This game is really nice. It's pretty clear that Gust have got the formula for this sort of thing down to a science - cute character designs, a fairly low-stakes story, a neat, intricate alchemy system and good JRPG combat with relateable and fun personalities. It's got problems, but after putting 25 hours into this, I can see why Atelier would be someone's favourite series.

Ryza feels like one of those PS2 games youd see in the mid-2000s when any mid-tier Japanese game with the remotest hope of marketabilty would get it's way to the west - stuff like Fatal Frame, Earth Defense Force, Gradius V - games that were often low in scope and/or budget, but were clearly made with strong direction and often excelled in a few aspects - much like Atelier.

This game was clearly made on a shoestring. The absurd amount of enemy texture swapping, voice acting, and often limited animation (take a drink for every cutscene where the characters do nothing but stand around talking and not doing anything). There's also a surprisingly small amount of levels and things to do in general. The whole game ends up about half the length of your typical JRPG - which is for the best, in all honesty.

Whilst some of these things are detrimental, the limitations of Ryza also feed into it's greatest strength somewhat. It's a game with a huge amount of heart that feels like it was made with love. The music is excellent, the atmosphere the game sets out of youthful adventure with cute characters is done really well - never feeling too tense even at it's worst moments, and the gameplay elements the game focuses on are surprisingly good. The combat in particular really surprised me by being way more engaging than most of it's JRPG contempories (this combat beats basically every Final Fantasy combat system), the alchemy system is really nice and gives the game a very rewarding sense of progression, and adds enough little extras throughout to keep it fresh.

It's a blatantly flawed game - the story is nothing to write home about outside of the character stuff, it's pretty repetitive and I know there are many people that just "wouldn't get" what this game is going for - and that's fine - but Atelier Ryza is really one of the most pleasant games I've played in a long while, and I'm really happy I gave it a go.

A mostly blind playthrough of the main story and most of the side content - all but one side quest that didn't unlock til I beat the final boss and didn't seem to want to spawn the next trigger to advance it until after I wrapped the rest of the main story, and one party member quest that I can't complete without finishing the aforementioned side quest.

A review in bullet points:

• The soundtrack is just banger after banger after banger. I was constantly stopping what I was doing just to vibe out to the music for a while. 10/10
• The story veered between kitschy and corny, but always sweet. Some details of the plot occasionally managed to surprise me despite the broad strokes being predictable, and a few of the jokes made me laugh out loud. 7.5/10
• World-building was minimal and the world was pretty static/flat, but the game felt like it was designed to not really need that stuff, so it didn't cause any problems (e.g. no dissonance between NPC dialogue/world state/game progress breaking my immersion). Landscapes were beautifully imagined and illustrated. 8/10
• Even playing on Hard, most of the combat was far too easy, and the "Very Hard" and higher difficulties are locked behind a clear save. However, in the rare chances you get to fully engage with the combat system, it's wonderfully fast-paced and chaotic, which made the very challenging DLC area and at least 1 or 2 of the boss fights pretty thrilling. At its worst, the combat is a 5/10 or 6/10 experience purely because battles always end before you have a chance to do anything interesting, but at its best, when you can actually spend some time in a fight, it's easily an 8/10 system. Given the lack of higher difficulty options on a first playthrough, I would probably recommend an experienced gamer intentionally handicap themselves with lower quality weapons and delay synthesizing upgraded weapons until 1-2 areas after the mats become available, to compensate for the enemies that fold like a wet paper bag against good quality weapons made from mats found in their same area. Overall: 6.5/10
• I liked the synthesis system overall, but it could badly use some QOL improvements. The deeper into the game I got, the more weary I grew of starting a synthesis and needing to undo/redo the steps multiple times because I kept having to back up and synthesize or dupe precursor materials I didn't have enough of. Making it easier to see not just what materials, but how many of each you're going to need, and better integrating the duping UI with the synthesizing/rebuilding/liquidation UI would have really reduced the tediousness that synthesizing sometimes had. 6.5/10
• I loved that I always had a variety of main story quests, NPC requests, treasure hunts, and party member growth challenges to work on. It did a great job getting me to try out and engage with all the game's systems and mechanics. 9/10
• I loved finding all the landmarks in each area and getting to pick different NPCs to author the guide blurbs for that area. Each author had a really distinct voice and perspective. My only criticism is I wish they were all a bit longer! 9/10
• The Encyclopedia was good at what it did, but felt a bit half-baked and incomplete. For instance, entries for monsters tell you where they spawn and what they drop, and entries for harvestable materials tell you what areas they can be found, but entries for monster drops don't tell you what monsters they drop from or even what area the monsters it drops from spawn in. All materials can have various type attributes like "Food" or "Medicine" or "Poison," but you can't easily browse all entries with a given specific attribute. It was too often easier to look up information about materials or monsters online than to reference their entries my Encyclopedia. 7/10
• A fair amount of questionably accurate English translations for UI elements made the initial learning curve steeper than it needed to be. Along with some clunky UIs, inconsistent availability of sorting/filtering options across different inventories, and inconsistent item information displayed depending on the UI, the overall UX would really benefit from an overhaul with QOL in mind. 6/10
• Gestalt score: 7.5/10 (which I've generously rounded to a 4/5 here on Grouvee)