Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land

Finally to finished the backlog title, bought at full price back in March 2025. There were too many distractions last year that kept me from playing this series. Regarding the Atelier franchise, I had previously only played the Ryza trilogy on Nintendo Switch and became interested in Yumia after seeing its trailer, and with Atelier Karia set two years after Atelier Yumia releasing soon, I’m certainly looking forward to it. While the Ryza series only dabbled in semi-open-world elements, Atelier Yumia takes a massive leap forward by offering a truly open, interconnected world map with minimal loading screens. Moving slightly away from the series' classic turn-based roots, combat in Atelier Yumia shifts toward responsive, full real-time action. Yumia fights using a "gun-staff" that doubles as a rifle, allowing for incredible flexibility when instantly switching between melee and ranged attacks. The synthesis system the heart of the Atelier series has been overhauled to be more accessible while still leaving plenty of room for experiment. Atelier Yumia seems like a great fit for me personally, like the exploration style found in Xenoblade (a Nintendo Switch exclusive games), and Yumia offers a massive open world, far more expressive character visuals, and highly active combat 💯

Do not recommend purely for the fact that the game is STILL marred by technical issues. If I can run games like crimson desert on max settings, then this game should not be having issues.

I Acknowledge some people love this game and I'm not going to use the usual old time atelier fan argument of bad alchemy and combat to explain why I dislike this game. The main glaring issue that made me drop this game after 4 and a half hours is the lack of soul. Soul in games is extremely subjective it's a compilation of different mechanics and decisions that give you the feeling love and care was put into the product you're playing. When you play Yumia the UI is gray squares with a colored shadow when you select a button, if you go into different menus they're extremely clean so clean in fact that they look like UI in a modern website, far too corporate. The skill tree menu is a black screen with some particles and a line of gylphs in the back, it looks eerily similar to a lot of gacha game screens to show the upgrades you get when you roll the duplicate of a character. speaking of characters other than yumia the character designs are too safe, let me explain what i mean by that. Simple character designs aren't a bad thing but your design needs to showcase, at least a little bit, the personality of the character in question for example a blacksmith having a hammer at their hip or wearing an apron. a knight having combat gear on or protective armor. Music, why on earth is this game so lacking in proper music? One of my favorite things I love doing in JRPG games is taking in the soundtrack and seeing the music blend in with the world of the game. This might be a consequence of the swap to open world but other than battle themes the music seems to just be not there at all or solo piano that gets old fast. try to make me interested in talking to some random npc with no music in the background. the game has battle themes and they're not bad nothing particularly special but not bad at least Open world, It doesn't feel like this world was crafted it feels like the developers were following a checklist for making sure the player had enough padding to slog through in between main story cutscenes. puzzles in games are fine as long as there's variety and you feel like there's a proper reason to be solving them. In the little time i played this game i did the same puzzle like 6 separate times not to mention having to find shrines and run around to unlock them just to get new recipes. Overall it feels like Atelier Yumia is kinda just corporate slop meant to appeal to as many people as possible as opposed to a new game in a long running series of games KNOWN for having love and soul put into them. it's unfortunate cause i'm still coping that Atelier Karia will be good so I wanted to play yumia first to get the story but I just can't bring myself to play this game any longer or recommend it to anyone else feels like a waste of time.

I just... can't. I tried coming back to it, but the game runs awful, alchemy is not fun, combat is not fun, exploration is pretty much a boring open world one. Characters seem nice, but it just isn't worth it when there is nothing else fun going on in this game. I might have gone through it if it wasn't open world and if the game actually ran well. I am not forcing myself to go through it any longer, I might come back to this game but I doubt it.

It's my first game from the Atelier franchise. At the time of this review, I'm at the beginning of the game, but I already have a blast playing it. Is it the prettiest and most beautiful game out there? No. Is it well optimized on the PC version? Not really, but nonetheless it's playable. That said, I obviously can't say if it's a "good" Atelier game or not, but like I said before, I have fun playing it and love the characters so far, and that's the only thing that matters to me right now.

Atelier Yumia is a disappointment of a game. While it does not feel like a traditional Atelier game, it still had potential on its own but still failed. The combat is way too easy with how you can endlessly spam evade to dodge any attack which gave no incentive to using guard and there was no more depth than just mashing buttons until you win a fight. I found that the story had potential to be good but didn't feel fleshed out. I would've loved to see more about[spoiler]Yumia's past and her mother but it felt rushed towards the end. I also would've liked to see more build-up to make the final boss seem more like a big deal in the story but it feels like you just forget about him until you reach the end.[/spoiler]How empty Atelier Yumia felt empty in terms of writing, makes it feel like there will be a sequel to the game that will flesh out the story of the first game which is not a good impression. The open-world exploration felt more tedious than enjoyable with how ugly the environments looked depending on the climate. Some scenes and areas look completely ruined if the weather happened to be too bright or foggy. It also didn't seem like changing anything in the settings could fix that either. The graphics of the characters and battle effects were nice. Combat looks aesthetically pleasing at first but gets stale very fast. Some character designs are cool but are mostly forgettable. Atelier Yumia absolutely does not feel like a $70 game. Even Atelier Resleriana: Forgotten Alchemy and the Polar Night Liberator had a better story while being a free-to-play gacha game. Only buy this during a sale if you're interested. As for performance, game runs perfectly fine for me on the highest settings and I had no issues. After review: Just saw the announcement of Atelier Karia. Hope that improves on the flaws of Yumia and results in a better game.

First of all, Atelier Yumia is not a bad game, on the contrary, it's a very enjoyable one. If you have money to spare, and like the genre, go for it. Now, why the bad review ? Because it's called ATELIER Yumia. On this side the game is pretty weak. Gust really made it with the idea to "please the western audience". Alchemy, the core of the series, is dumbed down really bad to the point there's no mandatory crafting in the game that requiert anything. No goal at all. You can juste make the bare minimum and pass the quest. The team is not that Atelier-like too. While character, independently, are quite decent JRPG archetypes, it lack the chemistry you can found the in other titles. The open-world is Ubisoft-like/lite. While not the the cluter-monster that modern Ubisoft open world are, Atelier Yumia quite copied the formulae. Be preppared to look for the same puzzle, landmarks and towers across all the different regions. The puzzle aren't engaging at all; beside them being repetitives, they are really, like REALLY, too easy. About the core theme of the Atelier brand, there's a lot missing. Alchemy feel strange, too "magical". You don't have the emblematic cauldron. Opening is still 3D game-engine cinematic and the OST, letting aside some rare key moment in the game, is weak and not memorable. On this subject, Gust made this game forgetting it's part of the Atelier brand. That's the worst part to me since every other Atelier game are niche, near-slice-of-life, crafting oriented game that are made more as a piece of art than as a product. The feeling is not here for this one. Now, I don't want to say it's a bad game. That's not true, it's a quite decent, sometime a little bit generic, JRPG with Gacha game element in it. It's not possible not to think about Mihoyo/Hoyoverse game while playing it. Some heavy moments are still there to make you remember it's still a mainline Atelier from time to time. Just take in account, price-wise, that the game was too ambitious for the studio and still feel unfinished.

If you gave a Chimp a typewriter he'd write a better story in a single day

I'm not good at these, but for whatever it's worth, of the dozens of JRPGs I've started, this is one of the few to get me invested enough and interested enough to finish it all the way to the credits. I think they did a great job with the alchemy system in this game, I appreciated the relative straightforward nature of the synthesis. Is it perfect? No, of course not, it's a video game not the second coming of Christ or something. If you are a curious first timer or you're a long time Atelier fan, I think this game is worth picking up.

Yumia so literally me frfr literally my first Atelier game and I love it, still at the beginning but already looking forward to Karia wandering around for like ten hours now with so little progress on the main quest lol Just wandering around gathering stuff, enjoying the scenery and aesthetic, reliving a familiar moment in my past, my memories, something like this is more than enough to make me love this game This is truly my Reminiscing in Solitude moment, my nostalgic journey, a longing for the past.