Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout
| 764 words
I won’t go too much into the synopsis or the basics of the game, these are just some notes
Story
The story is actually good in my opinion. Many other people say that the story of Atelier Ryza is bad and its biggest weakness but I have to disagree. Sure it will not win any awards in innovative storytelling and it won’t knock your socks off while subverting your expectations, but it’s totally passable with some interesting twists and characters.
Ryza is cute!
Difficulty
I play this game on the Normal difficulty. I always try to get the most normal or intended way to play a game.
Atelier Ryza is not a very challenging game. Apart from leveling up your characters through grinding the worst thing that can happen to you is dying, which only teleports you back to the Atelier with some random items removed from your pouch (the items you gathered since the last time you went into a safe zone). Since you can teleport back to your Atelier and back into a combat zone at almost any time, depleting resources and having a full inventory is rather a temporary inconvenience than a real threat.
Some boss fights towards the end get a bit tougher though. That’s not a bad thing but there’s a huge disparity between the regular mobs and the boss of that area.
Atelier Ryza also does not have an in-game time limit like most other entries in the series. Since this is my first Atelier game I don’t know how much more difficult it makes the games but I’m excited to try one of them out later.
Yep, there’s a fishing mechanic…
Alchemy
Ryza doing Alchemy stuff
Since I was never a big fan of crafting elements in most games I was a bit worried about the alchemy system. Turns out these worries were unfounded. The alchemy system is the central core of the game and it’s very fun. Absolutely everything you pick up along your journey can be synthezised, upgraded, converted and much more. You mainly unlock new recipes by either getting them from NPCs/Story or by unlocking them in a tree of another recipe. For example, if you go far enough in the alchemy tree of Ryza’s weapon, you unlock the next weapon.
The interface sadly cannot really keep up with the complexity of that system. You sometimes get confused what it wants from you or what certain icons and phrases even mean. And with hundreds of recipes, a search feature would’ve been nice instead of having to find that one recipe in a huge list.
If you pick up almost everything you find on your way, you will rarely run out of materials. You can experiment with unfamiliar recipes quite liberally thanks to that. The rebuild system also lets you upgrade existing items which is essential since you will most likely never max out everything in a tree.
Combat
Atlier Ryza’s Combat is certainly unique
The combat in Atelier Ryza is turn-based but with time limits. It’s supposed to keep you on your toes I guess but I found it makes the combat quite hectic sometimes for no good reason. I won’t bore you with an attacks and skills and instead go into the unique features of Ryza’s combat.
The other characters can give you orders. For example they tell you to deal ice damage and if you do that, they will execute a special attack. This is mostly a good idea but it’s their orders can be confusing at times. One of my favorites is: Lower the elemental resistance of the enemy!. Now figure that out within the three second time window until the next enemy turn.
The item system is really great though. You craft consumables through alchemy. But instead of actually consuming them, you get ~3-4 charges. After that, you can temporarily disable one of your items in exchange for more charges. Since no items ever truly disappear you can freely explore and upgrade consumables. Normally I rarely use consumables at all in RPGs but thanks to this system I use it all the time in Atelier Ryza. If you craft the right consumable against an enemy, they can become extremely powerful to the point where you don’t even have to fight at all anymore and just throw consumables instead.
Conclusion
I would describe Atelier Ryza as a fun and cozy adventure. It definitely kept me engaged through its 30-ish hour runtime and would recommend it to anyone looking for a light JRPG with cool alchemy mechanics.