I will start by saying that i love the atelier games, played several and even finished quite some (Sophie 1 and 2, firis, lydie suelle, al revis, etc) and i enjoyed every one of them.
That being said...this game is one major disappointment and i cannot fathom for the love of me why it is "very positive".
This game seems a downgrade from all other atelier games, in many aspects.
Alchemy washed down from a minigame to just "select ingredients to unlock stuff", which is not the worst thing...i mean its one way to do alchemy i guess but the gimmick is that you have limited ingredients which is fine...it is a choice and battle to pick the right one to reach the ideal item...until you reach the point where you unlock reduction.
All the effort to make perfect item? yeah not needed anymore cause you can take the old item and add EVERYTHING you could not with alchemy now you can add them afterwards! YAY alchemy is useless now...its a perfect example of auto sabotage. The only down side is that the item level raises which means you cannot use it if you are of a lower level...but you level up decently fast.
Since in this game you make all the equipment you need...that applies to them as well!
The combat has now lost all resemblance of any type of strategy...you can only control 1 character at a time...which means the others are on auto....and since it is an active time combat....well you can't even make a plan of action because you control only 1 character anyway so there's that.
Exploring is a MAJOR pain in the ass, the QOL of this game are non existent, no minimap with symbols, no clue where the npc might be when you looking for them, no quest npc during the night, and all in all boring quests with barely any fun factor to them.
You unlock things useful to you....in the end game!
remember item duplication to have to grind 100 hours just to have enough stuff for both quests and yourself? welp...duplication is here! ... but you unlock in the last 10% of the game story so its pointless as heck...but other ♥♥♥♥ you unlock...is also useless as ♥♥♥♥! :D
most of the game seems unpolished and extremely grindy, pointlessly so often.
The difficulty spike is random, as it is in this saga of atelier...you go from one shotting at times an enemy to being defeated by the story boss in the same area.
All in all about half of the game i really just wished to finish the game as fast as i could for the simple and very basic story this game offers....to be honest i feel the only thing this game offers is fan service...but that will become more prominent in ryza 2.
All in all the game is the definition of basic and boring, no QOL, no fun factor...it uses the name atelier to make more money for the producers but fail to be a decent game at all.
Even after finishing the only emotion i felt was relief that i can finally close and never re-open this game and uninstall it...dunno how or how they created this game...but i do hope they are not given more chance to do so.

My first Atelier game; and loved it. Cozy jrpg about 50:50 crafting and battles. Nice story and characters too

Goof game, ending is slow.

pretty fun crafting and collecting. enjoyed this more than i thought i would

7/10
I was bored and out of games to play, and my daughter recommended this one to me, so I picked it up. I'm typically not a fan of crafting/alchemy in RPG's, because it is usually done very badly: too many ingredients, poor inventory management, and no obvious relation between the materials and the product. Thankfully it is usually optional, so I can ignore it. Not so with this game: alchemy is the only way to get what you need to be successful in combat and progress! Thankfully, it's not horrible in this game (although it is quite complex), and I found that I was able to tolerate it for the sake of the story.

Now that I'm into it, it's going well.
- The cartoon graphics are well done, as is the open world. Fast travel is good enough to save a lot of frustration.
- Game save can only be done in home base, but it takes only 2 clicks to get there from anywhere, and you can usually get back fairly close to where you were.
- The voice over is Japanese only, but there are English subtitles, so that's OK.
- My main complaint is that things are VERY slow to start. You don't even get to the first official save and exit point until after more than an hour of play time (possibly several hours, depending on how much you explore). Fortunately, the game auto-saves, so you can kill it from outside of the game, and later pick up more or less where you left off.

Bottom line: if you are into crafting in RPG's, you will probably love this game. I'm not, but I'm still enjoying this one.

Note: If you are new to this series, make sure to play them in order! This series' alchemy rules and features are introduced in the first game, and fed to you gradually as the game progresses (at 15 hours, I know that there are still more features to discover and learn). In later installments of this series, it gets increasingly complex, and if you don't do them in order it tends to be confusing, and much harder to develop a good crafting strategy. I did game 2 first, and regretted it, so I'm now doing game 1, and things are making much more sense.

podler