A fine send-off for a girl who loves adventure and is obsessed with alchemy.
With recent exceptions, the Atelier series is usually a trilogy. A notable thing about the “Secret” subseries is that the protagonist is the same character in every entry. Glad to be back in her final action with her one of my favorite alchemy systems and probably my favorite Atelier Alchemist.
Reisalin “Ryza” Stout has returned to her home island for a while to help the local community as an alchemist. Suddenly, a mysterious island infested with monsters appears nearby. At the same time, Ryza is summoned by a mysterious voice to create a key and try to find the “universe code”. Personally, I think the second installment of the Ryza series can be played relatively independently of the first, but the final installment of this summer’s adventure will require some knowledge of the previous titles to fully enjoy the story. is required. There’s a prologue movie that summarizes the first two games, but it just covers the basic gist of the plot and doesn’t get into the important personal relationships.
The aforementioned “keys” are both important story elements and new gameplay elements, allowing Ryza to craft keys for a variety of uses. Keys can be powered up at landmarks or by absorbing enemy power, used as equipment, gain bonuses in both combat and synthesis, or open special walls and caches. I’ve found that using the keys I collect works best for equipment. Ryza 3 retains the game’s active combat system, using Core Crystals to keep items you craft and use in battle from disappearing. Turns out I unlocked the special Fatal Drive attack much earlier, but I start the game at level 20.
When I started the game, I was itching to unravel, but it actually happened much sooner than I expected, allowing me to move freely and synthesize recipes I already knew. Of the End and The Secret Key were pretty fuss-free, letting us recreate all the travel tools like airdrops and spirit whistles pretty early on, and brought back mounts and underwater exploration. The map size is significantly larger than previous Atelier games, with the entire map from the first Ryza being one fully open location, with no loads (aside from the travel required for boats to travel between islands). . There are also several other areas of comparable size that are quite winding and a bit difficult to navigate at first.
Atelier games have subseries, and detailed mechanics such as synthesis mechanics tend to stay in subseries. But Sophie 2, released between his second and third games of Ryza, has quite a few things that I wish were implemented in Ryza 3. join. This system was not retained in her Ryza 3. That is, you step into a single enemy that may spawn additional allies, and when that fight is over, you run into another enemy that was right there and start an entirely different fight. Many times I got stuck, such as finding that the ingot types unlocked by his recipe morphs in previous games were instead hidden in his skill tree. We knew the dungeon system from the last Ryza game was unlikely to return, but we lament the lack of a replacement for it. I feel like Ryza 2 has multiple Ateliers and different developments and inventories of the merchant Romy, even though it all depends on you. Personally, I enjoyed Ryza 2 a bit more than this game, but for those who made it that far in their Ryza 2 adventure, the third game is still worth playing.
One of the other changes is replacing quest boards with random quests. In some respects, I enjoyed it. For example, when you’re out and certain enemies spawn quests to fight them, you can deal with them on the spot. Fortunately, there are some basic quality of life additions, such as story quests that give you new recipes. Required materials are also provided in the quest description and markers.
As the final chapter of Ryza’s adventure, there are more cutscenes than usual.It’s important to see character growth, but especially for newcomers, there are a lot of these scenes scattered around the world that add even more to the story. It felt like a drag to include .
I’ve played previous Ryza games on my PlayStation system, so the Switch version is a bit visually downgraded in comparison and made me a little sad to see some of the beautifully designed areas. Switch games with such large areas had very short load times, so this relative loss in visual quality seemed worth it. Most loads take about 5 seconds, and can take longer if cutscenes are loading. I was. This didn’t seem to be any more busy, but at least resulted in severe stuttering that got stuck in place for a few seconds while mounting. did not.
An update has been made in response to some graphical complaints and the removal of some motion blur, but so far nothing has been said about fixing the text. There is also no opaque background behind this white text outside of small, normal style cutscenes. The minimal text is in the explore dialog. This may seem unimportant, but you’ll see your own story-related comments there too. and switching to handheld mode makes no difference. There’s also no English voice acting to alleviate the problem, as in recent games in the series. Unfortunately, the little text had a big impact on the enjoyment of the game.
Atelier Ryza 3: Alchemist of the End and The Secret Key has plenty of min/max systems to their heart’s content, allowing fans to hang out with the cast one last time. I think most people will enjoy the vast world and rich experience, even if the text is a little hard to read.
