[helios@talosone website]$

Atelier Yumia is a Video Game

Atelier Yumia is a video game of all time. It’s a weird game to have the Atelier title imo. It has alchemy, it has gathering, the music is good, Yumia is real easy on the eyes. But I struggle to call this an Atelier game.

I remember being pitched on Atelier back when I played the Dusk trilogy: “You know how in RPGs, when your party gets to the chamber before the final boss, theres often somehow a merchant waiting there to sell you potions you need to prevail? Atelier is a series about that merchant”

Image from Swetzie

Where Arland and Dusk were about solving much more local problems and helping your town, Yumia is much closer to a traditional RPG. You’re weak and the odds stacked against you. Theres a mean big bad, and you gotta smack them down. I guess what I’m saying is, welcome back Atelier Mana Khemia. I just wasn’t expecting it.

One of the major things Yumia improves is the… Story effort? Something I felt that Atelier was historically a little weak on was the story. This was fine, I wasn’t there for the story. I was there to dive into the complex alchemy systems and enjoy the beautiful character and environment design. Yumia puts a lot more effort into the story. It has plenty of emotional punches, character stories that intertwine with the main plot, massively improved cutscene/camera direction, and significantly improved character animation.

Another big direction change Yumia takes is the hard focus on an huge, open, seamless world. The series started inching in this direction since Ryza, but Yumia goes full throttle in this design trend. Yumia’s map is massive. Yumia also goes hard in the open world trend of dotting the map with random puzzles (if they can even be called that) and collectables. Of course, it also has synthesis materials for you to collect, like usual.

Unfortunately a lot kind of suffered in exchange. The alchemy system is probably my least favorite iteration. All it turns into is stuffing the highest resonance valued materials in to max out trait levels and quality. Theres no clever trait juggling required to break the alchemy system. Nah just get a small handful of recipes to lv10 and dump in a duplicated pile of your best stuff. The duplication system is way too strong. It doesn’t cost nearly enough to offset the massive benefit it gives you.

Additionally, the combat is kind of frustrating for a couple reasons. It’s almost a blessing that breaking alchemy so easily means you can stop engaging with it. First, the game does a terrible job of visual effect management. Fights turn into colorful messes and the camera is stuck too close to your character. Another issue is that nobody shuts up ever. All your NPC party members shout and scream with every attack. And theres 3 out at a time. It’s so noisy. And theres no volume setting for battle voices. I kind of hated engaging with the combat until I got strong enough to just delete everything in a few hits.

It feels like a lot of these design choices slowly chipped away over several games from what I liked about Atelier. No time system means that you inevitably turn into a synthesis material vacuum cleaner because you have no decision to make about gathering. No trait juggling to get powerful items with difficult traits. Even the random quests don’t care about the quality of your turn in. So whats there to optimize for?

It makes me wonder why they chose to name this game Atelier, and I wonder if I would enjoy this game more if it wasn’t called Atelier. Maybe? If Gust released Fantasy RPG Yumia, would I think this a better game? Maybe a little. I wouldn’t be comparing it to Atelier games, though I’d be giggling about the Totally Not Alchemy. The combat problems would persist though.

I guess this is all just a lot of rambling complaining about how I miss Atelier Dusk. Yumia is a neat game. The not Atelier parts are decent. The Atelier parts are not. I’d buy this on a nice big sale.