Atelier Ryza 3: Alchemist of the End & the Secret Key is the final game in the Ryza (or Secret) trilogy and the 24th overall game in the long-running Atelier series. I’ve played through and reviewed all of the mysterious series before but never played any of the two previous Ryza titles, which are often touted as the best in the series. Even though I have not played the Ryza series, it’s one that my partner has a minor obsession with and I am very familiar with the characters, world and overall story beats of the first two games.
Should you play Atelier Ryza 1 & 2 first?
Upon booting up Atelier Ryza 3 you’ll notice there’s an option to watch the Prologue Movie, which is a brief 5 minutes or so filling in the player on the events of the previous two games. As I already had some understanding of the characters and events, this did a good enough job at catching me up on the previous games but probably won’t fill in new players on the various character dynamics and relationships. That said, after a few hours of play the cast will feel like family, even to newcomers.
Story
The story centres around earthquakes and the mysterious appearance of a group of islands not too far from the home of our protagonist Reisalin Stout, or simply ‘Ryza’ to her friends. Throughout the events of the previous games, Ryza has proven herself as an alchemist and sets off with a couple of her friends to investigate the new lands known as Kark islands.
While investigating these new isles Ryza and Co. discover a huge gate and a mysterious voice instructs her to seek out the ‘Code of the Universe’ while teaching her the recipe to make a special type of key. This sets the scene for a grand adventure spanning four different regions of the world. The original world map from the first two games is included in its entirety with an addition of three unique maps of a similar size to explore all with their own different sub-regions, the game world of Atelier Ryza 3 is huge.
Gameplay
Exploration is handled slightly differently in Ryza 3 as all the areas in the world are connected with almost no loading screens between areas, except for when fast travelling to different maps. You could start at one point of the map and run for almost 30 minutes before you hit a mandatory loading screen and this is the same in almost all four of the game maps.
I was impressed at the speed at which Ryza now moves, she’s clearly been beefing up them thighs and now sprints across the map when you hold the R1 button. This greatly increased my overall enjoyment of the game and slow movement speeds were one of my main gripes with Atelier Sophie 2.
Once you visit a landmark, you’ll be able to fast travel directly to that location from the map screen. The map screen is a little clunky in design but you’ll soon get the hang of it, I guess having the extra regions to visit made it a little overcomplicated. I’m ashamed to admit this, it was only after 30 hours of playtime that I realized that you can press the square button to return to base at any time. I spent much of the early game travelling to the nearest landmark and manually heading there luckily, the fast travelling only took literal seconds and it seems the developers have made fantastic use of the PS5s internal SSD.
Early-ish on in the game you’ll get a recipe for the Summoning bell, which allows you to summon mountable monsters that can aid you in exploration. Some of these will need to be unlocked later via side quests but I discovered one creature for land and one for sea and I’m sure there’s probably more. Exploration is made easier by the inclusion of ziplines which you’ll find scattered across the maps although you need to activate each side manually before being allowed to ride across.
The Kark isles that have appeared have a tropical feel to them and you’ll often find friendly dolphins dotted around which are all too happy to offer Ryza a lift and greatly increase sea traversal speed.
While exploring the game’s various biomes, you find a ton of harvestable items that Ryza can pilfer into her basket and collect for later. To aid Ryza in her kleptomania you’ll be able to craft various tools for gathering, once equipped you to be able to mine rocks, cut grass, catch bugs, chop wood etc. which can all be used to further create higher-grade gathering using Alchemy and makes for a really addictive gameplay loop.
Alchemy
The alchemy system in each Atelier sub-series is handled differently, thankfully Ryza 3’s system seems to be quite straightforward yet addictive. At the Atelier, Ryza will throw in various ingredients, mix them together and produce a new item. Ryza can make weapons, armour, consumable items, keys and various story-related items which often require a touch of alchemy.
An interesting addition this time around is the ability to set up multiple Ateliers, you can set up one in each region and after a certain point around midway through the story, you can expand these to include different rooms and offer different effects. One type even comes with its own little plot of land for planting seeds, which is a nice little addition.
Battle System
The battle system in Atelier Ryza 3 is great, it’s very fast-paced and additional systems are introduced at a good pace throughout your playthrough.
Your core party will be three characters, with the party leader being controllable and the rest of the team controlled using AI. You can freely switch between the three party members on screen using the L2 & R2 buttons at any time.
Battles are turned-based and have an ATB-esque waiting system that determines character and enemy attack order which is represented by a filling circle item. Each character has a three-hit combo basic attack which fills the AP gauge and can be turned into special abilities by holding a shoulder button and pressing one of the face buttons, each costing a set amount of AP.
There’s a total of 11 characters you end up recruiting along the way and they all have their own unique skills and abilities. You can call in back-row characters to take place of your active character switching in and out a little like how the character system is handled in Final Fantasy X.
The speed of battles makes the game feel very fluid and accidentally running into an enemy, something that happened quite a lot was nowhere near as infuriating as in other RPGs as many fights were over sub-30 seconds.
While generally quite an easy game in terms of battles, some of the late-game bosses absolutely floored my team numerous times which needed a little grinding but more importantly, better gear.
As you progress through the world, you’ll become inundated with various side quests, these are usually simple fetch quests, but some have full mini-story arcs and can award you with Skill Points(SP) and sometimes even a new recipe. You can spend acquired SP on the Skill tree, which unlocks even more recipes for Ryza to craft. I became addicted to the alchemy system at one point in my playthrough and crafted for about 5 hours straight. You’ll soon unlock the ability to rework your created items and refine them to have even more abilities and become much stronger. This was usually what I would do once I hit a roadblock with a boss, which only happened three times in my playthrough.
An unintentional side effect of my alchemy addiction was I ended up with a TON of additional SP which is awarded for reworking items, this meant at about the 60% mark of my playthrough I had already completely unlocked everything on the skill tree.
There were a few occasions where I could not progress unless I had certain items which needed upgraded tools to harvest. This is not always very clear and I did spend a lot of time running around aimlessly looking for items, but as the world is so big now, this can get a little tedious, although very satisfying when you finally find it. I just wish sometimes the quest description was a little more concise.
The art direction and music are fantastic in Ryza 3, the various biomes you visit are vivid, and the character models are distinctive but I do have a few issues with the game with the main one being the Depth of Field effect that is applied to the whole game. Sometime’s objects just meters away from Ryza are out of focus and it made my eyes feel bad on a few different occasions.
The subtitles could also use a little work and are currently too small this is especially true in numerous cutscenes where it’s often small white text on a bright colourful background and even playing on 55inch LG C1 OLED television, I had to sit a little closer than I would have liked.
I’m sure the aggressive depth of field issues will be patched in the future, but it’s something to be aware of as that’s the version of the game you’ll have on your disc/cartridge.
Other minor annoyances include some quests having far too much back and forth, there’s one quest quite early on where you are trying to help out two arguing factions which ends up with your returning to your Atelier about 5 or 6 times there and back. It makes sense in the story, but still, it felt a little excessive to me. A similar thing happens with cutscenes, where you’ll finish one, walk a few steps and immediately enter another. These were usually story-driven or a special heart-to-heart style scene with one of your ever-expanding team and their merit are usually pretty entertaining.
The game’s length is in that nice sweet spot, playing on normal difficulty Ryza 3 took me 49h26m to complete. At the time of the competition, I had a ton of side quests and content to unlock and could have easily spent an additional 10 – 15 hours tieing up these loose ends and further refining character equipment. There are still whole areas of the map that I have yet to explore.
After rolling the credits on Atelier Ryza 3 you’ll unlock New Game Plus and the ability to play the game on the super challenging Charismatic difficulty along with some additional extras such as a character model viewer, a music player, interviews with the casts voice actors and a gallery to view all of the lovely artwork from the game.
Conclusion
Atelier Ryza 3 is a great game in an already great series and rounds out the trilogy well. Ryza 3 is definitely the best Atelier game I have played and I am a little sad that it has ended. I trust the developers Gust are hard at work on DLC which I will happily consume as soon as it’s available. It’s a feel-good game and a much more joyous adventure that side-steps the somewhat sad ending of Ryza 2 and instead goes for something a little bittersweet.
I would highly recommend picking up Atelier Ryza 3 or any of the Atelier games for that matter, they are all a lot of fun and full of whimsical charm.
9
PS5 review code kindly provided by Koei Tecmo