If you’ve been paying attention to titles released this year, you’ve seen titles that range from a strategy game in which your characters might permanently die, to a survival game that puts you and a NPC in a forest full of weird creatures and cannibals. If all this tension and stress is not for you, don’t fret! Atelier Ryza 3: Alchemist of the End & the Secret Key is the game for you.
The basic premise of most Atelier games is to focus on the crafting mechanic in a fantasy world. In Atelier Ryza, games that have the energetic and curious Ryza as the protagonist, players have everything the fantasy genre can offer: dragons, fairies, old civilizations destroyed by their own greed, and hordes of evil beings from different dimensions ready to kill every human they find. And in Atelier Ryza 3, we can keep following the girl’s adventure together with her faithful friends, now looking for answers about an island that appeared out of nowhere and some mysterious keys.
Although this might sound like the backdrop for an epic adventure, Atelier Ryza 3 was still capable of conducting me through this experience without causing me any stress. For example, I knew how important figuring out the mysterious island is because it is affecting the whole region where Ryza lives. The game, however, has the remarkable capacity to lay down such information and yet put me in a position that I feel comfortable in. Instead of rushing my way through the mysterious land, I was spending hours gathering every type of wood, fruit, and flower I could find. In contrast to other games of the same genre, Atelier Ryza 3 is not constantly putting me in long chains of quests where I might die and lose hours of gameplay because I hadn’t the chance to save between cutscenes, or having huge spikes of difficulties to make me feel impotent and justify more hours of grinding as well. In Atelier Ryza 3, I was allowed to keep up with the adventure at my own pace.
The whole game has elements to make your time in Ryza’s world calm and relaxing. There aren’t dark corridors full of places from where enemies can jump and scare you or super difficult bosses that give you the creeps. What you’re going to find are colorful forests and beaches and villages where the children are laughing out loud. As in previous Atelier games, Atelier Ryza 3 is great to look at and comes with pretty good art pieces representing specific moments of the adventure. On the other hand, there is too much blur applied to the background of this game, making it weird for the eyes during the first hours.
The design of some characters may look a little bit over the top to new players, but it’s clear that the team behind them wanted to give each character a very distinctive identity. Enemies were also designed following the same philosophy, since many of them are far from looking like vicious creatures that will rip you apart. They’re actually quite cute! Added to all of this, the background songs – some already known by those who played the first two games – that play during the game are gentle. Even during the boss fights, when the tune changes, it changes in such a subtle way that only instigates the smallest level of tension in the player.
Let’s not forget about one of the Atelier series traits: the crafting system. Sure, crafting sounds quite complicated when you begin Atelier Ryza 3, and there aren’t as many hints nor moments where everything about it is carefully explained, such as what some types of upgrades you find in the items’ recipes mean. But, once you get used to the crafting system, creating a better version of a piece of equipment or a healing item becomes a puzzle you will want to solve. The fact you can’t lose materials when only trying to craft something new already takes off part of the pressure behind the process of experimentation. At the same time, gathering materials is almost therapeutic. With simplified animations to smash rocks or chop trees, Atelier Ryza 3 makes the task of farming thirty logs an easy and fast one.
Now, in terms of Atelier Ryza 3’s narrative, you should know that it is as calm and slow-paced as other aspects of the game. The story is structured as a big adventure split into smaller arcs and in each of them Ryza is not only going to get a little bit closer to solving the main mystery, but she and her companions will meet new people and learn about different places. While some occasions are used for character development, others are barely adding anything substantial to the main plot. On the good side, even though some events from the previous games are mentioned, Atelier Ryza 3’s story won’t require you to know everything about the first two games. You will be ready to play the game by only watching the short retrospective in the main menu.
In Atelier Ryza 3, the combat system is maybe one of the few moments in the game you may feel overwhelmed. This can happen because of the number of systems the game has operating when you’re fighting a cute giant blue blob. Besides attacking with normal attacks as skills, you can also use offensive and defensive items or call one of Ryza’s teammates that are outside of the battle to change places with the character you’re controlling. Added to all of that, there are super attacks triggered after you use specific skills based on the companions’ orders as well as the creation and usage of magical keys that can buff. Because of all of that, your screen might eventually look like the cockpit of a mech with many alerts, glowing buttons, and exaggerated animations.
All of these aspects make Atelier Ryza 3: Alchemist of the End & the Secret Key a great game if you’re too afraid to play the newest entry in the famous franchise of zombie games, or if you just want a relaxing me-time. So…
Go for Atelier Ryza 3 if:
- You’re looking for a stress-free experience in gaming
- Love colorful scenarios
- Enjoy the fun behind picking digital representations of real (or almost real) materials and using them to create new and more powerful items
Avoid Atelier Ryza 3 if:
- You want a dramatic narrative
- You can’t stand slow-paced plots
- You hate battles in games with so many systems happening that it seems as if you’re actually piloting a giant robot. [lasso ref=”atelier-ryza-3-alchemist-of-the-end-the-secret-key-nintendo-switch” id=”23209″ link_id=”3947″]
