Atelier Yumia: Alchemist of Memory and Imagination of Lands is probably the most comfortable JRPG in the series – Hands-On Preview
Blog Andrew Joseph 21 Feb , 2025 0
After more than twenty-two mainline games, I can only imagine how difficult it is to innovate and keep relevance when it comes to great games every few weeks of great games, but that's exactly what Koei Tecmo aims to run for a long time Atelier JRPG series, Atelier Yumia: Alchemist of the land of memory and conceived. After spending six hours collecting resources, doing sailor moon-like magical dance rituals, and riding on motorcycles, I tend to believe they will achieve this again. With more attractive combat, improved visuals, more convenient handcrafting, and a brand new building system, you can take your own personal touches into the world, even if my opinion on the story and characters is, there are many Optimistic, at least so far during opening hours, a nice sample for this type.
If you've played the recent Atelier game, Atelier Yumia may not be shocked at first glance. All three pillars that have been around since its conception are alive and good: Explore, where you can run around where resources are collected and puzzles are solved; fight, you can use a party to smash beautiful anime friends and synthesize parties with The bad guys fight and combine hardened resources into alchemy creation to make you stronger. But everyone has undergone a major overhaul (not to mention a serious makeover) injecting new life into familiar formulas.
The battle seems to be getting the biggest rework, with an action-based system that allows you to perfectly parri, dodge obstacles and depending on whether you want to defeat enemies in melee or switch to different ranges from melee. distance. On the lower level, the battle seems pretty no exaggeration, as I was able to uninstall all the abilities I had, swap other characters to do this, and then repeat again, ending most encounters, but then in (and especially when I don't upgrade correctly), I'll severely flush if I don't focus on the enemy's attack mode and work on time. It never becomes particularly challenging as long as I get the proper upgrade, but it's nice to see a passive combat system that I can't evaporate on the autopilot.
Explore also has some improvements, such as having a gun hitting the enemy and collecting resources at a distance, once both sides of the line are found and activated, it can help you browse the map more easily, and crucially, it's a bad guy motorcycle . Speeding up this problem makes it easier to go around. Finally, there are comprehensive synthesiss that often get so complex in an intrinsic way that you may spend a lot of time customizing and minimizing aspects of your gear and crafting new items and attacks for use in combat. Or, if you don't have the patience like me, you can click “Auto Mode” and it will automatically optimize all features for you. Not that I don't like this aspect of the series, but I'm not willing to tinker with tiredness when I have the option to quickly return to the action, which is definitely good.
Atelier Yumia also cheers up by adding a fourth fairly important activity to the list of things you want to do as you explore and upgrade: the ability to build and customize settlements throughout the world map. That's right – Atelier Yumia seems to be leaning towards a cozy boom, so now you can do some animal crossovers with JRPG or the Sims by building fantasy cabins on a piece of land and spending some quality downtime with your party members. I could only get involved in this given the limitations of the resources I had available early on in the story, but I can certainly see myself having a lot of time in taming the wild with a well-decorated house.
With everything in all the studios, I'm going to say that it has few stories that make itself stand out. There is no doubt that the characters and foreshadowing stories that begin to develop during open hours are not bad, but at least so far, everything is predictable and there is a lot of basic past seen in JRPG. This is especially true of the characters I encountered during the exploration process, such as the wholesome Isla and Stoic and no-nosense Viktor’s Ditzy, which I feel like I’ve seen for over 500 times. But this is the beginning of JRPG, so it's very likely that the story will take a while to start scrolling or the characters show their true colors with any level of satisfaction, which leaves me with a lot of opportunities to make my worries go away. More time.
If I didn't mention that Atelier Yumia was the first time the series appeared on the Xbox platform, and as a Westerner who was very much hoping that more JRPGs would be available at any time, I would be very dismissive, which is awesome. Achievement unlocked!
