Posted 31 October 2019 - 02:33 PM

Here's my review for Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout on Nintendo Switch!

Atelier Ryza is a JRPG from our friends over at Koei Tecmo. It's about a young farm-girl, Ryza, who yearns for adventures with her friends, and finds a new passion in the form of studying alchemy.

The graphics are super vibrant and colorful, with lovely character designs. Lewd factor is pretty low. Despite some of the early buzz about the character designs, it's overall rather tame. There's one character in particular with a really ridiculous bosom, but overall there's no tone of lasciviousness or creep within the game that I've seen. The music, however, is my favorite part. It's truly phenomenal and reminds me of theatrical animated films like Disney or Ghibli. There's no English dubbing however, and all of the voice acting is in Japanese with English subtitles. This is slightly disappointing for a game of this size and caliber, but is better than not seeing the game released in the West at all.

Game-play sets up in two parts - combat is the usual Final Fantasy style ATB (active time battle) system, with attacks, spells, and items. You can set your party mates to aggressive or passive and they'll fight on their own, or you can switch to them directly to issue commands. It's fast paced and really fun, and kept me looking for encounters just to keep playing with the battle system. Enemies can be seen in advance, and if you approach them and strike them before they strike you, you'll earn a bonus to help in battle. There's a bit of an elemental strategy as well, and enemies have their own resistances and vulnerabilities.

The second half of the game-play is what makes the experience an Atelier game - the alchemy. It's a fairly complex and complicated system but essentially you collect and find materials throughout the world - fuel, components, etc and put them together via recipes to form various helpful items, even armor and weapons. Depending on the quality and configuration of your raw materials you can create items of varying quality with different helpful effects and traits, such as HP and speed bonuses. Experimentation and tinkering go further than the in-game explanations.

Materials are found strewn about the game world, and glow or sparkle. You'll have the option to either directly gather them, or sometimes you'll have to use a tool such as an axe or scythe to harvest them. Once you get the hang of collecting materials and progress far enough to start getting more recipes or altering current ones, you'll rarely have to visit a shop. You'll be able to craft nearly everything you need for your adventure yourself.

The story is quite delightful, albeit a bit meandering. The game early on presents very little urgency and is content to linger in a very slice-of-life vibe. However, I found it rather relaxing just wandering around looking for materials to harvest and plugging them into various recipes to see what new effects I could unlock. I really felt no rush to progress in the story. There were a few occasions where I was trying to get to a specific location and kept getting interrupted by multiple cut-scenes because I hadn't progressed down the story path in a while.

Speaking of, once you progress to a certain point in the story, you'll be able to establish a hideout of your own, which you can customize and decorate, lending another aspect to capture a great deal of your time, and which seeming has an expanded future with DLC, and looks to include various attire skins for your characters as well.

Atelier Ryza is a lighthearted, somewhat standard-fare, but mechanically deep JRPG. It's fun to look at and even better to listen to. The story begins a new chapter in the Atelier saga, so it's the perfect jumping on point for newcomers. It's a bit slow to start, but with no time limits you're free to experiment and learn on your own, which is good, as the in-game tutorials are a bit lacking and do it no favors. Once all of the systems are unlocked and come into play you're left with lots to explore and create. If you're a fan of the genre, and especially the Atelier series, it's a solid entry.