Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land

比起炼金工房，本作更像带炼金元素的JRPG，不建议作为炼金工房系列的入坑作，但当成JRPG玩还不错

Despite liking the demo when it dropped on steam and having done two playthroughs of the game once I made the purchase, out of all the recent releases of this franchise I cannot recommend Yumia if you like the more open world aspects of this side of the franchise (Mysterious, Secret and their new Memories series) Even though I played mostly from the Mysterious and Secret series, this has been the first game where I encounter bugs regularly (icons disappearing in the encyclopedia, merchants occasionally disappearing regardless if they were unlockable or not, mana invested zones that I've already purified reset as if i didn't unless i reset the game) are not game breaking, but are an issue for something that should be ironed out. Although traversal has been improved with verticality and giving the game a more diverse experience for exploration, the new vehicle feels clunky to use and found myself not having the need to use it for the lack of speed and how it feels cumbersome to drive in most of the open areas. Any other "issues" I would have are personal nitpicks at this point and are more geared to personal taste, and even though there are some design choices that are interesting to keep the game fresh (less of a slice of life story and more of a pioneering adventure as its focus) the lack of other design choices do bring the game down in terms of story and character (even in the first Ryza game, the theme of discrimination against alchemy felt that it was handled better as there was more conflict with the villagers growing more suspicious of Ryza's alchemy that it escalated unlike in Yumia we only see one one or two instances in the beginning where Yumia is meeting resistance with her co-workers but for the rest of the game there isn't any more conflict between the characters, especially with the Welleks I expected that the team was going to be found out and have some kind of conflict but no-one figures out anything Yumia made was with alchemy despite the taboo they had) Additionally, in previous games for example did have more distinct npcs where they had their own cutscenes to interact with, making you better remember them more easily with their own quests, but because of the lack of that, the quest givers outside the main questlines (not the repeatable quests) are so unmemorable and everyone nearly looks the same that I skipped through their dialogue because it was so bland and impersonal. One thing I did not like at all was the combat (despite the free movement positioning which made the combat fresh) they really don't tell you half of the mechanics engrained into it and during my first playthrough I forgot about the special attacks and did not realize that I could block and use recovery items despite it being on the screen as I only paid attention to the cooldowns on my attack buttons (my eyes glazed over those areas everytime, its dumb, I know) and everyone attacks with the same animations when doing friend actions (was disappointed that friend actions were only applied to attacks depending on items, not anything like special attacks or combos which could add another flare to combat) and button mashing was not fun, yes you can do elemental damage with items once an enemy is stunned, but you still button mash until you do your ultimate finisher) Another issue I had was with Synthesis, as it appears to hold more importance on how showy it is rather than the consideration of managing ingrediants, as you can just use anything other than the base material when starting to synthesis an item, taking away any need to gather any type of material past the first time just to unlock the recipe. But my biggest pet peeve is that you don't have achievements for filling out your material, item/equipment and monster encyclopedia, it's literally a pioneering story game where you are documenting a fallen nation and the territories within it, how do you not have achievements that goes parallel with the story other than unlocking all the icons on the map? I can only recommend this game if you already played through other Atelier games in the francize and you're looking for another Atelier fix, just know that you will be bored of some story and character content outside of the main storylines and combat is very repetative.