The Atelier franchise now spans over 27 games with 10 sub-series of interconnected games. Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land is the most recent and most ambitious addition to the series from GUST. Boasting vast open landscapes, a new alchemy system and a brand new universe to explore.
The Atelier games have seen a massive transformation over the years. From the original Atelier Marie in 1997 with turn-based mechanics and visual novel cutscenes all the way to modern-day consoles with Sophie and Ryza receiving expansive maps and full 3D animations, each game has worked to add and improve upon the previous entry. But how much more can they do after 27 games?
The answer is… A LOT.
Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land is the first entry to the Envisioned sub-series. It features the titular Yumia as she joins a Research Team to help them uncover the mysteries of the manabound lands and make them liveable again. What starts as a simple task soon takes a turn as fearsome creatures who can use alchemy appear. It is then up to Yumia and her new friends to uncover their schemes, but nothing can prepare them for what they will find.
Travelling in these manabound lands is dangerous and walking around them will deplete your manacore over time, adding a sense of urgency to your exploration. In the heart of these lands are ancient ruins for you to uncover, puzzles to solve and treasures to find, with each area revealing more and more with each area you clear.
In this world, alchemy is a forbidden art and a taboo Yumia discovered a latent ability for after the passing of her mother. Despite people’s instant mistrust of her, Yumia agrees to support the Research Team in their efforts and hopes to earn their respect with her actions. This felt like such a contrast compared to many Atelier protagonists as Yumia is essentially an outcast and downtrodden, her nature hidden behind a wall that takes much of the story to fully break through. When it finally did though…
Equally, Yumia’s team are also cautious of alchemy and by extension her. Through various character events, you start to see the bonds of their friendships forming and the slow build has some incredible pay-offs. These events are acted out in 3D with full Japanese voice-overs and marked on your map like quests too, so it’s not possible to miss most of them by sleeping or synthesising as has happened previously.
For me, the characters are the heart and soul of the Atelier games. I love the tropes and the side stories about random meals and the occasional teasing of potential romantic relationships. It’s something the franchise does well and it makes the stories more personable, which ultimately raises the stakes as we come to face the big bad.
Their growth as Yumia opens up to her new friends and them to her is endearing and each moment builds into the greater story in some way or another. Throwaway comments about their past became plot points that soon came into play and were resolved quickly because there was always something more on the horizon. This made the story feel fast-paced despite having an estimated run time of 30-50 hours if you ignore side quests and exploration. I wouldn’t recommend doing this though as you will likely hit roadblocks and become under-levelled.
The plot itself delves into the power of memories and the taboos surrounding the darker sides of alchemy. It has a few twists, some heartbreaking and others rather sweet, ultimately ending in an epic battle for the fate of the lands.
In this world, items called memory vials contain slivers of information about the past and much of the heavier world-building and additional plot is in these vial data entries. Your alchemy companion Flammie will give you a brief overview of them as they are collected and a prompt to open them further, but you are free to do this on your own time. I felt like this kept the main quest lines from feeling bogged down by extended dialogue scenes while leaving lots of content for the side-quests to pull from.
There are four main areas with “Pioneering Efforts” which require you to complete a bunch of goals to improve the Research Team’s efficiency and comfort in the region. Although optional, some of them do build into the story and work to remind you of different tools and attacks, and I enjoyed the addition. I sunk about 20 hours into the first area to unlock the “burst bullets” from the Pioneering Efforts before moving on to the next area, and honestly, I still had things to do.
As you progress, you find new locations to set up your base of operations. These “building areas” come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, and you can decorate and build on them to make new camps for the Research Teams to work from. Here you can place workbenches and other tools required for synthesis, including the synthesising alter.
The building area mechanics is something I have not seen in previous Atelier games and offers a wide array of building materials for you to construct all kinds of designs. There’s a limit on how much you can build in each location but it wasn’t ever an issue as there were so many large plots for me to place the buildings I required.
The required buildings also have blueprints which pop up structures automatically and there are some handy tools hidden among the building resources to unlock. It wasn’t the most intuitive system to navigate, and I regularly backed out of the menu by accident, but I could usually make what I wanted with a few tries. I also liked that you collected two types of materials in the field at the same time, so you don’t have to manage synthesising and building from the same pot.
The synthesising alter is a new feature to the game mechanics, replacing the cauldrons often associated with alchemy games. Instead, Yumia dances, using her motions to draw the properties from materials and combine them into something new. It’s a nice feature and has some beautiful animations, but it’s largely added for world-building and flair and doesn’t affect the synthesising mechanics.
There is a lot to the synthesising process, but it’s a system that builds slowly and has ample tutorials which are stored in your guide. First, you need to collect mana particles by defeating monsters and tracking down pools in the wild. Then, you can learn unlocked recipes in the “Recipe Recall Station” with an option to upgrade these up to level 10. This unlocks your recipes ready for synthesis.
The synthesis menu displays your unlocked recipes. Clicking on a recipe opens up a list of “Cores” with sub-menus which you then have to navigate to ensure the best possible ingredients are placed into your plans. These sub-menus begin with a single ingredient and then open out into multiple “stratums” with three or more material slots. Placing materials here will create a circle around the material slot and activate any bonuses or other slots within its radius. Once you have filled out as many of these slots as possible you hit start and get a preview of your results before confirming. But this is only the beginning of your alchemy journey.
Levelling up your recipes increases their base quality and resonance. Equally, better quality items boost your final product and you can synthesise your own alchemy materials from scavenged materials, which can also be upgraded and improved up to level 10. Improving recipes also added additional levels to your cores, allowing you to add even more ingredients to the mix with lots of bonus combos to unlock and play about with.
It’s an incredibly versatile system as you learn to spot which ingredient traits help and hinder, navigate the tough decision to accept a less-than-perfect result, and work your way to the perfect load-outs and equipment. I found it really rewarding to finally figure out how it all worked.
Or you could not do any of that… There’s a perfectly useable automated system which fills in recipes to the best, or worst, of its abilities. If you’re grinding out materials or just looking to complete the entry, it’s a really helpful tool. It will also point you in the right direction if you get stuck.
Levelling up recipes is but one part of this system. You can later improve weapons by forging them with certain alchemical items you can make and add “trait crystals” into their various slots to boost them further. You can also combine trait crystals to improve their rank, which means farming out different creatures and chests to find them. Then you have several skill trees with unlocks to boost synthesis, gathering and battle skills.
Yumia starts with the ability to boost herself up walls and can often reach locations you would not normally expect. She essentially parkours and vaults over pretty much anything. This lent itself to a ridiculous degree of non-linear adventuring as I explored ancient ruins and wild jungles, climbing onto the canopy and crawling through darkened tunnels, rarely ever reaching a roadblock.
You also unlock bullets and other exploration tools to open up roadblocks and shortcuts, which keeps each area fresh. Coming from Infinity Nikki, the controls were less forgiving than I had first expected and having the ability to perform wall jumps and gauging the momentum was a bit of a shock to the system. I soon grew confident however and found I was more comfortable running.
While walking, a blue light will appear and guide you away from the path. If you follow it, you will uncover a pool of mana-particles to use back at the atelier. These popped up in the silliest of places and some of them took me so far away from where I was going that I often detoured into new quests and ruins to explore. It won’t be everyone’s favourite mechanic, but I enjoyed getting lost following these trails and could always use the quest tracker to find my way or follow the gold trail to the quest goal. I also liked that this turned red if you were far away and would be better off teleporting.
Travelling the vast world in search of materials and secrets, I uncovered hidden relics, deactivated shines, monster hunts and countless other events that filled every nook and cranny of the map. The vast majority of the secrets are highlighted on the map and can be tracked, making things easier, certainly, but the world is so enormously huge that I would consider it cruel not to do so. They also show what they are after discovery so you can easily find all your landmarks and item locations to return to later once you have cleared the manabound areas.
The camping mechanic allows you to rest and cook meals to give you boosts in battle. I liked this mechanic but you can only camp in “safe” areas which mostly amount to the camps and populated areas. It’s a cute mechanic that I kept forgetting to use, but whenever I came back there were cute character events to trigger. Navigating to these felt a little weird and sluggish with the perspective but I enjoyed this addition. The food boosts are also pretty handy, with one highlighting chests on the mini-map.
Typically, the Atelier games tend to lean towards a turn-based mechanic, but over the last few entries, they have become more action-heavy and lean more towards a spectacle fighter these days. Battles are still instanced as three characters take on enemies, but everything happens all at once and has flashy animations. You have access to two sets of attacks which are assigned to the face buttons and change depending on whether your character is in the vanguard or the rear-guard. These attacks have a limited number of uses per “round” and you essentially have to time your button presses to achieve the best combos.
Switching between rear-guard and vanguard is essential to breaking through your enemies’ defences. You can also move your character around the stage with the analogue stick to avoid enemy attacks and use L2 to defend/heal. Combine the two and your character will dodge-roll, and you later get a counter to add to this by changing your character.
In general, I found the system fun and engaging, but did fall into button bashing after a while. On the easy difficulty, you really don’t need to worry about much and can walk through most battles without thinking, but hard-mode did offer some challenge. Having your companion’s stats on the right-hand side wasn’t the most intuitive for easy checking either, but there were pop-ups to let me know if there were any status effects I needed to cure.
Once an enemy is stunned, your items will highlight which will be most effective and trigger a “Friend Attack” where you join forces to unleash a powerful attack. These can be pretty devastating but cause the item to be on a cool-down for a long time. You can get skills to unlock more friend attacks in a row and reduce cool-downs with equipment and trait crystals, but until that point, I felt I had to be pretty conservative in my use of them.
Characters get four item slots. As always the arsenal of alchemy-crafted weaponry comes into play with heals, elemental tools and random effects aplenty. How you craft these items will change how they work in battle. While your recipe levels are low, you will have to make tough decisions between where you want to boost your tools and use trait crystals to increase their use or effect if possible. But ultimately, your goal is to get everything as high as possible and max out every effect available to you.
The Yumia map is by far one of the biggest open-world maps I have played in a long time. Certainly, if you placed a lot of game maps together there would be some to rival it, but I only ever hit load screens when teleporting. I would even argue it is comparable if not larger than Elden Ring in this regard.
There are several unique races with interesting designs and habitats, although most of it is in or among ruins. The first area is vibrant and green but this quickly changes in the manabound areas as toxic levels of mana shrouds the lands in shimmering magical darkness. Then we go underground through caves and hidden forest tunnels with multiple ways to go under and over the various levels to reach your destination. I had a lot of fun exploring them, but was grateful I could track map points with markers in areas with multiple levels.
With four main areas to explore, I didn’t expect to see a huge difference in enemies, but it did feel like there was something new added in each area aside from the elemental reskins of previous monsters. A lot of the creatures are from previous games and I like that they keep bringing back their signature creatures as it lends a level of nostalgia to the mix. Boss creatures were largely in the “make this bigger and add HP” vein but these were not linked to the story and just appeared randomly as hunt quests.
The graphics have seen an upgrade when compared to Ryza 3, but I wouldn’t say they were huge. The world is beautiful but suffers in darkness as lighting seems to be an issue. Admittedly, I was able to remedy this in my bases by building walls and putting my own lights up, but I would often return to base and wait until morning to explore because I literally could not see where I was going. It was so prevalent that I kept waiting for some kind of lamp unlock, but it never came.
Each Atelier soundtrack has been an underrated gem, and Yumia continues this trend masterfully. I felt subtle tones of Persona creeping in among the more typical fantasy fanfare, followed by gentle ambient tunes which complimented exploration well.
Similarly, I enjoyed the voice acting and felt the voices suited their characters. The Japanese voiceovers will put some people off, but I felt the cutscenes managed to contain a lot of information without feeling bogged down. I will say there were a lot of conversation pop-ups over the exploration which is a bit of a pet peeve for me when they are actual plot things, but the majority of them were repeated phrases that added flavour.
As a fan of the franchise, it was nice to see all the changes, while maintaining the core feeling of the Atelier games as a whole. The world is darker and grimmer, but the core themes of friendship, found family and magic still ring true. It’s not as fan-servicy as previous entries, but the cameraman still has his way in some places (and I think this is due to PlayStation censoring).
I didn’t run into any general running issues either. There were a few bugs where I was pushed above the battle map in caves or tight spaces, but I just switched my character to remedy this. Another saw a giant ape slide from a higher level of the map onto my base, so he was just sitting there as I turned the corner which I thought was quite comical, but never anything game-breaking.
Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land is a great starting point for anyone new to the Atelier franchise. It is by far one of the most impressive and ambitious projects I have seen from their team and adds a lot to the tried and tested formula. I’d like to see more from the building mechanic as we’ve not had a lot of control over bases before and the synthesis mechanic is one of my favourites alongside Ryza.
I’ve been begging people to give the Atelier series a shot for years now and Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land is no different. If you like crafting, exploring, adorable characters and personable stakes take the plunge, you won’t regret it!
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, Xbox Series X and Series S
Developers: Gust, Koei Tecmo Games
Publishers: Koei Tecmo Games, KOEI TECMO AMERICA Corporation
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