Atelier Yumia Feels Like An Identity Crisis For Its Cozy RPG Series
Atelier Yumia can’t find the magic in alchemy.
The Atelier series has always been a popular but still niche set of RPGs, focusing more on crafting and telling slice-of-life stories than the usual combat and apocalyptic stakes that the genre is known for. Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories and the Forbidden Land, launching in March, aims to draw in a larger audience, but its kitchen-sink approach waters down what made the offbeat RPG series so attractive in the first place, leaving behind a disjointed but generic adventure.
The star of the show is Yumia, one of the last alchemists in the world after an alchemy-induced catastrophe that destroyed a kingdom and left the survivors with an unending hatred of the magical art. That’s a shame, because it turns out alchemy is useful as all hell, capable of summoning just about any item you can think of out of thin air. In Atelier Yumia’s story, the distrust of alchemy mostly manifests as Yumia constantly being insulted to her face by everyone she meets, and having to prove again and again that she’s more interested in making potions than leveling cities.
Atelier Yumia raises the stakes on its story but can’t deliver drama to match.
Where other Atelier stories tend to be upbeat and low-stakes affairs, Atelier Yumia spins a tale of much dire consequences, as an evil cabal is out to prove everyone’s worst nightmares about alchemy true. At the same time, Yumia is following in the footsteps of her alchemist mother, who wants to use the art to help people instead. In practice, it’s unbearably dull. Despite the story’s high stakes, it’s told with near zero urgency, and consists mostly of the party undertaking one long journey after another between settlements to receive a few bits of rote dialogue spread across multiple long cutscenes.
Between those settlements, there’s a lot of combat, which is by far the worst part of the game. Atelier Yumia trades the series’ usual turn-based combat for a real-time system that seems to take only the worst lessons from MMORPG battles. Each character in the party has a handful of abilities which can be used multiple times in a row, but have long cooldowns to replenish those uses. Sometimes, you’ll need to dodge backward or side to side to avoid attacks, but otherwise, you’ll just be hammering the same buttons over and over. In more than a dozen hours of Atelier Yumia, I haven’t encountered a single fight that required more than button mashing, and the open world is absolutely littered with enemies, to the point that you can hardly walk ten paces without running into one unless you’re making a point to avoid them.
Combat is a frequent and frustrating distraction in Atelier Yumia.
But all that is meant to be secondary to Atelier Yumia’s crafting. Alchemy is by far the most interesting part of the game, but it still falls well short of actually being engaging. Atelier Yumia’s alchemy system is simplified compared to the rest of the series, which works to its detriment. To simplify a bit, creating an item means placing a series of ingredients into slots on a crafting interface, roughly arranged in a circle. Each material has a ring of resonance around it, and placing it so other material slots or drifting motes of mana fall into the ring grant the resulting item bonuses. Using high level materials or those of a certain element sometimes adds additional effects, but for the most part, simply picking the materials with the biggest resonance rings will give you a better outcome than trying to strategize. It’s ultimately quite simple, but it’s extremely unintuitive thanks largely to confusing tutorials and an absolute mess of menus of interfaces that plague the game.
Even that could work if Atelier Yumia emphasized finding the right materials to make crafting work. Instead, gathering works like it would in any open world game; just hammer on a single button to scoop up resources wherever you see the icon denoting them out in the world. There’s a chance to acquire materials of high quality, which you can increase through investing in a skill tree, but the quality is ultimately beyond your control.
Alchemy feels shallow but still confusing in Atelier Yumia.
Beyond that, alchemy just doesn’t have much impact on the game. You can craft weapons, armor, and other tools to help in battle, but combat is already so easy there’s no need to. At some points in the story, you need to craft a specific item to progress, but the process is never more engaging for these plot-essential tools than for standard items. Alchemy is central to Atelier Yumia’s story, but it makes up just a small fraction of what you’ll actually be doing in the game.
For a game that’s meant to be all about alchemy, the crafting process is the biggest disappointment. There was a time when even this bare-bones system might have been impressive, but in recent years, some games have developed far more interesting means of crafting and gathering that leave Atelier Yumia behind. Potionomics has an outstanding potion crafting process, for instance, and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, for all its faults, makes gathering plants into a full-fledged minigame. The recent Eternal Strands lets players essentially create custom armor by mixing different materials into a basic recipe, and crafting the right armor and weapons for your current objective is essential.
As much as the crafting-centric concept of Atelier Yumia speaks to me, its execution totally misses the mark. Rather than focus on what makes its series unique, the game spreads its attention so thin that its most interesting ideas get diluted to the point of irrelevance. If I got anything positive out of Atelier Yumia, it’s a desire to revisit the earlier games in the series to see if they better live up to the promise of alchemy.
