When playing a game in a series with a lot of history, it’s hard to know how excited to get about a new entry. It’s great when a series you love gets more games and you get to devour them all, but sometimes this can lead to fatigue as a franchise treads water instead of making something new and exciting. Now I’ve never really felt this about the Atelier series, but as a comfort game of mine I can’t pretend I’ve been looking for things to be shaken up. Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories and the Envisioned Land is now here though, and not content with a mild stirring has put everything you love about these games into an industrial strength blender to ensure maximum series shakeup.
This starts with introducing a new protagonist, the titular Yumia. As always she’s an alchemist, and one who was taught by her mother to always be the best she can be and challenge preconceptions. When a massive disaster destroys the land and Yumia’s mum vanishes, our hero ends up alone and the world at large decides that alchemy is to blame. Yumia isn’t disheartened though, and joins up with a team trying to survey the land to make it safe again. It’s a darker story than what Atelier is known for, but along the way it’s full of friendship and positivity to counteract this.
More than anything else in Atelier Yumia, the focus of the game is exploration. The gorgeous world where everything takes place is massive, and full of something to check out in every nook and cranny. Mostly you’ll be gathering ingredients for your alchemy though, which come in all shapes and sizes. Going to a meadow and grabbing mushrooms and plants is Yumia’s idea of a great day, and admittedly that feeling of tapping away to gather all the materials you need is lovely. More satisfying than that is using your gun to blast those out of reach crystals growing on mountains, which inexplicably doesn’t damage them and instead plops them in your bag.
Yumia’s gun isn’t just useful for collecting rocks though, it’s also a great weapon. The combat in Atelier Yumia is the most fast paced it has ever been, and sees you with full control of your character of choice with a whole heap of attacks to combo together. Dodging or blocking incoming attacks is often easy thanks to obvious attack markers littering the floor, but if you’re struggling to find a safe space you can switch to long ranged combat at the push of a button and jump away to a safe distance. Different enemies have different weaknesses you can exploit with your variety of attacks, and once you get used to the flow of battle it’s a hell of a lot of fun.
There’s more depth to the combat that you’ll discover as you progress too, even dozens of hours into the game. Allies can be tagged in at will and all have different abilities that can be used in exciting ways. There’s a mana burst system that leads to a massive power boost, and of course all sorts of different craftable items you can use in battle to batter all the wolves and beavers standing in your way. I didn’t get bored of the combat once in my many hours with Yumia, and I think that’s pretty telling.
Read our interview with Atelier Yumia producer, Junzo Hosoi.
You won’t have the tools to succeed in battle without doing a bit of alchemy, so you’ll be taking bits and bobs back to your workshop regularly. Alchemy has had a bit of a facelift in Atelier Yumia, and now involves placing ingredients into slots to try and gather as much “floating mana” as possible with their resonance field. You also have to think about elemental types, the quality ranking of ingredients and traits when trying to make a particularly banging new staff for your friend, and it takes a lot of getting used to. I won’t pretend it’s my favourite alchemy system from the series (as I found it a touch long-winded and less puzzle-based than some entries) but there’s always the option to hit the auto button which works a treat.
The three core parts of Atelier games have been combat, exploration and alchemy for years, but Yumia has added a fourth pillar into the mix: base building. With all sorts of different blocks and decorations you can now make multiple pretty homes across the land where do your work, and this creative process even uses different materials to ensure you aren’t punished for having fun building. It’s a touch on the janky side (it’s very easy to put items in the ground for example) but there are certainly worse building systems and it’s also completely optional. If you’d rather just open a catalogue and plonk down a pretty base that’s premade though, there’s no shame in that.
There are plenty of more important things to be doing than building regardless, like checking off myriad little question marks from the map. Some of these will provide prisms you can use to upgrade your movement abilities or total mana, others might be fishing spots where you can get fishy materials. There are countless chests that to open you have to shoot hidden nearby crystals, and machines that need activating by solving pipe puzzles. Exploring the world is a blast too, thanks to all your helpful movement abilities. Ziplines litter the land for fast traversal: by default you can already do two massive jumps, and eventually you’ll even unlock an upgradable motorbike to zoom around on. It’s a fun and dense open world you could spend weeks totally clearing out, with an additional checklist of objectives for each area with rewards tied to it. If you’re a completionist who can’t leave stones unturned then Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories and the Envisioned Land will gleefully absorb your free time.
Everything you do in the open world of Atelier Yumia has a purpose too, granting you skill points that you can put into a tree for more meaningful upgrades. These are split into three categories that will help you when exploring, fighting and alchemy-ing (which is definitely a real word) and you can choose whichever you want to spend your points in. I immediately grabbed some experience boosts to make levelling up a breeze, but if you prefer gathering better quality flowers or having a bag with more space then Atelier Yumia has got you covered.
I think Atelier Yumia is one of the best Atelier games the series has ever produced, but it’s not without a few issues. For the first few hours the combat is trivially easy, which would be fine if battles at least took longer than a few seconds. This just means you don’t really learn how combat works for way longer than ideal, and it’s a bit dull because of this. The main missions are often a little underwhelming too, mainly just tasking you with wandering to different points on the map and watching a cutscene.
Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories and the Envisioned Land takes the Atelier series in multiple bold new directions, and I loved pretty much all of them. If you’ve never jumped into this charming series then this is a great place to start, thanks to its fabulous gameplay loop, its fast paced combat, and of course the gorgeous world to explore. You’d be a fool to miss out on this time-sucking delight, so grab it as soon as you can.
