The Atelier franchise is a long-running Japanese RPG series that got its start on the PlayStation back in 1997, with the release of Atelier Marie: The Alchemist of Salburg. The games tend to be relatively lighthearted and humorous affairs, with a strong focus on recipe collecting and item crafting. Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & The Secret Hideout preserves the series' whimsy and gaiety, while also making noticeable changes to the item crafting system, visual style, and battles. Saving the world is all well and good, but sometimes a simple summertime adventure is all you really need, and Atelier Ryza is poised to deliver just that. I played the Japanese PlayStation 4 version at Tokyo Game Show, but the game is slated for an American release in October 2019.
Atelier games are divided into smaller subseries based on the in-game region they are set in and the character relationships. The stories aren't usually grandiose, though some certainly lean in that direction. Generally, your goal is to become a great alchemist or prevent your shop from closing by improving business. Atelier Ryza is the start of an entirely new subseries and as such, overhauls the visuals, artwork, and gameplay systems.
Dawn of Ryza
We follow Ryza, an entirely ordinary girl who is tired of her ordinary life. She rounds up her friends and ventures outside of her familiar rural town in search of adventure. It doesn't take long for her to find it: she wanders into a prohibited lot of land and discovers an alchemist in hiding. Fascinated by the magical science, Ryza and company dive headlong into the discipline, hoping to use alchemy to escape their boring lives. Unfortunately, the crew's wishes are granted in ominous ways, as a dark threat encroaches on their island hometown.
Visually, Atelier Ryza puts greater emphasis on light and shadows than previous games. It retains the series' colorful anime aesthetic, but also introduces dynamic lighting to bring the world to life. Ryza is set during the summer, as a summertime adventure of sorts, and the stronger lighting and shadowy contrasts certainly help to capture that theme. Environments are chock full of details, too, giving the light plenty of surfaces and features to play off of. Overall, Atelier Ryza looks quite nice, marrying a cell-shaded anime look with a touch of photorealism that puts it a step above earlier games.
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Jumping Into Action Combat
Atelier games have been strictly turn-based affairs, though some feature dynamic timing-based prompts for certain skills or attacks. Atelier Ryza shakes things up by adopting a completely real-time combat system. Battles are still turn oriented, but enemy and ally actions are queued and executed in real-time, so you cannot sit in a menu and lazily weigh your options as you could in older games.
At first glance, the active combat may remind you of the older Final Fantasy games' Active Time Battle systems, where enemies would attack as soon as their action gauge filled. In Ryza, a bar on the left side of the screen displays the attack order, with character portraits closer to the bottom of the screen taking action soonest. When your turn comes up, you can choose to perform a basic attack, a special ability, use an item, or move to a more optimal spot on the field. These options may not seem all that impressive from an action RPG standpoint, but given the series' relatively traditional turn-based roots, it's a big change, and one that immediately makes combat feel more engaging and energetic.
Allied party members are AI-controlled and will attack automatically. You can set their behavior by swapping between Negative mode and Aggressive mode. In Negative mode, allies use only their basic attacks to deal damage and will not execute their special skills unless prompted or controlled directly. In Aggressive mode, allies fight using whatever skills are available to them, as their AI dictates. Swapping between modes is useful because Ryza special combat skills are tied to the AP, or Action Point, system.
In order to use stronger abilities, players must amass AP by stringing together basic attacks. Once you earn the required AP, you can spend them on more powerful attack skills. The system gets notably more complex when Tactics Levels are introduced. If you amass a high AP total and don't immediately use it, the number above the AP gauge grows by one point, indicating that your Tactics Level has increased. This lets you perform multi-hit basic attacks, and open the door to attack variations and stronger skills.
The AI system complements your actions relatively well, and smart swapping between Aggressive and Negative modes help to manage your AP and Tactics Level so allies don't burn through resources too quickly. You can swap between party members on the fly, too.
Brewing Potions
Naturally, item usage is a very important facet of combat in these games, and Atelier Ryza mixes things up by making item consumption less restrictive. Core Charges are a value that corresponds to combat item usage, much like AP and Tactic Levels relate to skill and attack values. In earlier games, you invest lots of time and resources into crafting combat-related items, which you can use to improve your party's composition during a scuffle, deal damage to opponents, or heal up injured allies.
Sure, you could find potions and bombs out in the field, but you could also spend gathered resources to craft your own. The problem is, because the items are consumable and finite, one might feel discouraged from using precious crafted items during combat. Atelier Ryza alleviates that concern through the use of Core Charges.
Once an item is crafted, you consume Core Charges to use them in battle, rather than depleting the item itself. With this system, you can use items much more liberally, as the item is never truly lost after use. Core Charges, much like Tactics Levels and AP, can be earned through combat as well, so you can be less conscientious about using items.
Item synthesis is a pillar of the Atelier games, much like combat. Quite simply, you take materials and resources you find on the map and in dungeons, and combine them to make unique items. Typically, you find or earn recipes as you progress through the story, so you can turn your attention towards gathering the materials needed to create the item on the recipe.
Ryza's recipes feature a tree-like grid format, with various nodes corresponding to key items or catalysts. These nodes are generalized: they require a certain type of item, but which one you can use for the recipe is not set in stone. If, for example, a recipe requires an insect as a catalyst, you can use any one of the insects you've collected to modify the recipe to your liking.
This is particularly useful, as pretty much everything you gather has a unique secondary effect when used in a craft. A simple bomb recipe can use as few as two or three items, but you can easily modify it by switching around an item with an elemental effect you would prefer, if a simple firebomb isn't what you're in the mood for.
You can retrieve wooden materials from trees you hack, minerals from stones you smash, plants and soil from flowering foliage, and so on. However, Ryza has a magical bottle that, when filled with certain items, creates a unique gathering place for her to roam. This is a magical, specialized instance that is entirely disconnected from your workshop. These gathering spots have specific items and monsters associated with them, so if you need a particular material for synthesis, you will need to create these spots.
Interestingly, these gathering spots have a short password associated with them, and you are encouraged to share the codes with others. The password, when used, lets other players visit that same instance in their own game. It's a rather simplistic approach to community play, but it's a cute idea, especially for a single-player game.
A Fresh New Start
Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & The Secret Hideout is shaping up to be a promising new chapter in the series, and a fantastic starting point for newcomers. Ryza boasts stylized visuals, an engaging combat system, and clever item crafting systems, and wraps it all up in a charming package. If a mellow RPG adventure sounds like your cup of tea, keep your eyes out for Atelier Ryza, which is scheduled for a late October release on PS4, PC, and Nintendo Switch.
Atelier Ryza is a promising Japanese RPG that focuses on the joy of adventure and delivers satisfying combat and a robust item-crafting system to keep you invested.
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