I’m through my last RPG finish of the year, with the honor going to Atelier Sophie 2! About 55 hours played and all optional areas and scenes visited and seen.
It’s definitely my favorite Atelier game out of all I’ve played so far. The soundtrack has a trove of phenomenal tracks and the gameplay is the best in the series yet. I love the twin attacks and the game being reliant on all 6 party members. In Sophie 1, the majority of my party was benched, don’t even think I bothered with Fritz on there even once. Pulling off all kinds of cool moves feels really good, much better than how button mashy Ryza can get (which I also had benched characters in). In this game, it’s purely turn based, while the Ryza series is more like Final Fantasy “ATB” style. You’re constantly swapping in characters with the twin attacks and defensive moves and it all flows together and just feels so fun to play.
For the alchemy side of things, as usual I found myself getting absorbed into it for hours, the “tetris puzzle” system and connecting all the light orbs is so addicting and satisfying. As I always say the thing I like most about Atelier games is crafting obscenely powerful gear, which I felt this game allows for without letting you get too out of hand (unless you look up guides I assume lol).
Graphically I thought the game was really good. I mostly played in Handheld, which these screenshots are from. Blown up on a screen here looks a bit warty, but the game looks incredible on the Switch screen. I liked the visuals here more than in Ryza 3, especially the character models which are just gorgeous.
For story, well, it’s Atelier so there’s usually not much major to comment on. Atelier stories are generally “small-time/homely” kinds of stories. I always like these games for focusing on a protagonist challenging themselves to honing their profession as it’s quite relatable. Sophie herself, Young Plachta, and Ramizel are prob my favorite 3 from the game. The ending got to me a bit, Sophie’s voice actress did amazingly there.
There are 2 bosses that are reused 3 times each. That slightly bothered me, by round 3 it gets too “familiar”.
Cons: Didn’t really like the weather system on the maps that much, just felt like distractions to make getting through them take longer. I also felt some maps were a bit unnecessarily big, and I was wearing the maximum speed up shoes too.
The game crashed on me once early on, thankfully there’s autosave so I lost like a minute of progress lol. This reminded me that Sophie 1 is actually quite prone to crashing on Switch and does NOT have autosave. God, that was annoying. Thankfully here, it was just a single crash, maybe it’s just my Switch’s old age.
So overall I liked the game more than Ryza 3 which I played earlier this year and already gave an 8/10. As my now favorite Atelier game I think I will bestow it with a 9/10 
I still have Atelier Firis and Lydie&Suelle to get to for the Mysterious series. I played Sophie 1 in 2022 and only played 2 now so… Someday, lol.
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I’m gonna do a “sequel” to this post soon, where I give my thoughts on all the RPGs I played this year. This was a really great year for both new releases and me personally as I started investing into playing JRPGs with Japanese text which has been its own bundle of fun and let me expand into amazing titles I played this year like Sakura Wars 2 and Ys X