Atelier Yumia Review - Open World Woes

The Atelier franchise has changed quite a bit over the last few decades. Starting as short, slice-of-life stories, modern entries now feature lengthier adventures and more open worlds. Atelier Yumia brings these changes to their natural conclusion, featuring the largest areas seen in the series so far while also simplifying many of the mechanics to make them more appealing to a new audience.

Unfortunately, while not being particularly terrible, this leads to a final product that fails to excel in any area. Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land loses the little depth that was left in the Atelier Ryza trilogy, all for a stale open world and underbaked narrative.

A World Where Alchemy is Taboo

Atelier Yumia sees the titular alchemist traveling across various regions of Aladiss, a place once home to a great empire before it fell to ruin. Joining the Aladiss Research Team, she makes use of alchemy — something considered taboo due to its perceived dangers — to pioneer this long-unexplored continent.

Alchemy’s role in the Atelier series is one that’s always changed, so having it be something that’s considered “evil” in Atelier Yumia doesn’t feel too out of place. There was definitely some potential for conflict with the main cast and the people that Yumia encounters during her journey across Aladiss.

In practice, this doesn’t actually lead to much. A few party members are slightly wary early on, with the negative history of alchemy having its moments during the story. And yet, there’s not really any depth to the conversation around alchemy at any point. Yumia ruminates over it multiple times, but it all boils to down to “what if alchemy is good… AND bad.”

Yumia herself is fine as a character. Even if the general discussion around whether alchemy is really evil isn’t handled in an interesting way, Yumia’s journey to find her place in the research team is often endearing. Other characters aren’t quite as lucky.

For the most part, Atelier Yumia fails to give characters interesting moments outside of the main narrative. There are only a small handful of events per party member, with most offering very little in the way of characterization or just rehashing what we already know about them thanks to the story.

Things are worse when you look outside of the main party. Other than the 6 core party members, there are surprisingly few characters that actually have any importance. This is especially true of the villains, who barely make an appearance for most of the game and have the depth of a puddle.

The Open World Still Lacks Purpose

In many ways, the Aladiss continent itself is intended to be the main star of the show. For the first time in the series, Atelier Yumia contains a fully connected map with no loading screens — well, it’s more like 4 distinct regions connected by short corridors, but the point still stands.

You’re free to explore each region as you reach them, roaming around for materials, chests, and collectibles. Outside of some areas requiring specific items and later regions being locked behind story, you have a lot of freedom in where to go.

After being left to my own devices, it was initially exciting having a less linear experience to look forward too. The Atelier franchise has attempted open worlds in their own ways a few times, but even Atelier Ryza 3 didn’t make use of areas this large.

However, it didn’t take long for me to realise that there just isn’t that much to actually discover in each area. Sure, opening the map shows lots of “?” markers, but the world itself is devoid of actual unique landmarks or secrets.

Across a region, you’ll find the same sets of materials, the same enemies (or slightly resized/recolored ones), and chests with mostly useless items. You’re never rewarded for going off the beaten path, as all you’ll find are materials you have an abundance of already.

Adding to this repetition are the Prayer Shrines scattered across each region. Every single one works the same way: interact with them, go to the points marked on the map, and complete basic tile puzzles. I was already bored of doing these after the first few times, and there are over 50 in total.

In the end, the world just feels like a checklist, something to fill in and move on rather than properly engage with. Some decent sidequests could have given purpose to more of the map, but most just require you to hand over materials or create a specific item.

Moving to a proper open world also comes with the question of how you’ll balance combat, since players could potentially encounter tough enemies early on if they’re not careful. Atelier Yumia tackles this by removing the challenge from battles entirely.

Atelier Yumia’s Combat is a Bland Mess

The Atelier Ryza trilogy started to shift battles to a more actiony style, with Atelier Yumia switching things over to full real-time combat. You can actively dodge attacks, or move out of the way of AOE markers. You don’t have complete control however, with movement constrained to inner and outer rings you can switch between freely.

Each character has access to 4 skills while standing in each ring, which charge up over time. Some skills can be used repeatedly as a combo, while others require recharging after a single use. Items also function this way, though finite consumables have not been a thing in Atelier combat for a while now anyway.

Skill can have certain effects (Yumia can buff her attack or debuff the enemy), but in practice, all you really do is mash your basic combo and then use one of the other skills while it recharges. There’s no depth, no thought you have to put in. What you see in the first few hours is essentially what you’ll be doing during the endgame.

A few systems have been implemented in a vain attempt to give combat some sort of interesting hook. Using physical or magic attacks on an enemy enough times will stun them, letting you follow up with stronger item attacks. But this is never actually needed since your regular attacks are always more than enough to take on every enemy.

It’s annoying that, despite the switch to action combat, everything is more restrictive. You can’t switch targets — a lot of enemies are even grouped together with a single health bar — and you rarely have a reason to switch between characters.

Alchemy Lost Its Depth

Another part of why combat is so easy comes down to alchemy. Alchemy has always allowed players to become super powerful if they made use of its systems, synthesizing broken gear or items as soon as possible.

Atelier Yumia’s issue is that alchemy has been simplified to a level where making overpowered gear requires very little effort. In the past, you’d have to think more about the types of materials used, taking traits from them and transferring them over to the finished product.

Now, most bonuses are determined by skills you select before synthesis, or via Trait Crystals you can equip after. Alchemy just boils down to throwing in your highest-quality items and making use of the building system to duplicate them for free (more on this in a minute).

By the second region, I was already making gear that easily destroyed anything I encountered — even the few bosses Atelier Yumia has went down in a minute. Again, this is not something completely new to Atelier. But the process of making gear has just been dumbed down completely, meaning that even tackling harder difficulties takes much less preparation.

Building Had Potential But is Underutilized

One bizarre aspect of Atelier Yumia is building. Some areas of the map are designated as areas where you can build structures. This system is surprisingly robust, letting you create multistory houses to fill with decorations and crafting stations. There are presets if you want to quickly create a base, and even the option to make random ones.

I call this bizarre because there’s essentially no reason to actually make a proper base. You get the same benefit from building a fully furnished base as you would from making a shack with 50 chairs stacked into each other. A strange choice, when a good chunk of chest rewards in the open world are more building items you’ll now likely never use.

It has so much potential — imagine if you could build rooms for party members to unlock new events or create new towns for NPCs. Instead, you’re restricted to small squares of land that are spread far apart.

Most of the time, you’re better off using land for greenhouses or manufacturing plants. These let you duplicate raw materials and crafted items respectively, only taking time to do so. Greenhouses unlock incredibly early, reducing the need for gathering materials. It’s convenient, but it also doesn’t mesh with an open world that mostly just exists for gathering materials in the first place.

I can only hope that this is expanded upon in Atelier Yumia 2 (or a potential spin-off), as freeform building really feels like it could be an interesting direction for the series to take.

Some Visual Improvements, Though PC Port Might Have Issues

Modern Atelier has never been at the forefront of graphic fidelity, though Atelier Yumia does try to improve in some aspects. For one, characters are far more expressive. Early 3D Atelier titles often had character models that could look lifeless, relying on great 2D character portraits to carry things instead.

For Atelier Yumia, it seems like a lot of work has been done to fix this. From subtle eye movements to cocky grins, the main cast are far more lively now. Granted, the actual models still have a few issues (namely, low-resolution textures at times), though it's a welcome improvement.

Environments, on the other hand, aren't a huge improvement, though some of this can likely be chalked up to the focus on bigger areas compared to previous games. Some areas suffer from poor draw distances and pop-in, too, though this isn't overly common.

One area that I'm not 100% sold on is performance. While I have confirmation that a day 1 patch is intended to fix this, I ran into a number of issues with performance. This was almost exclusively tied to travelling between regions or making use of fast travel, causing my framerate to drop significantly until reloading my save.

Outside of this, everything generally ran at a solid 120fps on an RTX 3060 TI, barring a couple of areas with heavier visual effects. Again, this is something that shouldn't be present at launch, though it's worth keeping in mind when looking back at other Atelier ports on PC pre-Ryza 3.

Atelier Yumia Review | Final Thoughts

Atelier Yumia has no elements that are inherently awful, but the changes it makes to the series don’t work overall. Future games need to rethink some of the simplifications to synthesis while also figuring out a way to make open worlds that are actually worth exploring.

Atelier Yumia was reviewed on PC using a copy provided by Koei Tecmo over the course of 45 hours of gameplay.