Atelier is an odd series for me. Since picking up Atelier Rorona back when the Switch was still fairly fresh and didn’t have much in the way of JRPGs, I’ve absolutely fell in love with the relaxed setting and fantastic cast of characters. Since then I’ve picked up and played every game on the Switch but, embarrassingly, haven’t actually found the time to beat any of them. At least since Rorona way back in 2018. Not forgetting about the series, I’ve been looking for a good entry point to hop back in, and with Yumia being a new adventure with a new protagonist, I figured now was as good a time as any.

A Ruined Country

Atelier Yumia starts out with a trope I'm generally not overly fond of. The tutorial takes place mid-way through the story, kicking off the game with something of a bang. I do understand why this is so often done. It's a hook designed to get you invested in characters you're yet to meet; to get introduce you to your cast so that when you do eventually meet them for the first time, you'll know they're somebody to pay attention to. In this much I can at least say Yumia succeeds. Opening with a grand cutscene of the game's cast ascending an ancient-looking elevator, the stage appears to be set for a grand confrontation. Where I find myself frustrated in this style of introduction is in the decision to give the player a huge assortment of skills and abilities, only for them to be set back to basics when the game actually starts. This is more impactful in a game like this where having a larger assortment of skills means waiting less and generally enjoying fights more. I'll come back to combat in more detail later though.

Rewinding back to the start, the story kicks off in the Ligneus Region as a research group begin their journey to discover the events leading up to the downfall of a once-great empire. Coming from older Atelier titles, there's a good bit that stands out when it comes to the setting. I've always seen Atelier games as something of a cosy bubble, where you come across an assortment of charming characters being turned to the wonder and whimsy of alchemy. There is a lot of that still here, but the starting point has been pushed way back. Instead of alchemy being something interesting or unknown, we see a world where it's shunned as heresy. Our protagonist Yumia, having loved alchemy as something of a gift from her mother, is left in a bit of an awkward position. Joining the research team she wants to use her skills to help out and uncover alchemy's place in the empire's downfall, but to do so she needs to work through the stigma and negativity of her peers. It's a darker and frankly more hopeless setting than I'm used to seeing as a starting point, though it does follow something of a familiar path as people warm up to both Yumia and alchemy as a whole.

Before long you’re left to your own devices and free to start exploring the world. The Ligneus Region as your starting area is surprisingly large, though you are still limited out of the gate. Some of the ways the game limits you I feel are well-crafted, while others aren’t quite thought through enough. To look at the positive aspects first, I really do like how the manabound areas work. These are Yumia’s primary role in the investigation. Basically when you arrive at a new region, only a few areas are entirely free to roam around. Though you can technically go anywhere in the region, many parts will be “manabound”. This means that the density of mana is particularly high, siphoning your energy a little as you’re in the area. This is more impactful in the early game as your energy is particularly limited, and less of a restriction as you progress and have more energy at your disposal, giving you a natural sense of getting stronger and giving you more options later in the game. Clearing these areas involves you getting to certain marked places on the map and performing a small ritual to disperse the mana. With that out of the way, the area clears up and you’re free to explore it without limits. Cleaning up the map also gives you the benefit of being able to see where points of interest are as question marks, making 100% map completion a lot simpler a task.

In the Ligneus Region clearing the map is very much a part of the story, with options as to which areas you can open up being limited until you decide to engage with the plot itself. Though I don’t mind this on paper, I do feel there should’ve been more of an effort to make areas you shouldn’t be in more inaccessible. It felt like the developers didn’t fully account for either the mobility you have when exploring or a player’s desire to explore that mobility, leading to situations where you could be at the place to clear a manabound area with no option to actually do so. This really is only an issue with the Ligneus Region, with the additional flexibility of the other areas meaning you can pretty much go where you want out of the gate. It is a little bit of a shame all the same though, and can sully what is otherwise a really fun time exploring while you’re still finding your footing.

 

Though you are given more freedom to explore as you progress through the game, one thing I did notice is that the maps you’re exploring feel smaller and smaller. I actually don’t think this is a terribly bad thing. As somebody who really enjoys exploring in this kind of game, I often find myself taking a lot of time trying to see everything and burning out before really getting to the meat of the story. Here though I felt guided in a subtle way. The regions you’ll see in the mid and late game aren’t necessarily small, but them being smaller makes you feel as though you’re progressing faster, both playing back into that sense of growing stronger and also pulling you into the growing pace and urgency of the plot. It’s something I quite enjoyed as I played.

Questers and Pioneers

Beyond just exploring and finding landmarks, the game presents you with two primary means of keeping you occupied: Quests and Pioneering. Quests are probably exactly what you have in mind for a JRPG like this. On the map you’ll come across icons to suggest a person in an area wants something from you, and you can choose to help them out. This might involve hunting something, collecting something, delivering something; it’s all relatively standard for the most part, with there being a bunch of optional things to do alongside exploring the region and progressing the main story. Alongside the main quests and standard side-quests, there are a few others worth mentioning that mix things up a little. Chief among these are character-specific quests that will unlock as you both add a given character to your party and progress to a certain part of the game. Though completely optional, these quests take a moment to shine a light on the character in question, giving you an opportunity to better understand their personality and motives as a small story is built around them. I do feel like more could have been done with these quests, but I did also come to appreciate their brevity as my personal focus tended to lean more towards exploration. To me they were just short intermissions to break up the part of the game I really enjoyed, and in that they certainly succeeded.

The other two notable quest types are Location Quests and Random Quests, with the former in particular falling slightly short of the mark for me. Location Quests, on paper at least, are neat. They’re quests tied to a specific part of the map, but not given to you by an NPC. More often than not, these are quests to activate shrines around the map. These aren’t like the shrines you’ll likely have come across in the open world Zelda games though, offering unique challenges each time. Instead you get one of a very limited number of puzzles, with the goal being to activate two or three small markers dotted nearby. At first I thought this did have some merit. You might need to explore the immediate area a little, and do something fun and interesting to actually activate the pedestals. Some you shoot at in passing, and others you’ll have to solve a simple puzzle of rotating tiles to connect the starting point with the end. That’s… basically it though. And there’s far more of the latter than the former. The relay-style puzzles are frequently used throughout the game for repairing zip lines amongst other things, and as a quick thing to do in passing I never minded them. It’s when you’re exploring an area and go from one shrine to another and have to do these same puzzles six, nine, twelve times in a row. It gets tiresome, especially when there's a limited number of unique variations and you're repeating the exact puzzle.

 

Random Quests by comparison don’t fall into the same trap. These quests are spontaneous and aren’t required for any kind of completion metric, respawning in new areas as they’re completed. You might get some requests from NPCs for this style of quest, asking you to do basic things a normal side-quest would require of you like hunting a monster or delivering an item, but you can also just run into them while wandering around. The ones encountered while wandering were certainly the ones I engaged with more, with them often taking the form of hunting a stronger than usual monster in the area. They were a fun challenge when I fancied it, without a major sense of obligation to slog through it when I didn’t. These quests are in essence filler content, but much like the character-specific Companion Quests, they offer a nice break from exploring or the main storyline. Like Location Quests, they would have greatly benefited from additional variety, but what is there did at least feel substantial enough for me to want to dip in and out occasionally.

Looking beyond quests, Pioneering is the other major form of optional content in Atelier Yumia, and it’s here I found the most enjoyment with how well it ties into exploring as a whole. Pioneering is, at its core, just questing packaged up a little differently. Instead of being given one objective to fulfil you here get presented with a whole list of things to do related to the region you’re in or lining up with the general progression of the game. In doing these goals, you’re all but forced to visit far-off parts of the map, and engage with systems you may have otherwise overlooked. As you clear the various goals laid out for you, you unlock a series of recipes for crafting amongst other things. For those wanting to see all there is to see in each region, Pioneering is something you can’t overlook, with even a number of optional quests being tied to progression that can in turn unlock entire out of the way areas and additional context for the larger story.

There isn’t much in the way of missable content in the game, if any. If you’re somebody like me you’ll want to do and see everything right out of the gate, but there’s nothing stopping you from going on a whistle-stop tour of the region just to focus on the story and looping back to the additional content later. I really enjoyed the freedom to engage with the world as I saw fit, and I feel like others could have an entirely different experience while enjoying it just as much.

Group Brawls

The combat of Atelier Yumia is something I was a little unsure of at first. On the surface it’s actually a lot of what I dislike in an RPG combat system, making use of a number of skills that charge over time and can be activated once charged. This kind of action-oriented system is a good chunk of what put me off playing Final Fantasy 7, and even with games like Xenoblade that I largely enjoyed, it did end up being something of a low point. Here we see a simple system that I do think benefits from its simplicity.

Instead of being turn-based at its core, Yumia leans more into the real-time aspect of a fight, and does so in a really fun way. The stage for these battles takes place on two rings around the enemy, giving you free movement left and right, with the option to jump backwards and forwards. As the fight goes on, you can see attacks being telegraphed and dodge or block, on top of being able to attack with skills assigned to each of the face buttons. Each skill can be used a number of times before needing to be recharged, and you have different skills depending on whether you’re on the inner or outer ring. There’s a surprising amount to juggle here, but it’s presented in a really easy to pick up way that I enjoyed a lot more than I expected to. As touched on earlier starting out with a lot of skills does hurt a little with them being taken away at the end of the tutorial section. With skills having a recharge timer between use, having more to just cycle through is a huge help in keeping you engaged and actually doing something. This can be helped by crafting combat-oriented items in the early game, these not being one-time use and ultimately functioning just as normal skills do, but I didn’t really feel I was fully up to speed again until around half way through the story.

 

I did find how the game handles multiple enemies to be interesting, and something I hadn’t really come across in games prior to this. When entering a battle with a number of enemies, the game does one of two things: groups them together into one large encounter with an elongated health bar, or splits the encounter up with some of your AI teammates getting started on the other group. I quite like both approaches, and they pair together quite well. The large encounters are definitely the standout, with multiple enemies attacking from one central location. This does a great job of keeping you on your toes, while also keeping the action in one area to allow you to better read attacks and ultimately respond to them. The split groups I do appreciate, but more often than not your AI companions don’t really pull their weight. These encounters can drag on a touch, but I still enjoyed them a lot.

Alchemy Made Simple

It’s taken me a little longer than it maybe should have to get here, but with this being an Atelier game, alchemy is something that needs to be talked about. Alchemy, for those who haven’t played an Atelier game before, is basically a souped up crafting system, and one that the series is pretty much built on. You typically go out and gather resources of varying quality with the intent of combining them to make something new, the quality of which will vary based on the ingredients used. Depending on the game you’ll find a few changes here and there, but the core is fundamentally the same. That same core is very much on show here, with the gathering of ingredients as streamlined as ever thanks to Yumia being able to use her staff as a gun in the field to gather a number of hard to reach resources. For the resources within reach, it’s incredibly easy to just run through the world mashing the gather button too. The end result is that you’ll very rarely be without materials for most of the essential recipes, though the quality of your materials will naturally be worse at the start of the game and improve as you progress. You’ll also be picking up recipes throughout the game, further bolstering what you’re able to make.

The actual process of synthesising is something I engaged with surprisingly little for a game with it as its core feature. It is an interesting procedure with relative depth though. Each item can have three active cores contributing to their quality, effects, and traits. Within each core, you can then place ingredients, with different ones giving different bonuses and allowing for further ingredients to be placed. Later in the game you can also add set skills to further increase quality, increase the resulting quantity, number of uses, and a bunch more. It’s a system I am a little ashamed to admit I never fully came to terms with, in part because the game just gives you the option to automate the process with a focus on quality or effects, and because it can just feel quite slow at time when you're just wanting to keep playing. To get the most out of synthesising you will want to be doing everything by hand, but if you’re just wanting to get by, these automated processes will do you well enough.

You’re able to make a pretty significant variety of things in Atelier Yumia, going beyond simple consumables in battle or equipment to help you through the game. You can still make those, for what it’s worth, but you can also use your resources to create building blocks and furnishings for the various bases and campsites around the map. I’m not one to pass up a bit of base building in my open world games, though I did feel a little underwhelmed having played around a bit. Much of this stemmed from the comfort system.

You see for each campsite and base location, you’ve got both a limit to how much can be placed, and a number of targets to aim for in terms of comfort. Some of these comfort goals will give you a one time unlockable for hitting them, and others will have a bonus for as long as the comfort remains that high. On top of these bonuses, a comfort level that’s too low might result in your base being raided by monsters, requiring you to hunt them down to get things working again. This might seem like a relatively balanced system on the surface, but the end result is something I ended up seeing as an obligation more than a thing I looked forward to. Each item you can place has both a “weight” contributing to the placement limit, and comfort score. You can place as much as you want however you want within the placement limit, and if it scores high enough, you get your bonuses. There’s no synergy here though. There’s no reward for actually making a house, placing the essentials, going above and beyond to make something actually good. Instead it became a task of finding the lowest cost item with the highest comfort value. My solution? Place one wall and put shelves on it until I hit my target. Seriously. The game really does have all the pieces for a great system here, but squanders it before it has a chance to really be something worthwhile.

A Fantastic Place to Jump In

Atelier Yumia is by no means a perfect game, but it is a game I’ve thoroughly enjoyed playing. Having put around 30 hours into the PC version, I managed to beat the game, fully explore the map, and complete every Pioneering goal. For those more interested in just sticking to the story and a side quest here and there I imagine you could shave 10 hours off my play time, while those chasing all achievements would likely be in for a further 10 hours more than I played.

At its core we have much of the Atelier spirit I’ve come to love presented in a new and interesting way. Though I’m not without my complaints, I do feel they did a good job of bringing an open world environment into the series, and I’m thoroughly looking forward to the two new maps yet to come via the Season Pass. With this being a new entry with no ties to previous ones, it’s a great place to jump in if you’ve been considering Atelier for a while.