Atelier was about crafting before crafting in video games was cool. Arguably one of the founding series in what we call “cozy” games today, Atelier started as a mixture of time management, traditional RPG combat, and cramming items together until you had the ultimate healing potions and cartoon bombs that could level cities. Over the years, things evolved, and friction-oriented mechanics like time limits faded away in favor of more exciting battles and streamlining crafting to maximize appeal. Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land is another step forward into new territory, one that’s so interested in being an Everything Game that it struggles to focus on anything but the vibes. The vibes are nice, though.
Things really accelerated for Atelier when the Ryza trilogy dropped and sold out several times on the Nintendo Switch. Something about that series really resonated with people despite its old school tendencies and niche, systems-heavy gameplay. Developer Gust used its success to experiment more, to try and grow the audience with a shift to real time (ish) combat mechanics and intensified efforts to make crafting accessible. Making a Monster Hunter-like shift from zoned environments to open world-style exploration was the third major move, and Atelier Yumia is a full-force commitment to all those things.
We don't take too kindly to alchemy 'round these parts
Each Atelier series has a new world, and in this one, Alchemy is bad news. It was a relatively normal practice until disaster struck, with an incident that all but wiped a powerful empire from the map. Years later, Yumia has joined a sort of government research group, tasked with exploring the ruins left behind by the incident to learn more about what happened. She has a secondary motive, as it turns out she’s a practicing alchemist after inheriting tools and knowledge from her mother. The goal is not only to uncover the mysteries of the past, but also rehabilitate alchemy as something that can be used to help people. Unfortunately, to her peers, that’s kind of like waltzing into Chornobyl 20 years after the disaster and telling everyone there they should give nuclear power another chance. Not easy, to say the least.
As Yumia’s Scooby Gang grows and she eases alchemy into the picture, she shows everyone how great alchemy is by way of contemporary video game magic. That means exploring an open world, beating the stuffing out of monsters, purifying dangerous landmarks to make the map even more explorable, building a ton of stuff, and helping everyone who has problems. This game is a hearty helping of video game soup, with a little something for everyone. There’s a way to kickstart your dopamine receptors around every corner, whether it’s filling out an exploration checklist, finding ingredients to craft new equipment, filling out multiple skill trees, solving puzzles to access treasure chests, demolishing the local wildlife, or designing a new base.
Everything, everywhere, not always all at once
The loop is wonderful. The nice thing about a lot of these systems is you can choose your level of engagement, and get through the game no problem. Don’t care about building? Drop the bare minimum of effort in, press the “do it for me” button, and move on. Crafting makes your head hurt? Drop the bare minimum of effort in, press the “do it for me” button, and move on. Don’t wanna master combat, think about the skill tree, or bother with random side quests? Crank it down to easy and cruise through the story. Nothing is stopping you from engaging with Yumia how you want. And if you do want to engage, you can lose hours just running around, filling in the map, making sick bases full of neat decorations, and pumping up your crafting skills until you’re cooking WMDs out of monster guts, plants, and shiny rocks through the power of interpretive dance. That’s how alchemy works in this one.
The problem is how messy everything feels. Despite all the efforts to streamline, the UI is all over the place, tutorials are kind of overwhelming and frequent, building exists across multiple menus and aspects of it make no practical sense, and combat is so frantic I sometimes found myself relying on sound cues to make sure I understood what was happening in front of me. In the effort to cram so much stuff into one game, there’s a significant loss of clarity, a stark difference from the evolving elegance we were seeing across the Ryza series. I found myself messaging colleagues in the media several times as we exchanged notes on how to do things like set up a camp, which would be one of the simplest things to do in other RPGs. It’s rough in that department, and an observable consequence of so aggressively chasing a wider audience.
Sure, put a magic motorcycle in there too, why not?
All that said, there’s something for everyone, and for me it was movement. It feels so damn good to move around in Atelier Yumia, and part of what makes the loop so wonderful. Running around, kick-flipping up walls, riding ziplines, grabbing random ingredients as I run by, aiming my magical staff at a distant object like a musket and… shooting it to collect it somehow, all of it feels great and looks cool in motion. When you get a motorcycle later on, a motorcycle that can also wall jump like the dopest Super Mario 64 hack of all time? Forget about it.
Even combat, often incomprehensible, is fun despite itself. Watching Yumia leap and flip around with her magical jet fuel-powered high heels, spinning her staff/gun gimmick around and spraying the field with bright, red bullets, stunning an enemy then calling in another party member to wreck it with a pair of giant ice hammers, and so much more is some of the coolest stuff I’ve seen in a video game so far this year.
Unfortunately Yumia’s lack of focus claims another victim, and that’s storytelling. Atelier as a series has had its ups and downs over the years, but once again, Ryza was a high point in this category. Focusing on a growing group of friends who face and overcome problems over time is a great use for a trilogy, but even the first game’s character-driven mystery solving was fun, easy to follow, and complemented the alchemy-driven loop well. Here, the storytelling is all over the place. The game does a poor job of onboarding, starting with a fun, action-packed hint of things to come then barely establishing who anyone is or why I should care before shooing me off into the video game soup. The internal and external conflicts continue to develop in awkward and vague ways and by the time a villain shows up or some character’s tragic backstory starts to unfurl, I couldn’t help but feel like I was just being asked to just smile and nod along.
Just like its impressively long and unwieldy title, Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land is a messy game. But it’s a messy game with lofty ambitions and a lot to like, even if which pieces you end up liking are not the pieces you expected or wanted to like, especially if you’re a returning Atelier fan. It’s also hard to recommend Yumia as a starting point despite its apparent interest in being one, when I can point to Ryza as a strong foundation that manages to justify itself as a three-part arc that never overstays its welcome. What we have here is an RPG that casts too wide a net for its own good, but has a lot of cool ideas and hits enough different notes in different ways that still make it worth playing. For folks willing to engage with a flawed experience in good faith and put up with some janky bloat, Atelier Yumia has a lot going for it. But those looking for a more realized vision that cleanly hits its targets will likely lose patience.
Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land is available on March 21, 2025 for the PC, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch. A PC code was provided by the publisher for this review.
- So much video game packed into this bad boy
- Movement looks and feels exciting, from open-world exploring to combat
- Wall-jumping motorcycle
- Perhaps too much video game; lack of focus and polish
- Vague, unsatisfying storytelling
- Messy UI makes onboarding and keeping track of systems annoying
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replyLucas White posted a new article, Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land review: Video game soup
