I think I have an interesting perspective on the Atelier series. See, I’ve played exactly two Atelier games before: Atelier Iris, the first entry in the series we received way back on the PlayStation 2, and Atelier Rorona, the first entry on the PlayStation 3. Both of those games are about as different from each other as two games in the same series can be… And funny enough, Atelier Yumia is even more different than either. If you’re relatively new to the Atelier series, I think you’ll benefit from reading this. If you’re already a super fan, then you’ve already got your copy of the game, but, I mean… feel free to stick around for the vibes. We keep it chill around here. Also, I might say something that enrages you, and you don’t want to miss that! All right, let’s get into it.
Atelier Yumia is the story of a young woman, an alchemist, who joins a survey expedition into a land that had been destroyed by the power of mana a long time ago. Their goal is to figure out exactly what happened there, in the hopes that they can benefit the world they live in now. The issue with Yumia coming along for the ride is, alchemy is seen as seriously taboo these days. This is all made very clear from the get go, and one of the first things I noticed was how interesting the character of Yumia is, and how good the game is at dropping us in with minimal information and letting us intuit exactly what’s going on as the story progresses. Considering the plots of the two Atelier games I’ve played were very straightforward, no frills sort of experiences, I’ll admit I was expecting something similar here. And truthfully, it’s not THE most complex story I’ve seen in a game for sure. But it manages to set up an interesting world with what I would call a non-traditional conflict or goal at the end, and it’s a lot of fun discovering what’s going on along with the characters.
Speaking of the characters, there are some legitimately great ones here. I’ll talk about my favorite last. So there’s Yumia, she’s the alchemist, she’s great. She’s really sincere and kind of a goofball at times, but she really wants to do a good job and find ways of showing people that alchemists aren’t all bad people. There’s Viktor, a knight who joins the expedition along with his sister as part of… let’s say, dealing with some personal trauma, since I don’t want to spoil anything. He’s stoic, all about duty and doing the right thing, you know the type. He’s fine. Vanilla, but fine. I like his earrings. Then we have Rutger, the other dude, and he starts out as your fairly stereotypical rebel bad-boy type, but as you get to know a bit about him you learn his tragic backstory, which sheds a little light on his behavior. And anyway, he’s definitely that type of bad boy that you can tell has a good heart, so he’s pretty solid. Next is Nina, she’s got huge… Well, she’s here for a particular… segment of the audience. Let’s say that. She’s a skilled mercenary. She’s fine, I honestly don’t love her all that much, though she does have a very interesting backstory, which raises her up a few notches compared to how bland she seems early on. And there’s Lenja, she’s a member of the Welleks race, though she’s not native to this particular country. She’s with the survey team as sort of a go-between to help them deal with the locals. She’s the cutesy, clumsy, big hearted character who just wants to do a good job. The ultimate girlfailure, and we stan a girlfailure around here. And finally, my favorite, there’s Isla. The story behind why I like Isla so much is, I think, a case of expectations being far outpaced by reality. From the early trailers, when I saw Isla, I thought – oh boy. I’m NOT going to like this character. She seemed like that overly bubbly anime stereotype girl, the one who’s bouncing everywhere and getting on every other character’s nerves, as if that somehow excuses them also getting on the AUDIENCE’S nerves. But it turns out, she’s actually a really level-headed and cool character. She’s FAR less bubbly than she appeared in the trailers to me, and she’s got a fun sarcastic streak that I find endearing. She’s also Viktor’s sister, who I mentioned when I talked about him, but for whatever reason I decided to save her for last, so I had to talk around that part before. But yeah, Viktor’s sister. She’s a cool kid.
Outside of the main cast, the secondary characters didn’t leave a huge impression on me. They’re mostly functional in helping to move the story along, though the chief of the survey team has a bit more nuance and kind of plays matchmaker by getting this Yumia dream team together. He also seems way more tolerant of Yumia’s taboo alchemy stuff, which makes him very sympathetic to an audience that paid money for a game literally about an alchemist. Like, obviously WE’RE all on board with alchemy. We think it’s cool.
And oh right, the alchemy. That’s a big part of the Atelier games, both in my limited experience and in what I’ve heard of the rest of the games. I was PRETTY nervous about this, not gonna lie. I don’t thrive with that kind of gameplay, at least the way I imagine it to be. If you ask me to do a bunch of complex things with a ton of ingredients and somehow keep track of it all, I’m gonna nope out of the experience really quickly. And there is a LOT of complex things to do with alchemy in Atelier Yumia. Like, a LOT. But the way the game handles this complexity is really genius to me, from a game design standpoint. See, if you are the sort of person who enjoys maximizing your item creation, spending a ton of time finding the best quality ingredients to make the best sword or healing item or whatever, you can absolutely do that. The game makes it really flashy and cool, and the interface is pretty slick. On the other hand, if you’re like me, and when faced with a series of interconnected systems like this you just say why god, please god no, don’t make me do this, the game ABSOLUTELY has your back. You can press a couple buttons and the game will make the choices for you, based on some simple criteria. This is a LIFESAVER. The complicated alchemy is not a roadblock to enjoying the game. But if you want to do it, it’s there, and you can go nuts. More game designers should make note of this. Unless part of your design ethos is forcing every player to do everything in your game, even if they aren’t interested in certain parts, then giving an easy option like this is a must.
Okay, we’ve talked about story, characters, alchemy. Let’s take a look at the world. Man, this is a pretty game. Gust makes some super vibey experiences, including the Blue Reflection series which is among my favorites, and there’re similar vibes happening here. It’s a bit more naturalistic than Blue Reflection, of course, we’re talking about a fantasy landscape and not the hallways of a high school, but just walking around and looking at the scenery is very relaxing. Not to mention – but I’m going to – there’s a huge amount of stuff to do if you’re so inclined. I mean, it’s not NUTS like a Breath of the Wild sort of situation, but each major region of the game has a bunch of different landmarks to discover, checkpoints to unlock, treasures to steal, all that fun stuff. And despite all that stuff to do, it never felt distracting to me. Like, I was never a dog seeing a squirrel, you know? If I wanted to focus on the main story, I was able to do that. If I wanted to take a break from advancing the plot and just run around and find things, I could do that. My only nitpicks on the exploration side has to do with some strange inconsistencies. For example, there are switches that you have to push in order to open doors, activate elevators, that sort of thing. Sometimes, you approach a switch and are prompted to press the confirmation button. Other times, you approach a switch and you’re told you have to whack it with your staff. To me, the buttons look exactly the same. It’s an oddity, but nothing more than a little annoyance. There’s also a guiding light system whereby you can have the game show you the path you need to take in order to get to your next destination. It’s cool, I like games that do this, but the way this one is done makes it occasionally ambiguous which direction you’re supposed to be following the thing. I found myself turned around a few times because the way this light undulates, it’s a little unclear which way it’s moving. But look, it’s a super fun world to run around and explore, you can find ruins and solve simple puzzles to find treasures, and it all feels very rewarding. As far as open worlds go, it ranks pretty high on my list of favorites at this point. It’s big enough with enough to do that it feels real and intriguing, but the mini map isn’t so full of distractions that I found myself leaving the main game behind in order to waste time.
There’s a surprisingly robust base building mechanic in the world, as well. When you find certain safe areas, you’re able to set up camp or, if you’re feeling really ambitious, you can create a whole base, complete with furniture and workspaces and you name it. You’ll find blueprints for all the various things you can use in base building scattered around the world, so there’s yet another incentive to spend some time scavenging if you’re construction inclined. I will say, and maybe this is something that’ll be fixed, but I did notice some distracting glitches in the base building, particularly with the floors – they jitter and jump around, and it’s super distracting. Like, you know, I wanted this place to be a home. I’m sure I could adjust for that by raising the floor up off the ground – at least I assume the ground texture beneath is what’s causing it – but come on, I don’t want to have to completely redo my foundation. Still, even with all that, it’s surprisingly fun and easy to build whatever you want, and even me, a not-very-construction-minded person, found myself enjoying it.
Another thing I enjoyed quite a bit – once I got the hang of it – was the combat. But the combat might actually be the piece of the game I had the most issues with. So this is basically an action RPG now, a strong shift away from the turn-based days of the series. When you encounter an enemy on the field, your friends appear and you surround the enemy. You have full 360 degrees of motion to move around it, and you can block and dodge in order to evade attacks. The battlefield is actually double layered. What I mean by that is, you can push a button and jump to the back row, which puts more distance between you and the enemies and allows you to use some different, long-ranged attacks. Flipping back and forth in order to use specific attacks is pretty fun, and pulling off a successful dodge feels really great. The battles are super flashy and just feel extremely over-the-top in a good way. You attack by using skills, which you’ll learn as you level up. You can assign a skill to each of the face buttons, and once you use a skill, it enters a cooldown state, so you can’t use it again until it’s recharged. It’s similar to skills in the Xenoblade series, though you don’t have any omnipresent auto-attack happening in between skills. It’s skills or nothing. Now, for the most part, and especially once you get access to a skill for each face button, you’ll almost never find yourself in a situation where your skills are all depleted and you can’t do anything but stand there with a dumb look on your face. Besides, you also have access to battle items, which you can switch to with the press of a button. You craft these items just like everything else in the game, and they’re on a similar cooldown meter as your regular attacks.
Those are the basics. This isn’t a battle tutorial so I’ll forego getting into the nitty gritty. But I wanted to lay out the battle system at a high level so my criticisms make more sense. Now, like I said at the beginning of this section, I actually did enjoy the combat quite a bit. It’s a lot of fun, and you feel really strong and cool, which is great, particularly when you’re like me and are neither of those things. But inputs feel sluggish – and in an action RPG, that’s a pretty bad thing. Now, someone might argue that, well, this isn’t a PURE action RPG. It’s like Xenoblade, right? With cooldowns and whatnot? Which, I mean, sure. That’s true. But it doesn’t actually PLAY like Xenoblade. Your movements and button presses mean everything in this battle system. You can’t rely on any auto-battle mechanics to keep stacking damage for you. And dodging in particular is SUPER important, particularly in the boss battles. Now, dodging is actually very smooth and responsive, it gets a pass from me in this section on sluggishness. If the dodging hadn’t been so good, I think the game would have been downright unplayable. Where I feel sluggishness is when issuing skills and choosing items to use. If you’re just chaining skills together, there’s no issue. True, this sort of game doesn’t really reward precision playing – I was more or less just jamming on all the buttons in sequence in order to keep the attacks flying. Maybe there is a big brain way of using a combat system like this, and maybe that sort of thing is necessary on the higher difficulty levels. But on Normal or Easy, it’s really not. Where we run into issues is when you need to switch from skills to either attack items or healing items. Switching to attack items requires a press of the right bumper or R1, and by hitting that, all your skills are replaced by the items you have equipped. So now, you’ll press the face buttons to choose which items to use. Great. But the act of switching requires you to be completely still and not attacking. You CAN press the button mid-attack, and often the game will recognize you pressed it, but your options won’t change until the attack is complete and you’re not doing anything. Maybe you can tell, but it’s kind of hard to explain. It isn’t the end of the world, but it does make the game feel way more sluggish than it should. The same goes for using healing items. You hold down L2 to access those, and I found I had to sometimes jam on the appropriate face button multiple times before it would register that I had chosen it. And yeah, I made sure it wasn’t because I’d already used the item and it was in cooldown. I think, once again, it just has to do with needing you to be still and not taking any action in order for your commands to register. It’s not a big deal, and I still really enjoyed the combat, but I’m hoping they refine this system a bit for the inevitable sequel, because I think it could be REALLY good with a few tweaks.
Have time for a few more gripes? Here we go, rapid fire. Why don’t the friggin’ items tell you what they actually do? It took me WAY too long to figure out which item is the one that brings characters back when they die in combat – it’s Bitter Syrup, by the way – and I can’t think of a reason that should be. Also, and maybe this is par for the course for Atelier games, I don’t know, but there’re a few parts that are gated off if you don’t have enough particles or materials of a certain kind. Not a big deal, other games have similar things, but the world of this game is so big, and it’s not always clear where you need to go to find the particular items you need. My last gripe is the lack of English. Not having an English dub hurts this game immensely, I don’t want to sugarcoat it. I know the Atelier games have gone without a dub for quite a while now, and it’s a super big negative. For a lot of reasons. For one, while the localization itself is competent, sometimes funny, always very clear, it still reads a bit stiffly. This is pretty common when watching something with subtitles – localizers tend to be a bit more literal when they’re not writing for English voices. So you get a lot of “Kore wa’s” translated as “This is…” and things like that. Stuff that’s TECHNICALLY right, but isn’t how English-speaking people talk. Another issue is that the characters frequently talk to each other as you’re running around the world. I’m not able to read conversations between characters in small font at the bottom of the screen when I’m trying to climb a mountain. It’s a lesser experience than the Japanese-speaking players had, and it’s a bummer. It also led to some actual gameplay issues. For most of the game, I didn’t realize your characters tell you when you’re near a mana geyser – these things you need to find that aren’t on the map but that provide what you need in order to create new synthesis recipes. Only at the very end of the game did I realize that some of the phrases I had heard them saying throughout the game were hinting that I was near one and should look around. If they had been speaking English? No confusion. I harp on this sort of thing a lot, because I do think it’s important. I mean, sure, keep the Japanese voices in there for people that like that, no skin off my nose. But give us the same experience the Japanese players had, please.
I hate to end on a negative note, so let me say unequivocally that Atelier Yumia is a fantastic game. I really enjoyed my time with it. I will say, keep in mind the main story isn’t super long – you can probably race through it in 20 hours if you tried. But the world is huge, and you’ll definitely want to explore at least some of it, so expect to spend a good deal of time treasure hunting. For whatever reason, maybe because of my limited Atelier experience, I expected this to be a story-lite experience, but I was very pleasantly surprised to be wrong. The writers show a lot of restraint with the plot and these characters, and they let things flow naturally and in a way that leaves a lot of intriguing mysteries for us to think about. They even manage to give the overarching plot real stakes for Yumia, and in a way that I actually BOUGHT it, so I wanna give props for that. Like I said earlier, if you’re already an Atelier fan, you’re already getting this game. If you’re NOT, I would argue this is a really great place to jump in. I kind of consider it my jumping-in place, even though I did play a couple of the oldest entries. The series is just so different than it was back then, and it’s better now in basically every way.