Atelier Ryza 2: Lost Legends & the Secret Fairy DX

tl;dr score: 9/10 for the most part, 7/10 for some parts, but overall an 8.5/10. Very highly recommend. Ryza 2 was such a massive improvement over the first game, and this carries over into the DX version. The combat, in particular, is so much smoother with the way that you can chain your abilities, and chain those to meter dump. Making your skills build up your Tactics Lvl instead of sharing a resource with it (and thus feeling like you "can't") along with consistent pacing on when allies call out for orders means that you can toggle between aggressive and passive styles on your allies when you either want to build T-Lvl or let the meter build up a bit in anticipation of an order or skill usage burst. Additionally, and a HUGE thing I liked about this game more than the first, is that you can set a 4th party member as a support, and swap them in/out of a character slot ... and do it mid-combo. So if an enemy is about to be stunned, and you built (let's just say Tao) to do bonus damage to stunned enemies, you can bank up a bit of AP, start a combo with Ryza and then at the end of the combo swap her out for Tao and he'll continue the combo. Or in the early game you can just ... dump all 4 of Ryza's items on the enemy, and instead of having her sit there with all that WT, swap her out for Tao for a couple rounds while she recovers. Game does suffer a bit from a similar problem as Ryza 1 where materials are gated by story progression, which locks you out of advanced recipes, but I honestly it's not that big of a deal. The skill points system for crafting is a bit abusable, though, with the ability to make rank-100 neutralizers and such at almost the very start of the game, and then rank-300, 600, and 999 when those unlock (gated by story progression). That said, the better skills (which are the more important thing) come from raw materials, and those are also somewhat gated by story progression unless you find a convenient loop (*cough cough* neutralizers *cough*). Regarding the DX content: - Empel and Lila being able to join in the story is just ... not really true. They don't join you until quite literally the final dungeon. In Ryza 1 DX, you got Agatha and Romy almost immediately on game start, and I spent so much of my playthrough wondering when I'd get access to them only to have long lost interest by the time they actually did unlock. - The side story with Empel and Lila is pretty cool, though, and any time with Lila's ridiculous figure is always funny. - The custom combat thing is just ... meh. A big "who cares?" from me. - Fi providing support was pretty cool. Especially the tiny post-battle heal perk I felt was really nice because I didn't feel as railroaded to make sure everyone was equipped with something that had regen on it. - One thing they only very briefly mention in the store page is "Improved Spirit Beast functions". It has a pretty small-sounding change with a pretty important benefit to me: you can use your gathering tools (including hitting enemies to start fights) while on the Spirit Beast, and I don't remember if it was like this in the original, but enemies will ALWAYS (except for big guys) run away from you as if you're high level. This is huge because it lets you run through newer areas collecting things without having to do a battle every 10 seconds.