Recent reviews by Poshy

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It's the year 2025, and Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land (PC) gives Zelda: Breath of the Wild tough competition for best looking Switch game of 2017.

Update: Yes, the graphics are really bad, even a good way into the game.

After having played through maybe 30% of the game, this game feels uncannily like the earliest batch of well known open world games, ie Skyrim/Far Cry. The gameplay loop quickly devolves into visiting random random POIs across the map, but every type of POI becomes samey the 2nd time you do one, from the ruins to the shrines to the random skill point caches in a tree that somehow quality as a POI. Given that traits are no longer tied to items, literally the ONLY discerning difference between items is the "quality raiting." The "puzzles" that you find around the world are quite literally IQ puzzles you might use for 9 year olds, and they never got that much more difficult the further in I got. Maybe the optimal way to play is to not go out of your way to explore all the POIs on the map, as it'll leave you extremely burnt out.

Treasure chests have the issue of being extremely unrewarding, as they give 4 types of items, each with their own problem.
1. ) They give strong crafted items, which defeats the entire purpose of engaging with item synthesis mechanic for the ordinary player, or, if you engage heavily in synthesis and have your own stronger version of the same item, the reward is literally useless.
2. ) Gives you blueprints for building. To some people that focus on building, this can be a cool reward, but for others that don't really care about building, this reward is pretty meaningless.
3. ) Gives you some very slightly "maybe higher quality than gathered" materials. However, as I will discuss in the crafting section, because virtually any material can be used in any item slot, individual materials have lost most of their identity, you just look at "does this item have good quality and a good trait".
4. ) Slottable gems. These are the best reward, but none of them are unique as far as I found, and the gem blending furniture allows you to craft whatever trait gem you need.

Hilariously enough, the reward for getting 100% exploration in the first zone is a special bullet that allows you to access the HIDDEN CAVES behind the SPARKLY CRYSTAL WALLS you'll find while exploring in a metroidvania-esque way, but in the end, the rewards are just another chest with meaningless rewards....

The skill tree is pretty uninspired by modern day standards, it's mostly a "get more of this item when crafting," or "increase quality cap." Nothing will change how you actually play, it just rewards you with more of what you're already getting. Honestly somewhat expected from jrpg skill trees.

The combat is very weak, as every single monster attack, regardless of whether it's a targeted attack or AOE, has a loud "DING" noise right before the attack would damage you, and if you dodge within ~0.5s of the DING, you will always be able to perfect dodge the attack. I was playing on very hard and the only difficulty in fighting, including boss fights, was staying interested enough to engage in the mindless button jamming that passes as a rotation. To prove this point, I fought a treasure chest guardian "boss" monster with my eyes closed, relying on only the audio cue to dodge. It may have took 7 minutes, but I managed to effectively solo the boss (since the rest of my team died like 30 seconds in) while only getting hit once, likely a mistime on my part.

Crafting has been further simplified from the Ryza series, which was already been greatly simplified from the Mysterious trilogy when I started playing. The crafting is less of a puzzle, but more of jamming the highest quality items you have available to you into whatever slot. Separating trait, quality, and the functional item level into separate "cores" further simplifies crafting, as there is no opportunity cost of pursuing one facet of the craft to others, so if you have good enough items, you can make a perfect item without thinking. On the flip side, if you have subpar items, even with a lot of thought, you can't really make amazing items. Additionally, 99% of item slots have no prerequisite category, so you can quite literally use any item in any slot, which dilutes the flavor of synthesis and makes the complicated prerequisite chaining in previous games a thing of the past. This may be a welcome change for newcomers of the series who are looking for more of a cutesy open world game and don't want to be forced to think, but the synthesis has been dumbed down so much at this point that the word "Atlier" in the title starts to feel like misdirection.

The introduction to the story is a fairly poorly executed "glimpse into the future" that quite frankly left me less wanting to play game. Unlike every Atelier game that I've played, you are quite literally just plonked down into the world with 2 random companions that you don't really know anything about, nor attempt to make a meaningful connection with for the first few hours.

After having played for a good number of hours (probably 20?) neither the combat, the exploration, the synthesis, the characters, nor the story have left me wanting for more. To be honest, I likely would have dropped this game hours before if it weren't for my dedication to the Atlier series.

Very good core gameplay, incredibly deep gameplay system for a keyboard-only operated text based game. However, has some nasty bugs with multiplayer games, from the score/wpm screen always being blank tocertain progression flags being set for everybody but one character at certain junctions. Also, higher difficulties feel like it requires kiting due to the sheer number of enemies, but the game does not handing that kind of movement particularly well.

It's 2024 and there's no option to turn off the ridiculously strong head bob. Ffs the accessibility tab has literally one option.

I wish someone would throw me out of a window

I have joined the pm brainrot

Overall a very good game with solid foundations. However, as a player that likes the thrill of novel experiences and discovery, after 50 hours, having memorized the recipes, finished the first 5 seals, and played on some of the albeit lower prestige difficulties, it feels as though I've played through all the unique experiences the game has to offer. While definitely containing roguelike elements, this game is 100% more of a factory optimization/micromanaging sim than a "every run is a memorable experience" game. Great game, especially if that scratches your itch, but if you're looking for a more roguelike centric game like I was, perhaps do some more research first.

Silly plot devices that conveniently move the plot whenever the devs are out for lunch, and plot points so questionable that they might as well be plot holes abound. Yakuza plots have never been possible without asking you to seriously suspend your disbelief but this game takes it to a whole new level.

We need more games like this

Good game