Atelier Ryza 3: Alchemist of the End & the Secret Key is final instalment in the “Secret” arc of Gust and Koei Tecmo’s long-running Atelier series. Released on the 24th of March, 2023 for Playstation 4, 5, Nintendo Switch and PC this game sees Alchemist Ryza and her friends reunite for this trilogy’s conclusion.
Atelier games are fantasy-themed RPGs with a heavy emphasis on crafting and item creation. The protagonist is usually a teenage girl that takes on the dual role of inventor and witch, who inevitably surrounds herself with a party of warriors, scholars and busybodies to help gather ingredients to fuel their alchemical exploits. Ryza’s tale is no exception. This adventure sees our protagonist and her friends investigate the mysterious appearance of an island next to her hometown, that seems to be linked to alchemy. This sets Ryza off on a sprawling adventure that has her recruiting allies new and old to help determine what’s going on and how to stop it.
The early game here is quite telling, and what it told me was that the primary audience for this game is series veterans. You are immediately thrown into combat as soon as you take control, and there’s not much in the way of character introductions other than what you can determine via context. I found this to be a refreshing change of pace, as I was expecting to have to wade through hours of basic tutorial info that I learned two games ago. Yet, my thoughts quickly turned to just how poor this would be if you’re starting your Atelier journey here. The game does feature an in-game glossary which contains information on everything from raw ingredients, character info, locations and boss monsters, and you’re likely going to need to read these descriptions to understand who everyone is and why they matter. Striking the balance between catering to your returning fans and new ones is never easy and it’s clear what camp Gust settled in – for what it’s worth, I think they made the right call for this one.
This story calls back to a lot of interactions and relationships from the previous Ryza games and uses these as the driving force of the narrative. In many respects, you are walking this path for the nostalgia, as much as you are the materials. It’s not too far into the game before you are presented with overarching goal – to figure out why an island has magically appeared – and this does eventually lead Ryza back to the Underworld. What she learns about it this time, is much more tangible and provides a good focal point for tying up this arc’s loose ends.
One of this series’ strengths is that it sets the tone well with each character. These are designed to be interesting, but that often comes alongside a heavy dose of cliché and anime. The new additions here, like Frederica, are more developed for good reason – but the real highlights are in seeing just how far the original cast have come. In 2019, when Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout launched, we were introduced to Ryza’s gang – Klaudia, Lent and Tao. These figures have all grown and developed across the series and are much closer to complete articles as people than they were then. Even Empel, Lila and Bos get endings worthy of their roles.
For better or worse, you need this same prior context to truly appreciate their growth, rather than just skip past two games of character development. This is a self-contained adventure, and could be played without this knowledge, but the weight of each action will not be felt to the same degree.
One great positive though, is that it’s easy to like these characters, whether you’ve known them for three games, or just since the opening animation. Atelier titles make use of their characters very well, and I like playing them as wholesome escapism. This isn’t free of threat, but there’s a relentless outpouring of optimism in every aspect, and when you know these characters, it’s believable optimism too.
As for gameplay, this is split up into roughly three parts.
The first is exploration and gathering. You take control of Ryza from a third-person vantage point and control her as she walks around towns and field locations. In these areas you’re exploring, battling and gathering, with the gathering portion a key part of your alchemical loop. Each procured ingredient has a rarity, and on occasion some effects and traits which come into play with your synthesis.
This is the primary activity of the Atelier games, which sees the protagonist magically create items to use as plot devices, consumables or equipment to use in combat. You’ll likely spend a lot of time at your cauldron as you grasp these mechanics and learn to bend them to your will.
The final part of the game is combat, which is a sort of on-rails auto-battle mixed with some turn-based features.
I am unapologetically a fan of progression in the Atelier games, and Ryza 3 is no different, as it’s everything we had before with more added to the point where this almost has too much. This did feel like a lot of layers upon layers. Characters have levels and stats, and can equip purchased gear and weapons along with accessories. New here, they can also equip keys with different effects. Some provide static character boosts, like an additional piece of equipment, others are temporary buffs to gathering, while others still are used in combat and synthesis. In her Atelier, Ryza can synthesise powerful items, and the best measure of your progression is what recipes you have unlocked and how powerful your crafted items are, rather than your character level.
Some of these recipes are gated for story purposes, but most are learned by completing other recipes or spending SP, which is earned through quests and synthesis. It’s all quite intuitive, really. There’s also a level of granular progression for each item you can craft, as you add effects and traits to each one. Items can have up to four of the former and three of the latter, with a new Super Traits slot for this game. Effects are restricted to the item, while traits can be pulled from all the ingredients used in the recipe. This does lead to some powerful combinations and means that you can make the same item multiple times and increase its effectiveness as you unlock better materials.
In order to actually synthesise items, you need to meet certain colour-coded criteria and then follow nodes along a branching path. This system is more beginner friendly than the one in the Mysterious Arc games, which require you to be quite familiar with the basic principles of Tetris. Ryza’s system is about adding enough of a specific colour to a ring, to unlock the next.
This has seen significant improvement since the original Ryza game, with the additions from Ryza 2 joined by Keys and Morph recipes to give this its own nuances. I don’t prefer one of these systems over the other, as they all work fine, and if you’re just here to enjoy the story there is a “do it for me” button, which makes an adequate version of the item. What I don’t like too much is how the skill tree is gated for recipe unlocks. For a game clearly aiming at veterans, it would have been nice to see the full, or a “spoiler redacted” version of certain paths on the tree before you spend points in them. Had I known a specific metal ingot was locked away near the top of this tree, I’d have diverted points to it earlier on than I did. Instead, I was already past needing that ingredient when I did unlock it.
While I’ll speak about the story and characters in a glowingly positive manner, I have always had a love-hate-relationship with the combat that is in the Ryza games. I described this earlier as “on-rails auto-battling” and it does in part feel like an idle mobile game where you are a passenger not a participant. You have three characters on the field, and the two you aren’t controlling, auto-attack when their action bar fills up. You can switch them to “Aggressive” which sees them use skills and items, or “Support” where they don’t drain the shared AP gauge and leave it all for you. Either way, you perform skills that deal either magical or physical damage, and trigger your allies to perform additional attacks, which do more damage and build more gauges. This system really likes its gauges and once you’ve unlocked all the different facets, it has a lot for you to pay attention to. There’s still an idle feel to this if you give your allies powerful weapons, accessories and items – which is huge part of the game’s progression. It’s completely possible to start combat, switch your allies to aggressive and then AFK for a few seconds while they kill enemies without your input. I’ve had three games to learn this system and while it shows design flexibility and innovation – I just prefer the system in Atelier Sophie.
This is a mostly open world, and in many ways, Atelier Ryza 3 is all about areas ripe for exploration, with instancing between buildings and larger zones. The game even expands on your traversal options from Ryza 2 by giving you two additional mounts and adds some verticality to the play area with swimming and diving. Graphically this is fine, and looks like an Xbox One or PS4 era title. Some of the character animations have been improved here, but general walking and running feels very stiff and rigid. This dated feeling is further enforced by lifeless NPCs. This game does do a much better job of letting you move around, but there are still lots of areas where you’ll come across an invisible wall where you should by all rights be able to pass through. This adventure also comes with some jittery camera angles and a bright flash during “Key Extraction” that might just need toning down a touch. I found myself looking away from my screen when I needed to do this and, I’m not particularly photosensitive.
Enemy design has had a touch of change too, with some new monsters appearing here. A lot of the mini bosses you fight are still larger or colour-swapped models from the generic overworld enemies, but there’s at least some new races of monster and that’s more than I was expecting.
Environmental variety is up and down, with this adventure taking Ryza to different towns and locales from sandy beaches and under-the-sea, to rural villages, mines and ruins. These are an okay mix of environments, but nothing really stood out. I can’t point to a single location where I felt impressed or like I was exploring because the environment was interesting. I was only exploring because there might be new ingredients lying around. I felt the same with the music and sound design too. It all fits and feels appropriate, but for both better and worse there’s not one piece of background music that sticks in your head.
I also want to make a quick note on an issue at launch, as there was a clear problem with depth of field in the game. This was set to be incredibly aggressive and made the majority of the game area that wasn’t within an arm’s length from Ryza a blurry mess. This was truly awful, and you just had to turn this off completely. I also noticed some localisation issues, which will inevitably crop up when there’s this much written text, and it was perhaps more noticeable because there’s no English audio, and I’m just churning through written text. As an interesting additional note, this is a game that didn’t launch on Xbox consoles, but there was no option to change away from using their button layout for the PC version, even with a PS4 controller connected. In years to come, I’d like to see the Atelier games on PC get a small change – a search bar. The filtering menu at the moment is fine for consoles, but it would be useful to have the ability to just type part of the name for an item, like “Lantern” and get results for “Lantern Bug.”
Finally, some of the female characters are designed to check a fan service box, and it’s a sign of improvement that I said “some” not all. Ryza and Lila fall into this category with the latter evidenced by her spine-shatteringly large breasts… and there’s an unfortunate fixed camera angle that you can’t navigate away from as our protagonist squeezes through tunnels that leave you in no doubt about why the community dub her ‘Atelier Thighza.’ This is by no means the worst “fan service” in games, and as it’s not what I play these games for,I considered it a mild annoyance you can just look past it and focus on the gameplay loop and mechanics. I think my biggest issue with this type of fan service is that the game throws up a veneer of wholesome respectability, with it’s plucky characters and honest approach. On the surface this is the kind of game I would feel comfortable giving someone in their early teens without having to vet it myself first. When that on-the-surface tone and setting is interupted with these moments that brush up against perversion, it’s a jarring tone change that feels wholy unnessary to me. I’m not some prude, and if you want that type of content there are plenty of websites or even games themselves that address that need. There really is no gain from trying to hide a watered down versions of this into what is otherwise a very PG experience.
Atelier Ryza 3: Alchemist of the End & the Secret Key is undoubtedly the deepest and most developed of the Atelier games to date and shows significant improvements in both mechanical variety and world construction. However, this is far from the best choice as an entry point for this series. It’s also priced in a way that makes it unappealing as a litmus test in this regard, with copies at £50 or €60 on day one – that’s good value by modern standards for a 60+ hour adventure, but one I understand new fans will not want to pay until they know this is “their” thing. There’s also the usual inappropriate DLC costumes, and a season pass that comes with it’s own hefty price tag. This is fairly standard for this series, but this DLC costs more than some full Atelier games are on Steam.
Ryza 3 has nice new features, but lacks a simplicity and clarity that the original Ryza game had, and that is a game I would recommend to any new player without any hesitation. Gust caught lightning in a bottle with the first Ryza game, and haven’t quite replicated that raw appeal here, but this is a more complete product, and is a great addition to the series for veterans of the Secret arc, that arrives in the year the Atelier franchise celebrates its 25th anniversary.
Fatelighter 