Let me preface this by saying that Atelier has been one of my favourite JRPG franchises for a very long time, basically since Iris on PS2 -- that's A6, this is A17. It was also a primary reason for me to keep consoles around.

For those unfamiliar with the franchise, a succinct way to describe it would be as non-linear, character-driven slice-of-life JRPGs, with a significant focus on alchemy as a gameplay mechanic. Alchemy is basically crafting, but unlike the crafting implementations in most RPGs doesn't suck -- it offers significant player agency, lots of choice and optimization potential, and has a huge impact on everything else you do in the game.

The series is very long-running (as the incredibly terse Steam description indicates), and it has lately been grouped into mostly independent trilogies. As luck would have it, Sophie is the first in a new such trilogy, and as such it is a great point of entry for anyone new to the series!

Other than the gameplay, a main charm of the game (and franchise) are its fantastic character models, that offer an amazingly direct translation from anime-style concept art to in-game 3D representation. Beyond that, as with all games developed by Gust, the soundtrack is fantastic and varied.

When the game was announced for the PC, I was very concerned about its port quality, given some of the previous efforts by Tecmo-Koei. Luckily, while not perfect, this port offers everything I personally really wanted on PC: 4k resolution support, MSAA (which is easily upgraded to SGSSAA with the Nvidia driver), and 60 FPS [Edit: actually, it seems to happily support arbitrary FPS -- good news for owners of high-refresh-rate monitors!]. The biggest issue is probably its lack of mouse support, which makes a controller much preferable for playing the game.

If the idea of a non-linear JRPG with a large focus on (great!) crafting and lack of the usual driven "save-the-world" narrative sounds enticing to you, do give Atelier Sophie a try! You might be surprised at how addictive it turns out to be.