It’s been a good long while since the last mainline Atelier game. Since the series used to do a new entry annually, I figured that three years between titles would really give us something special. Unfortunately, it seems that series developer, Gust, has instead gone out of its way to not give us something special. Instead, Atelier Yumia is one of the most cookie cutter open world games imaginable, lacking not only the focus that the series is beloved for, but being loaded with bloat and incredibly uninspired content that actually seems below the level of open-world gacha games.
The root of what went wrong with Atelier Yumia couldn’t be more clear. While past games focused on alchemy above all else, it’s basically a footnote here. On occasion, you’ll need to craft an item to progress the story, but the alchemy is so simplified here that you’ll be able to do so with pretty much any items you have lying around, save for the specific type needed to form the synthesis core. These cores come in varieties, such as adding trait slots that can be filled or increasing the item’s quality. With that said, you simply won’t be doing much alchemy in the game at all, unless you just feel like messing with the system just because you can.
Instead, you’ll be following the most typical open-world game loop known to man. The game’s large map is shrouded in fog by default. You have to go to an icon on the map and unlock the section in order for the fog to lift before it populates itself with question marks. There are so many question marks in Atelier Yumia, and they represent a bunch of copy-pasted content that you’ll possibly grow weary of while you’re still in the first region. These are either gathering zones, monster nests, little constructs that you interact with or shoot, or shrines that give you an item needed to unlock new nodes on the game’s skill tree. While previous games usually let you progress in the game via alchemy, here you just use a basic skill tree instead.
The skill tree requires skill points and prisms (the aforementioned items from shrines) that you’ll get from exploring. Atelier Yumia is the epitome of what’s referred to as Ubisoft-style open-world checklists. Considering it launched the same day as Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which is considerably better in this respect, that doesn’t really do this game any favours. If anything, the open world here reminds me a lot of Wuthering Waves, a Chinese gacha game that focuses on giving you currency for gacha pulls. However, that game has a better open world and is more focused and fun as well.
That all comes down to the fact that the alchemy, y’know, the absolute crux of Atelier games, is pretty much just barely here. That means that something else would need to be the focus, but there’s sadly nothing. The game has a new real-time combat system where you can move in a circle around the enemy, block, and evade while spamming four buttons to attack with skills. It’s honestly not bad, but it’s also so easy that all you need to do is mash buttons for a few seconds and the enemies just melt. Things get better against stronger foes and bosses, but the combat mostly just feels like more fluff here.
Therefore, it can be argued that the central aspect of Atelier Yumia is instead navigating to question marks. There’s also a metric ton of things to gather while you’re out and about, but since you’ll barely be doing any alchemy, this too feels pointless after a while. You can put buildings together and place objects in building areas because someone decided to throw in an incredibly simple base building mechanic. The game very much uses the “we threw in everything but the kitchen sink” approach and it doesn’t really do much of anything well. Granted, the game is still competent and you can absolutely sink hours into it, but all the content is rote. The parts that usually function as padding in most open-world games are sadly the main attraction.
At least you do get a bike to speed things up, as well as upgrades you can buy at shrines with prisms that augment Yumia’s exploration abilities (extra jumps, taking less damage while falling.) On the other hand, the biomes look diverse and there’s some pretty decent art direction going on here and there, but the texture quality is very low, making the game look far more dated than I was expecting. Much like previous entries, there’s no English dub here either, so if that’s important to you that’s going to be a problem.
What irks me the most, however, is that it would have been easy for this to feel like an Atelier game. Yumia can gather pretty much everything you see right from the beginning without even needing any gear, but the game should have used Atelier Ryza‘s system, where you had to make new equipment all the time to gather and progress in the environment. Instead of a generic skill tree, you should level up by doing alchemy. You should feel the need to constantly improve your team’s gear as they explore deeper into the world. But the game tries so hard to just be the most generic open world game instead.
Atelier Yumia isn’t a “bad” game, but it is a thoroughly disappointing one. The series’ strengths are simply nowhere to be found here and they’re replaced with nothing of note. The goal was apparently to make as much money by broadening the audience as much as possible. In pursuit of this, the series has instead been completely stripped of its identity and this game doesn’t really offer anything to fans. I can only hope that this course is corrected after this. Gust has already shown that they can make an open world Atelier game actually feel like an Atelier game eight years ago, or be at risk of the series being dumbed-down even more.
Atelier Yumia: While not a bad game in and of itself, Atelier Yumia is a complete waste of the franchise that completely ignores nearly everything that makes it worthwhile in exchange for typical open-world monotony. – Andrew Farrell
