For years now, I have seen the Atelier series and though, I need to give that a go. Its not the characters, the alchemy or anything specific that makes me want to play it, but rather the entire series just seems delightful and in an age where most RPGs are bleak, this seems to break the trend. Koei Tecmo invited me to put sometime into the upcoming 3rd entry in the Atelier Ryza game and I came away with mixed feelings.

The game started with a nice opening movie and then put me into combat against, for both myself and the characters, unknown enemies. With the combat tutorial being important I paid attention and learnt how things would work for later on and once it was done, Ryza started to have voices appear in her head. The story jumped back in a timeline sense for a bit, before coming back to the modern day and I was so lost on everything, as there was nothing to indicate who the characters were in the grand scheme of things. With the story complete for now, it was time to start exploring and more importantly creating things.

The preview window I had access to was around 1 hour in length, which usually for any RPG means not a lot of time to get into the mechanics of the game, here that was not the case. Now it could be due to the game being the third in the sub-series and the 24th mainline game, but they threw a lot at me without a by your leave. The games main hook is collecting ingredients and then combining them with alchemy to create things, be it medicine or farming equipment and likely much more. The way that the game has you create items is by selecting the recipe and then adding the main ingredients and while you could call it a day, you can also tweak the items by adding boosts. Sometimes these are just extra materials, other times they are materials with fire, ice or other elemental effects. The game clearly knows that some players will be overwhelmed by the system, as pressing and holding a key down, lets you automatically apply ingredients.

When you are not doing the creation, you need to do the exploration and for that, you get to explore the world, well in my time with the game it was a limited part of it. Exploration is pretty decent, but I did discover early on that the game has the traditional Japanese issue of not letting you jump down ledges and such. In random woods it makes sense, but not being able to clear a short hedge and then having to walk all the way around it, is just infuriating. This is not an issue exclusive to the game, but rather one across most RPG games developed in Japan, so I kind of expected it to happen, just was let down when it did. Outside of that, most of the exploration can be done by following the on screen compass, which will indicate known locations or show a questions mark icon for those yet to be discovered. You can also fast travel to select locations, once you have found them, which will cut down on the travel time quite a bit.

As I was more into the exploring and alchemy of the game, the combat was something I didn’t actively seek out, except when someone asked me to help take down monsters. The combat is pretty interesting, its all real-time, but I couldn’t move around and enemies still wait to attack. Most of my attacks could be done by hitting the attack button, but the special attacks required some AP to build up. The games instructions on how to execute those attacks was confusing, indicating multiple buttons were required, but once I sorted that out, it was actually simple. The members within the party can be taken control of and if you want, set them to be more aggressive or less, should you want to leave them to their own devices. I am sure as more and more folks join the group, those decisions will become harder to make on the fly, but in the small area I could experience, it was easy.

As a first experience with the series, I came away with concerns and much of them could be connected with the games many existing characters and systems that were new to me. The depth to the synthesis mechanic is far deeper than I thought it might be, so the inclusion of an auto mode is very welcome. Combat is simple enough that most people should get by without too much hassle, though later fights may challenge that notion. The world is vibrant and the characters fun and I do want to see more of them in action, it just now comes down to how the full game shakes out. This small taste does make me want to play the others in this series, but hopefully the game does something to welcome those who haven’t, when the full game does release.

The game is set to release on March 24th for PC, PlayStation 5, Switch and PlayStation 4