Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land Review
Parkour Potion Princess
After only lightly touching the Atelier series before, 2024 saw me binge hundreds of hours of the series, falling deeply in love with the more modern games. Luckily for me, Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land has emerged early this year and stands as a delightful and comforting addition to the series, a franchise renowned for its charming characters, intricate alchemy systems, and immersive gameplay. This latest installment gracefully balances familiar elements with subtle innovations, offering a satisfying experience for both seasoned alchemists and newcomers alike. However, while it excels in delivering a cozy and engaging adventure, it has a few minor foibles, potentially leaving players yearning for a little more in some areas.
The narrative of Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land unfolds as a gentle and heartwarming tale centered around the themes of confronting the past, and the bonds between individuals. Trained in the art of alchemy by her deceased mother, young Yumia navigates a land where her craft is unwelcome due to its repeated history of causing destructive events. Fortunately for Yumia, alchemy is still needed to help the Exploration Team tasked with exploring the remains of the Aladissian Empire, a relatively small country that excelled at the alchemic arts before being wiped off the face of the planet by a mysterious cataclysm.
Finding things to shoot while out exploring was a blast!
Flanked from the start by noble sibling party members Isla and Viktor von Duerer, Yumia’s primary goal is to simply explore. This is wonderfully matched by an excellent open-world experience, a rarity in the Atelier series. Players can swim, jump, climb, zipline, and perform Quick Alchemy on the fly in the field to explore every corner of the game world. There are literally hundreds of marked places to explore, targets to shoot with various ammunitions, engaging puzzles to solve, and items to collect. While this open-world change likely led to the Switch struggling to maintain a constant framerate when too many things were taking place in the nearby environment, it rarely took away from the sense of wonder and excitement every new discovery brought.
For those looking to maximize their experience, the game nicely tracks exploration percentage in each game region and provides a checklist of challenges called Pioneering Effort that unlocks new items and abilities based on completion. Rather than being something solely for completionists, rewards for fully completing each Effort are crucial to being able to continue exploring some previously inaccessible areas. As exploration progresses through four large interconnected zones, the Exploration Team grows with some excellently written new party members. Special events with these new team members, as well as the von Duerers, help to explore their connections to mana and the remains of The Aladissian Empire.
Puzzles to unlock doors and treasure chests were engaging without being frustratingly difficult.
If the title of the game doesn’t give it away, relatively soon into the narrative of Atelier Yumia, it’s obvious that there’s a single key concept to the game, and it’s something the game pulls off very well. The practice of alchemy in this game world is focused on mana, which is explained as the leftover memory of everything that ever existed in the world. From the way new alchemy items are learned, to events both past and present, to party member characterizations, the theme of memory is always at the forefront. It’s actually quite fascinating to see how the game is fully developed around this one key theme, right down to villains that pop up along the way and their motivations. The villains in the game are all quite memorable, and have excellent, dramatic story beats, something that the Atelier series isn’t exactly known for. After hundreds of hours of dealing with other-worldly mostly-mindless foes in the Ryza trilogy, it was exciting to be able to point to a single big bad villain and their gang of mutants and be thoroughly entertained.
At the heart of every Atelier title lies the alchemy system, and with Yumia, Gust has meticulously created yet another crafting mechanic that invites players to delve into the art of synthesis… or just lightly engage with it. The game encourages experimentation, rewarding those who gather a massive pile of materials and toy with ever more complex alchemy recipes as the game progresses. The joy of discovering new recipes and concocting potent items remains a cornerstone of the Atelier experience, and Yumia delivers this with its usual level of depth, while also giving players an opt-out. For those not willing to delve into the nitty-gritty placement of dozens of items, an almost equally granular automated alchemy option is available. Players can choose to automatically concoct the best quality item, one with higher bonuses, or even select from a half-dozen custom options such as limiting the quality of items to use in synthesis or using only gatherable (not synthesizable) items. The auto options saved multiple hours of mid-level alchemy while also making amazing late-game gear. Taking full control and adding everything in was as fun as it ever was in other Atelier games, but the increased amount of granular details in setting up automated alchemy was quite a bit more fun and rewarding this go-round.
As if it wasn’t bad enough for Yumia to be stuck out in the rain, being literally stuck in the hillside was worse.
Whereas the new alchemy system is definitely a hit no matter which approach players take towards it, the same cannot be said for the battle system. To put it bluntly, it’s far too simple. After encountering monsters on the world map, players are whisked into battle with three party members. They can change between which party member is actively being controlled at any time. The party members dodge monster moves and attack in either a close-up ring around an enemy with melee skills or in a larger outer ring with ranged attacks. Up to four of each skills can be equipped at any time and have a set number of uses that replenish based on a cool-down timer. Similarly, up to four items created by alchemy can be equipped and used at any time.
While this all sounds very complex, at standard difficulty, most enemy encounters can be won by random button mashing. It’s difficult to discern differences in skill uses as the combat takes place so quickly, and there wasn’t a single moment in the entire game in which all four skills were out of charges due to how fast the cool-down timer recharges. Excellent alchemy attack items can be crafted very early in the game and immediately used in combat to effortlessly defeat almost any random encounter. For this review playthrough, maximum levels were reached with all characters no more than 70% of the way through the game without grinding or engaging with roughly half the available sidequests, making even an increase to the next-harder difficulty not much of a challenge. This combined with such excellent options for alchemy that are able to make powerful equipment, combat in the game is trivial.
As stated earlier, the Switch version of Atelier Yumia has some graphical struggles, especially when a lot is happening on the world map. In addition to frequently reduced framerates, there were a few times when missing graphics led to either a game crash or characters falling through the world map. Aside from those issues though, the game looks absolutely stunning. The world map is bright and vibrant and full of things to see and do; nowhere ever felt empty or devoid of details. The character designs are all quite distinct and well put together, conveying their wide range of personalities well. All the cutscenes look amazing, with characters’ expressive faces conveying the emotions that a lack of English dub could’ve also helped with. There is Japanese audio that can be mostly turned off if players wish, but still plays at a few key moments. The soundtrack masterfully blends the series’ signature bright and upbeat themes with distinct regional melodies, resulting in a relaxing and immersive audio landscape perfectly suited to the varying moods and settings. Furthermore, the battle music injects a welcome dose of excitement into combat encounters, and much like Yumia’s alchemically created items, the musical composition is remarkably well-crafted.
Even being chased by a flying fish couldn’t stop the sunset from being a breathtaking event.
With memories being a key theme to the narrative of Atelier Yumia, this review would not be complete without mentioning that many memories of playing the game center around the concept of excellent player choice. Right from the start, there are options for various color-blindness considerations in the graphics, and options for larger font sizes. Alchemy is treated as something players can choose to interact with as much or as little as they like yet still reap the benefits of, which is also a choice available for one final new system in the game. Base-building in large building zones or smaller campsites is a prominent reoccurring event while out exploring. While there are multiple hundreds of different walls, floors, roof tiles, etc., to help players build their perfect custom atelier, there are also dozens of pre-designed models ready as well. It can be something players spend hours perfecting, or it can be completed with a few simple clicks. Much like the alchemy system, the choices provided to players are quite welcome.
Atelier heroines have come in many varieties over the years. Students, heroes, shopkeepers, adventurers, and civil servants have all appeared in the series so far. As a parkour potion princess leaping through her open world, Yumia fills the alchemist role while stretching the mold, offering something new, much like many other aspects of her game. As the Alchemist of Memories, she offers an excellent start to what I hope will continue to be a fun new trilogy, or longer, for Atelier fans to enjoy.
Disclosure: This review is based on a free copy of the game provided by the publisher.
Charming characters and a heartwarming story centered on memories
Engaging open-world exploration with diverse activities and rewards
Deep and customizable alchemy system with a satisfying automated options
Visually impressive world and character designs
Combat is far too simple
Switch version suffers from graphical struggles and occasional crashes
Recent Comments