izigame.me

tldr; 6/10: Gone is the difficulty, all hail generic casual slop! A good atelier story, only an okay JRPG game.
-I'm not even going to mention the horrible performance issues yet-

This feels like generic RPG designed for casual players. The characters are great, the music is good, and the story is more wholesome atelierness. The issue is the foundation of the game: the crafting has gotten even worse and combat is not fun. The crafting has been gutted into a overly simplified and streamlined system that incentivizes grinding (even more than previous titles) rather than creativity, where character levels are even more important. Oh, and combat is a blinding special effects show where you spam the same 3 skills mindlessly.

Atelier, for me, has always felt like a premium AA game. The story, character design, music and levels were always top tier, but what really pushed it to my *most loved* games list was the crafting. I could spend hours tinkering and trying to figure out a gimicky way to break an item, or create the next cool thing I want to try out in the game. Farming traits was rough, but it created a scarce resource I enjoyed playing around to make better inputs or altogether creating new skills through merging (older atelier titles). This wasn't easy and the mechanics did get very complex but this complexity made it feel that much more rewarding when I finally made *that amazing item* through some ingenius way of looping crafts or uptiering my skills.

The complexity though is what made atelier a niche RPG, with mechanics that deliberately gatekeep most audiences. Gone is the difficulty, all hail generic casual slop!

Crafting: Feels simplified, streamlined, watered down, grindy and boring.
Crafting has been further watered down this title. I had issues with Ryza's changes, but they grew on me and still let me do some interesting things. But in this game, all that matters is grinding a scarce resource to globally improve a base item (inputs matter less and locked into story progression). Quality doesn't feel as important, and traits have been gutted from items. Some are now strictly part of some base materials (crafting related traits), while the rest were moved to trait crystals (combat related traits). Items improve by using better inputs that pick up stars in an area near them on the crafting board, better items have larger range (crafted items have ludicrous range). More possible upgrades appear by upgrading the item with said scarce resource (particles) so you are story progress locked from upgrading an item rather than looking for a special type of resource like "wood" with special element combination to further into the items crafting tree.

Combat: I hate it. Mindless and blinding light-show every fight with the same brainless combo spam.
Older atelier games were turn based, and felt like there was at least some strategy (before you broke the game). Ryza introduced a pseudo realtime combat but still felt strangely familiar. Yumia has further simplified combat into a button mash system where you nonstop spam skills, brainless and broken from the get-go. The whole combat system only involves moving out of red circles on the ground (if you can see them) or block/dodge a second after you hear the *DING* of an enemy attack targeting you which feels like doing a QTE.

Exploration: Love it or hate it, I find it tedious.
One of the big appeals of this game was the open world exploration. Personally I'm sick of this stuff, and don't enjoy having to go through a checklist on the map. At least there's no towers to climb to reveal new map areas *hollow laugh*. Criticism aside, the game does look great, *for an Atelier game*. You can see the inspiration from BoTW and Genshin. Overall it's okay if your into this, but what disappointed me was that I was able to explore areas I wasn't suppose to early but I couldn't progress in them because of being locked due to story progression *shrugs*

Progression: What progression?
You start the game with wall jumping enabled, you can break every resource with your staff or shoot anything you can't reach. I used to enjoy crafting special equipments in previous titles. It make me feel like I always progressing towards something new. I could craft a special axe to get more quantity of materials, or another that adds extra effects to the drops. By having the ability to specialize equiment (before maxing them) it felt like I had to make a meaningful choice due to limitations. Now I can just get everything through the skill tree. The skill tree also incentivizes the player to spam craft cheap garbage to farm SP to unlock more efficient farming. You don't need to do it, but in game designe the questino always asked is "what does this incentivize the player to do". In this game, it's to ignore everything and spam filler garbage to max out stats available ASAP. Some skill tree nodes are locked behind a scarce resource you get from shrines (the equivalent of towers you climb in the world map in this game) so there is some story progression required but most of them are optional.

Traits: Removed because they're too hard for casual players.
Traits used to be tied to items, where you would have to grind for some of them but you could move them around items through crafting to get that good combination. Now, they're completely cut from items, all crafting related traits have been merged into base items, and combat related traits have become slottable gems called "trait crystals" which you embed into gear. You can craft new trait crystals, but how well you do is tied to skill tree progress and generally feels overly simplified and grindy.

Base Building: Undercooked and optional.
The idea feels interesting, building a new home in each zone you explore, but it's mired by bad optimization and design choices. Object placement feels janky, snapping doesn't always work, and rotating object can be a real hassle. When the stars align and you can make your own setup (there are presets you can use) it feels okay, but object placement will forever be part of my nightmares. I can understand why they heavily eased the issue of unit collisions, allowing you to place things almost completely underground or objects on top of each other to prevent some placement issues from happening, but it makes the clipping look very silly.

Characters and Story: Another amazing atelier game.
I love the character design and the story is fantastic. The music is top tier as always and the overall feels of the game is still another great atelier game. You can really feel the effort they put into the open world. The environment really do feel nice, it's a real shame you can just run by it all and ignore everything.

PC Port: Atrocious. The game doesn't look much better than previous titles but runs at 1/10 the fps
I'll keep it short, the optimization doesn't exist. The game looks blurry, has frequent fps drops, and I average 20-45 fps. I had to spend an hour playing around with game and computer settings to not get nauseous from the micro stuttering.

Atelier Yumia feels like a lost title, where it forgot its identity in an effort to appeal to a wider audience. The asthetics are all there, but the core gameplay is so far removed from all previous titles that it now feels like an "atelier themed" jrpg slop. I play games to have fun, and as much as I love the story in this game, the gameplay just isn't for me. I really hope the game direction improves, but if this level of quality is kept on later titles, I might just stop buying these games.