I last played this game on March 30th . . .

[Walrus Beard]

I will beat it someday, but I just don't feel the same overwhelming urge to play it that I had with Atelier Sophie 2. From what I've played it isn't a bad game, but I do feel it is too simplified and too easy. I hear people saying that even on the hardest difficulty it isn't that challenging. Contrast this with Atelier Sophie 2. The alchemy was fun but challenging. You had to actually get good at it to make high quality items. Trait combos were incredibly useful. You actually had to experiment and think to figure out how to overcome the combat challenges. I felt Atelier Sophie 2 was more visually appealing overall as well. Gust has lost something. I hope they can find their way again. That Red Alchemist game based on the trailer looks like it will lean more in the fantastical and whimsical direction, so hopefully they can recapture some of their old magic.

[Seth Rehu]

Trust me i had the same feeling that delayed the HELL outta me on the game so i only just finished it today, skipped the ending cutscenes cause i was butt-hurt by how they flipped the entire plot from both start to finish cause:

1. Unlike Atelier Ryza 2 or the Mana khemia 1+2 entries, where you are ENCOURAGED to gather all kinds of ingredients to use different resources or unlock new node pathways when working on a recipe.

Yumia ENCOURAGES you to instead spam particle farms to FIRST unlock the recipe (and get hundreds of them to push them to lvl 10) after you get the `base resources` that does not point where they are (till you get a tracker by finding them first and then just tell it to EFF off by using a resource duplicator instead) where a giant massive map makes it hard to spot them unlike how Ryza 2 i believe had a better tracker to make use of and Mana Khemia 1+2 being still in the era of linear-like corridor traversal with hidden pathways was what did a better job to encourage by finding rare item harvest spots to make better items early where later on they might become more readily accessible but you could of acquired better gear in mana khemia 1+2 in advance to make boss checks easier to manage.

2. Remember Flammi? Remember how:
+You can only use the bike because Flammi plugs into it to power it?
+You can only keep track of your energy core because Flammi is reading it and checking manabound density and what not?
+You can only read memory vials due to Flammi being the only device in the game able to do so for the entire party?
+you can only do Synthesis at altars and even later point stuff because Flammi dives in your `backpack` to barf out a special crystal object you use to do the actual synthesis with?
+You can only have any tracking mechanisms, records kept of memory vial details and recipes due to Flammi???

Yeah you`ll know EXACTLY why your gonna be sour note when you finish the story.

3. Ya know how combat is so stupidly fast that you can never make any use of precision counter character switching, support heal items, support combat items or even MANA SURGE unless you purposely jack up the difficulty to the highest and/or run with trash gear by purposely avoiding any engagement with the synthesis system???

Expect to feel extra butt hurt when likely 99% or more players who didnt play like a masochist who probably only got the trophy to doing your mana surge at a certain FORCED segment and that same segment makes mana surge feels TERRIBLE, just as much as the `boss fight` attached to it shows GUST laziness even worst then how the Neptunia games fair these days...

4. Anyway, if you do plan to continue keeping any care for Atelier games after this one, i highly suggest you PRAY that they do not do a Yumia 2 and have an entirely new cast instead. Seriously, they want to talk about alchemy being forbidden by the kingdom that SENT YOU on a survey, but because they conviently have it in a wasteland of destroyed empire, that never gets actively engaged with and i RATHER they go with an ACTUALLY ILLEGAL ALCHEMIST where you are not just simply doing the same stuff as Ryza 1+2+3 did but actually having todo alchemy in a land that portrays it as forbidden properly and you have to do shady jobs, being extra sneaky and inconspicious from the `law` and they just ditch the lazy open world design and make it feel more like a challenge to acquire resources either thru dangerous locales that even law enforcement would not venture in, have to make trades with underground and tight lipped dealers to do your trade and you could actually have consequences if you are too brazen at it to suddenly have to actually avoid getting captured (game over) and maybe even actions to erase any traces of your activity thru some creative alchemy use to keep doing business...

Cause gonna be honest, i feel that Atelier games especially with Ryza 2 and now Yumia have gotten too far in getting WAY too much resources and burning 60+ of them in Yumia especially to make a single item and its got so much tedious work unlike Ryza 2 just if you wanna make something as simple as a new weapon without needing to burn over 300+ difference resources between making synthesized ingots/gems to also going thru lists of a thousand materials to sift thru a crap ton of annoying effect text to snatch the ones that actually work in synthesis and flip off any with trash effects in general.

[Kio Kurashi]

Originally posted by Seth Rehu:

2. Remember Flammi? Remember how:
+You can only use the bike because Flammi plugs into it to power it?
+You can only keep track of your energy core because Flammi is reading it and checking manabound density and what not?
+You can only read memory vials due to Flammi being the only device in the game able to do so for the entire party?
+you can only do Synthesis at altars and even later point stuff because Flammi dives in your `backpack` to barf out a special crystal object you use to do the actual synthesis with?
+You can only have any tracking mechanisms, records kept of memory vial details and recipes due to Flammi???

Yeah, I'm not even half way through the game and even if I assume Flammie is just grabbing the crystal out of her bag for her rather than producing it I still feel like Flammie is too much of a "here's the solution to literally everything alchemy and if you try to do anything without it you'll be floundering in deep waters without a paddle" type cop out for writing. (I have not finished the game so I still don't want any spoilers)

Originally posted by Seth Rehu:

3. Ya know how combat is so stupidly fast that you can never make any use of precision counter character switching, support heal items, support combat items or even MANA SURGE unless you purposely jack up the difficulty to the highest and/or run with trash gear by purposely avoiding any engagement with the synthesis system???

I got half way through this and thought, "But I do get to use some of those things, sometimes." Then I finished reading and realized that they only reason I do is because I haven't upgraded my gear since the start of the game, ignoring a handful of teir 1 bare minimum weapons made for characters but mostly to have 'made one of each' alchemy recipe. Why? Because even on top difficulty I don't feel the need to like you said. XD

Originally posted by Seth Rehu:

... but because they conviently have it in a wasteland of destroyed empire, that never gets actively engaged with ...

First thing I did when I was told by the beastkin leader to not let anyone know Yumia is an alchemist is to perform quick alchemy right in front of everyone. Nothing happened. Much disappointment. The only "engagement" for this is that people distrust Yumia, and even that tapered off a lot faster than I expected. I mean, there's constant "we're watching you alchemist-scum" being said, but nothing really seems to put that into actionable effect so surprisingly the worst offense I've seen was with the early on quest where you make medicine and get to so the dual-faced nature of people who despise something just because they're taught to.

Originally posted by Seth Rehu:

... and i RATHER they go with an ACTUALLY ILLEGAL ALCHEMIST where you are not just simply doing the same stuff as Ryza 1+2+3 did but actually having todo alchemy in a land that portrays it as forbidden properly and you have to do shady jobs, ...

This would be awesome! I'm trying to think of a comparable game, but sadly nothing really fits or all the mechanics would likely lead to just being 'colored' with the brush of 'dangerous.' ex: You buy from the 'shady merchant' but other than that it's just like any shop in any other game. GTA kind of comes to mind, but only in the sense that if you're caught doing a crime then the police will start coming after you so there's "consequences" but I wouldn't want them to make 'Grand Thaumaturgist Atelier' since that would be terrible. Perhaps if they combined things from games like Dishonored, Schedule one, thief, and other such games to give it a relatively linear story (as would be expected anyway) but with actual progress stopping depending on your actions (even better if you can lose the game early by playing poorly) then that would be good. I would also be alright if at the end of it they're accepted, not necessarily fully but at least like aquitted of their crimes, because they used alchemy to defeat an otherwise impossible threat at great risk to themselves.

Originally posted by Seth Rehu:

Cause gonna be honest, i feel that Atelier games especially with Ryza 2 and now Yumia have gotten too far in getting WAY too much resources and burning 60+ of them in Yumia especially to make a single item and its got so much tedious work unlike Ryza 2 just if you wanna make something as simple as a new weapon without needing to burn over 300+ difference resources between making synthesized ingots/gems to also going thru lists of a thousand materials to sift thru a crap ton of annoying effect text to snatch the ones that actually work in synthesis and flip off any with trash effects in general.

I feel like this is one of the things that really warrants an extensive discussion. The main issue with this isn't that we're getting so many reasources and then burning them, it's that it was a solution to a problem that has been in the games for ages, and that's the fact that all resources are random in a very wide range. Ignoring quality which could easily be reworked (and was certainly an issue in prior games where just having a 999 item could break things) you have a wide variety of traits, and items that can give various triats, some trates can be combined, others transferred, etc, but all of these traits are randomly gained, or sometimes created, from items you have to gather. Which combined with all other randomized aspects makes even some items with the right traits invalid options, or at least ones that require even more work to get them up to par. And this isn't even if you're trying to min-max at this point. And I didn't even include any of the other issues that might come into play on a game-per-game basis for getting things they way you want them.

In the earlier atelier games the wasn't nearly as much variance, so you could get an item and be reasonably assured that you'd get what you needed. But as they added more variance, and more complexity, and then felt they needed to keep that from game to game, it got to the point where you're already collecting thousands of useless items. The past several games have been trying to find some ways to mitigate that. They gave us ways to generate items passively, ways maximize the values so that even if we didn't get exactly what we wanted it could still be usefl, ways to duplicate rare perfect items, ways to use items that we didn't strictly need, higher quest requirements (at least Ryza tried that), and now with Yumia: ways to burn a ton of the items.

No, none of these options were a real final solution to the core problem, and removing that core problem would also be met with disdain for similar reasons (usually the term "dumbing it down" would be used), and most of them added their own issues. Taking one of the problems with Yumia which is that a big way to burn materials is through the trade gets not only slower (higher value items become more abundant while trades become less apealing), but if you don't really want to do any base building beyond what's necessary for tasks or personal use, you really don't have any need for the blueprints (let alone the D rank materials you probably already have a bunch of). In this regard it's like they tried to take a step forward but were too scared to even commit to the system exclusive to this game (which means ignoring duplication and such things).

I do think that, as I said before, more discussion is needed for this problem because it can't really just be removed as even ignoring 'dumbing down' arguments if you remove traits or other things too much then you essentially have a normal binary crafting system of x+y=z and that wouldn't be fun for an alchemy game. The closer they get to that then the more they feel the need to compensate with other things which could lead to the once unique atelier series being... well any other anime-styled female led (usually) jrpg. And those aren't exactly an uncommon occurance. I personally am interested in figuring out a solution because one day I'd like to make my own alchemy-based game with this series having inspired me to do so, but I'm hesitant on what to do since if I make it like Atelier then I would also end up having the same core issues.


Anyway, thoughts?

[Zeo]

I'm also still playing, when we unlock a new region it's very exhausting to unlock and discover everything all over again so I take a break, not to mention the materials since the game don't have a "rank up system" for them and we need to gather the new variant instead. You guys are totally right with the different amount of items, if the other Atelier games are like that I don't want play them, I'm using everything on auto.

I think that we need to had a system which the adventurer association could gather materials for us, not to mention the greenhouses that are limited of only 1 peer location, teleporting all over the map just to collect a thing inside your greenhouse was a terrible decision, i'd rather have them all in one location.

Combat also is weird, this is my first Atelier but before I could get Lenya I had to hold myself because my party was already almost max level! Also it took me a while to notice that items are extremely broken, I feel like I'm cheating.

Some items like the Rope Ladder, Repais Kit Liquid unlocks super late, making me wonder what was the point into having them in the early levels, just to force useless backtracking.

Camping I'm also only touched once for the quest, I don't see a reason to waste 5 slots on my back for this useless feature, dunno if we have to use it in the highest difficulty.

Game is fun overall, Yumia is hot and cute as hell, I'm enjoying my part members, especially Rutger, oddly enough I found Yumia and Viktor the worse party members, Yumia animations take too long and she's the worse to counter/change into her, Viktor is weak overall, Isla, Lenja and Rutger are fun to play and Nina is a must since she have the most magic attacks.

Atelier Yumia definitely don't worth the price, people should wait for a 70% sale.

edit:

@Seth Rehu yeah particle collecting totally sucks, I'm locked with many recipes that I can't upgrade, even while have materials for crafting ton of them, it is another thing that we could farm with time or while AFK.

[Spaghett Meatballs]

Originally posted by Zeo:

I think that we need to had a system which the adventurer association could gather materials for us, not to mention the greenhouses that are limited of only 1 peer location, teleporting all over the map just to collect a thing inside your greenhouse was a terrible decision, i'd rather have them all in one location.

You don't need many. Just dump the highest quality item you can and the 20xitem nodes will take care of everything. I placed down a lot then used pretty much only one greenhouse.

Originally posted by Zeo:

Camping I'm also only touched once for the quest, I don't see a reason to waste 5 slots on my back for this useless feature, dunno if we have to use it in the highest difficulty.

It saves you some pain hunting down treasure chests (all other meals are useless) if you're the type that wants to true 100% instead of just platinum. But that in itself is an evidence of bad game design.
The only time in the entire game where I actually ate for stats was when I was playing on Charismatic but was only around level 15, with equipment just out of the demo version, picking fight with one of those black crystals on Hard danger level. The monsters probably outleveled me by 15-20 levels.

Originally posted by Zeo:

Some items like the Rope Ladder, Repais Kit Liquid unlocks super late, making me wonder what was the point into having them in the early levels, just to force useless backtracking.

Rope Ladders are straight up useless. You can triple jump to almost anywhere you want to. With some good platforming? Double jump only. For some reason I never ran out of the few Liquid Repair Kits I collected during early game. I think most chests are just Wood or Metal, with very few places requiring the other 2 types.

Originally posted by Zeo:

Game is fun overall, Yumia is hot and cute as hell, I'm enjoying my part members, especially Rutger, oddly enough I found Yumia and Viktor the worse party members, Yumia animations take too long and she's the worse to counter/change into her, Viktor is weak overall, Isla, Lenja and Rutger are fun to play and Nina is a must since she have the most magic attacks.

I'm surprised characters can feel different to you by the point you unlock everyone. By the time I unlocked Rutger, everyone was already 1 hitting everything, so combat was the same regardless of character.

[Zeo]

Originally posted by Spaghett Meatballs:

I'm surprised characters can feel different to you by the point you unlock everyone. By the time I unlocked Rutger, everyone was already 1 hitting everything, so combat was the same regardless of character.

Ah totally, but when I mention that some characters are stronger/weaker I mean their animations, some have long animations and delays which you can't even block or evade (mostly Yumia after counter-changing into her), stat wise is kinda pointless to debate since you can have them have the attribute you want with items and crafting.

I confess that I noobed about the liquid repairs at the beginning, because it took me way too long to notice that I didn't lost those items that I receive as quest rewards, but I had to manage my bag while under the influence of a place with a chest for it to appear.

[FreshMint]

I feel like something that really tilts everything is the fact that it feels like you can, shockingly easily, just let the duplicator run for a while to then toss them into really powerful iems that chop everything in half (while skill scaling seems to fall behind even on max stats).

Add the ease of 99999 gear as well and you've kinda 'solved' the game, which makes me feel like the DLC later this year isn't gonna offer much of a challenge if they don't shake things around.

And even if you don't do those things you really have to hold back on duplicating your strong materials, and eventually you start to wonder why you even try with regular stuff anyhow.


Atelier Sophie 2 did kinda let you break the game a little by making very good seeds but the materials you would get were still a mess of random traits and shapes to fit on the grid- something you still had to work with to make items.
Sure, Plachta's late unique damage item broke the endgame, but (partially thanks to relying on MP) that was still more involved than 'Make a single item with your duplicated rainbow punis/philosopher's stones/etc'


I'm also surprised they tried to do recipe levels again after Atelier Firis showed how discouraging it is to try and make a good item if the recipe isn't even max level yet.

[Kio Kurashi]

Originally posted by FreshMint:

I'm also surprised they tried to do recipe levels again after Atelier Firis showed how discouraging it is to try and make a good item if the recipe isn't even max level yet.

This is exactly how I feel and I hadn't gotten around to playing Firis yet. XD Now I might not :/
And in this game it isn't even like it's that hard to max out items, but I don't want to sit there going through it and just holding down the button so that it can finally be "usable" to make something good.

[spike86]

firis taught me to NOT be perfectionist, I always used the items I created there, even if low level, also thanks to catalysts you can bypass some low level restrictions.

with that mindset and less perfectionism, yumia is fun and good.
just build thing the way you can now, you will build better next, but there's no point in waiting if you need something.
also balance is bad so being easy it doesn't require 999 quality items anyway.

just like in firis, enjoy the ride and stop setting boring objectives (like waiting the highest level on a item before building it, that will also require particles farming which is good every once in a while but grindy and boring if you to too much of it in a short time)

I'm starting to guess that people not enjoying this game just have different mindset than what this game really ask for

[Kio Kurashi]

Originally posted by spike86:

I'm starting to guess that people not enjoying this game just have different mindset than what this game really ask for

The problem is that I think this is probably right, but what it asks for differs from what it offers. Take what you said above: To enjoy it is to not be a perfectionist, or even to just not try to make the best item that they can because the moment they do they drop the difficulty of the game heavily (not strictly making everything a sinch with just a single item, at least until later recipies are unlocked). Yes, we can choose not to do that, but that's like cutting off half of the content to make the other half enjoyable. The game incentivizes the player to do these things to some degree, and it doesn't really tell you at what point it is "acceptable" to stop so the player has to figure that out themselves.

I'm not saying you're wrong, in fact I agree with you perfectly. My argument here is in that the game is designed to work against you in that regard. Personally I have put the second ingot (the two toned one) and Yumia's second weapon up to level 9 and 6 respectively, nothing else has gone beyond level 1. I also don't even feel like crafting items in general because there's really not much point given that I can sufficiently kill everything if I just ignore my allies and focus on Yumia. To make the game "fun" I'm cutting out all of that stuff. And it's all added to pad out the game to justify the content that... you're cutting out. At least this is how I see it. I'm not strictly complaining about the game, but I do hope they don't continue down this path in the future.

[spike86]

I think they just messed up with the balance because this is the first time they really do a fully open world go where you want from the get go paired with level scaling and not holding back anything part zone 2.

i mean, even in ryza 3 they padded things out more broadly, you have to advance the story to do a lot of things, and in firis many mechanics are bound to the story as well.

here they give you all the tools almost immediately, and the level scaling is just not powerful enough to keep up, also since levels cap at 100, but you still don't have the most powerful equipment by then (yes they messed up exp points too by giving way too many of them too fast) the game pratically stop 'growing' with you around either area 1 or area 2 depending on how much you fight. even if you avoid most fights I doubt by area 3 you'll be less than level 90 without even trying.

I think this is crux.
without further empowering of the enemies stats in any way, the game just sit there and watch a supreme power creep from yumia party. that happens already less than 20 hours in...

they should either implement a different way of balancing the enemies (maybe based on story rather than levels? or unlocked recipes levels? I don't know) and at the same time limit level ups to 50, or even 20 because they also are too generous with the stats gain.

some of my favourites open world are from piranha bytes (a sadly defunct studio) where there's total freedom.
however you flee from most enemies until quite a lot of time due to enemies power being fixed (and some of them can rip you too pieces even with the most powerful armors if you are not careful even at high level) from then start instead of following the player. I think it's easier too balance an open world that has crafting in this way.

I mean, it's totally NORMAL for an atelier player too try to break the game as soon as possible, that's how we play usually (I broke ryza 1 at around 15 hours in, had to remake items only when I got defeated once by the end boss (phase 2!)) by spending around the same amount of time in the atelier and farming ingredients) but here, considering the vastness of the game, it happens way too early.

either they make fixed enemies power and balance them considering the power creep (like in firis where you have uber bosses (like the wind elemental) from the start) or level cap you around 50 but level up enemies based on recipes total level, or halve the stats gain from levels and allow to level up up to 200, with enemies scaling in bigger terms of stats past level 100, hereby forcing the player to create more powerful stuff and resisting better against power creep (the should NOT be removed since it's the whole point of atelier games)

with the right difficulty this game would have been a blast, the elements are all there

[FreshMint]

Originally posted by spike86:

firis taught me to NOT be perfectionist, I always used the items I created there, even if low level, also thanks to catalysts you can bypass some low level restrictions.

with that mindset and less perfectionism, yumia is fun and good.
just build thing the way you can now, you will build better next, but there's no point in waiting if you need something.
also balance is bad so being easy it doesn't require 999 quality items anyway.

just like in firis, enjoy the ride and stop setting boring objectives (like waiting the highest level on a item before building it, that will also require particles farming which is good every once in a while but grindy and boring if you to too much of it in a short time)

I still need to get into firis' endgame, it has a special spot for me now because I successfully fumbled through the exam very shortly before I had a real big deal exam going on but the endgame felt a bit difficult to get into (probably because I was underleveled among other things).

Beating perfectionism is honestly why I like the systems in Ryza and Sophie 2 though honestly? Especially in Sophie 2 I would easily spend a long time on an item and still have to go "ah well, I guess I have to miss out on X or Y because i can't fill up everything".
But that felt a bit more natural, Firis' recipe levels felt a bit more arbitrary (though I guess a good mentality on it is that it just means investing more materials!)

I still went through Yumia decently well but my negativity feels more towards 'how is post game/release content gonna entertain me' in part because I have to worry less about those same kinda choices.

Originally posted by spike86:

I'm starting to guess that people not enjoying this game just have different mindset than what this game really ask for

I think its generally agreed that this game is different from other games yeah, much as I can say 'it's not the same' I personally enjoy the game a lot more if I stop making those comparisons, but I do wish the balancing was better.