Atelier Yumia Is An RPG For Crafting Fanatics And No One Else
Atelier Yumia makes RPG busywork a bigger draw than combat.
Crafting is one of those things in games that you either love or hate. That’s understandable: A lot of the hate comes from having years of RPGs with a half-baked crafting system shoved in whether they fit or not. But for the sort of player whose complaint is that there’s not enough crafting in games, the Atelier series provides a welcome change of pace, where cobbling items together in your workshop is actually the main draw. Ahead of its March 20 release, Inverse went hands-on with Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories and the Envisioned Land to check out the latest entry in the nearly 30-year-old series.
I’ve been interested in the Atelier series for years and dipped my toe in once or twice, but like many people, one question has kept me from really diving in: Where do I start? The broader series is divided into multiple sub-series, each with their own ardent defenders, and it’s hard to know where to begin. Atelier Yumia is an attempt to answer that question.
“By listening to fan feedback of previous titles, we improved various aspects of every part of the game, from battle to synthesis, so this is a great game to get started with and experience Atelier for the first time,” producer Junzo Hosoi tells Inverse. “But if you are still waiting for Yumia to come out and really want to play one of our games, I recommend starting with the Atelier Ryza series.”
For those who haven’t found their starting point yet, the Atelier series revolves around a handful of plucky alchemists, people with the power to create new items by manipulating the magic in everyday objects. Each blends a lighthearted RPG story and simple turn-based battles with a more robust crafting system, making them the games of choice for plenty of RPG fans who want a less combat-focused experience that’s altogether more relaxing than your typical quest to save the world.
Atelier Yumia’s story isn’t breaking any new ground.
This time around, you follow Yumia, an alchemist in a world that once saw an entire kingdom leveled by alchemy, leaving most people understandably spooked by her ilk. Yumia’s quest to uncover the secrets of the fallen kingdom starts the game off with a bit more drama than the typical Atelier title, but there’s precious little plot to hold onto in the portion I played. If the few hours I spent with the preview build are anything to go by, Atelier Yumia’s story seems to run more on comfortable tropes than exciting twists.
One big change for Atelier Yumia is its switch to a real-time combat system.
“I was mostly inspired by ‘Tales’ and other action-RPG games,” Hosoi says. “We want you to feel like this is a mix of a traditional turn-based RPG and an action game, as Atelier Yumia plays in the middle of those two styles.”
Combat is full of flashy effects but not much strategy.
Despite the change in direction, combat still isn’t the focus in Atelier Yumia and it shows. Encountering an enemy in the game’s open world cuts to a battle screen like it would in a turn-based game, only here you’re allowed to run in a tight orbit around your foe. Each of the face buttons is a different attack, which often apply a buff or debuff as they do damage and can be strung together into combos. Enemies telegraph their attacks with markers on the ground, giving you time to dodge out of the way, or jump backwards into a second, more distant circle around your opponent, which also lets you use a set of ranged attacks.
While I can see some strategic possibilities the system offers, in practice, it’s nothing to get too excited about. It’s a mostly button mashing affair, and the speed of battles leaves little time for thinking things through. Fights usually last just a few seconds, with victory animations that take almost as long, and working through a field full of enemies one-by-one feels more tiring than exciting.
The real purpose of combat in Atelier Yumia is to gather monster parts to combine with the other materials you gather in the open world for alchemy. Synthesizing, as it’s called here, is a minigame unto its own, one that takes some time to understand but is up there with the best crafting systems in games.
This all makes sense in practice. Eventually.
Synthesizing requires you to first unlock a recipe, either through story progress, finding spots in the world where you’ll spontaneously learn one via plot magic, or completing certain quests. Each recipe requires a specific item to begin the crafting process, opening a series of “cores,” all of which have some number of slots to shove more resources into. Every material you insert produces “resonance,” seen as a ring around them in the crafting interface, and overlapping them with other resources you’re using or specks of floating mana displayed as you craft improves the final product. Some recipes have additional challenges, like asking for materials with specific elemental properties to enhance the resulting item, and some resources offer bonuses of their own.
A helpful tutorial explains all this, but only through practice does it really click. While Atelier Yumia’s combat feels like the gameplay equivalent of a fidget spinner, its crafting is satisfying and strategic, rewarding experimentation and always offering the chance to outdo your last creation. It also provides ample motivation to explore the game’s open world in search of rare ingredients and drops from high-level monsters.
Crafting is the star of the show in Atelier Yumia.
Along with synthesizing combat items, Yumia can use alchemy to build entire bases in which to work her craft. Base building is much simpler than item synthesis, with structures and furniture just selected from a menu, but the chance to customize a series of homes in the wilderness scratches some of the same itch that Atelier Yumia’s deeper crafting system does.
So far, Atelier Yumia is shaping up to be a mixed bag. Its move to real-time combat feels less significant than it might sound, since all the game’s focus is still on its engaging crafting system. For all its faults, I found the need to diversify my pool of items was plenty of reason to keep me exploring for rare monsters and rarer drops, either to craft my next synthesis recipe or just decorate another outpost. I’m not convinced that Atelier Yumia will be the game to finally make me an Atelier sicko, but I’m nonetheless eager to get back to the workshop for more of its magical crafting.
