallel paths – a more adventurous and open world approach, like Yumia, and a more traditional approach like Resleriana. I think the world can exist with both of those Ateliers.
When I think about Atelier Resleriana, and the Atelier series more broadly, for some reason I find myself thinking about Thomas Kincaide. Some of you might know him, he’s an artist who made an industry out of paintings that explored a world in which bad things didn’t happen. A world that was purely good. Most artists I know don’t really think too highly of Thomas Kincaide, and I can understand why, to an extent – ignoring the reality of the world seems a little irresponsible. But I also think there can be psychological benefits to spending time in a fantasy like that. Not to get lost in it, but to decompress in it. The Atelier series is sort of like that. It’s not that bad DOESN’T exist in these games. There are bad people, just not many. And even when they show up, they usually don’t pose THAT big a threat. Most of the bad stuff that happens in those worlds has happened a long time ago, right? It’s unrealistic, sure, but it’s refreshing. It’s even necessary at times. That sort of fantasy serves a purpose, and Atelier provides that fantasy in spades.