Lost Legends & the Secret Fairy

Summer in the city

Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout was my introduction to the long term Atelier series. And while I certainly enjoyed it, it did not leave enough of an impact to run with it and watch the rest of the millions of other games in the series. It’s a big bet, and something like that scares me.

However, it left me thirsty enough for a sequel now in the form of Atelier Ryza 2: Lost Legends & the Secret Fairy. It’s time to go back into the kettle and spark some adventure and find out if anyone has gotten fashion sense since the last game. Spoil: they have not.

Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout (PC, link [reviewed], PS4, PS5)
Developer: Gust Co. Ltd.
Publisher: Koei Tecmo
Released: January 26, 2021
MSRP: $ 59.99

It’s been 3 years since the events of the first Atelier Ryza, and Reisalin ‘Ryza’ Stout’s loot will still not stop. She spent the last three years on her own alchemy as her friends dropped her all off to go to the capital. She asks the local rich man to explore a beautiful stone, and she does not know if her experience is enough to find out, so she decides to leave for the city to join her friends.

Atelier Ryza 2 is a little more immediate than its predecessor. Your first fight is just down the road and you have your studio before the prologue is over. Then you are ready to store some bombs in your apartment.

Like the first game, however, the narration is a bit slow. You want adventure, so you go on adventure, sums up the character motivation pretty well. Things develop just like that from there. There’s a series of ruins in the capital, and it seems like the perfect place to kill yourself, so it’s time to take care of their secrets and find out how your flying pet hamster, Fi, everything connected.

If you’re new to the series, you’re probably wondering if you should play first Atelier Ryza to enjoy the second, and the answer is: yes, probably. Many of the games involve meeting old friends, and a ton of dialogue discussing how much everyone has changed in the intervening years. I’m not saying you couldn’t figure it out from the context, but just not the same impact.

If you are not familiar with the Atelier games are JRPGs with in-depth manufacturing mechanics. Alchemy, they call it, which apparently is the art of throwing specific ingredients into a pot to create a bridge. While this may sound like an excessive complication of your typical equipment system, it does add a bit of progression to the game. While traveling, you will gain access to more ingredients that can be used to make better weapons and equipment. This is important because while you can buy goods in the stores, nothing compares to what you pick up in your studio.

I had a problem with the progress of the previous game; it felt like there was a lot of starting and stopping while traveling until you hit a wall, and then going back to the studio to improve your equipment or make a key item. It hasn’t really changed, but I feel the game’s progress is a little more involved. You still go on adventures and then return to make a nicer shirt, but there is a firmer gap between the two activities, and it seems to work better.

The ruins do not necessarily unlock in a linear fashion. If you focus on bee-searching along with just the modest game, you can see that you are gaining access to new areas without necessarily completing the previous one. It can give you access to new sources of ingredients that will enable you to improve your alchemy along with your adventure. This makes the discovery of new areas all the more exciting as you not only advance the narrative but also your skills.

There is a dizzying depth to Atelier Ryza 2, some of it completely disposable. For some reason you can decorate your studio, but I do not know why you would do that. You can also farm with ingredients and upgrade stores by selling items, but artificial supplies scatter the ground and can be found in each monster’s butt. It offers alternative methods of accessing some items that you would not find later, but whether they are worthwhile depends on you.

The manufacturing itself can take you some time to grasp the little niches to it. Some of this is because it is not well explained. It has multiple terms for healing, for example, and I thought the only healing item I had access to was grass beans. By the end of the game, they were no longer doing the work, and I had to experiment to discover that ‘healing taste’ was analogous. After that, I created the most amazing desserts ever invented by man and reached the end by regularly forcing my teammates’ donuts.

The advantage of this is that you get everything you put into it from alchemy. If you take the time to find the right ingredients, learn the mechanics and discover new recipes, you can quickly turn your party into an unstoppable force. However, if you ignore it, you may struggle.

While Atelier Ryza struggling to catch up, I did not have quite the same problem with the sequel. I would spend hours making figures and stirring my kettle, sometimes skipping the critical path. However, it broke down towards the end of the game as I got tired of the absolutely unhappy dialogue.

Like its predecessor, Atelier Ryza 2 is irrevocably cheerful, tending to be a fresh air in an industry full of gloomy protagonists with dark past fighting the unequivocal evil. The optimism helped something Atelier Ryza stands out in my mind, but here I just got terminally ill from it.

There’s so much wasteful dialogue, it’s dizzying. Much of it revolves around Fi and how much everyone loves it and everyone loves it. I do not need deeper insight into why it bumps someone’s head. For every play that actually includes meaningful character or narrative development, there are about a dozen more characters talking about the cafe’s food. Even the parts that end up in the characters play way too long before they deliver something valuable. It tends to walk in circles, going through information that is already obvious or that has already been provided.

It’s going crazy. I listened intently to the dialogue to flip through it for important things. When the text in the last track in the match became unplayable, I was very annoyed because I had to see every member of the group say how important this fight was to them. Save me.

As much as I can understand the inevitable vortex of dialogue that haunts you every scene transition, I will still admit that I enjoyed the actual play a little more than the first when it did not speak. Maybe not for narrative reasons, but the progression and mechanics just clicked a lot harder for me this time. I ended up about 50 hours through the game, but I could probably reduce it if I did not spend so much time refining the tastiest donut. However, I would probably have enjoyed it a lot less as well.

I’m the same as last time: I enjoyed the experience, but I’m not in a hurry to pick up the rest of the series. If I have anything, I’ll wait until I’ll slip in Ryza’s incredibly tight shorts next time. Given the typical pace of the series, it will probably be in another year.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

Atelier Ryza 2: Lost Legends & the Secret Fairy reviewed by Adzuken