I finished Atelier Ryza 3 a few days ago, now I have some free time to write down my thoughts.
It was an awesome albeit a bit bloated game. It is the longest Atelier game I think. I finished at about 85 hours with 100% content done. Meanwhile I was 100% done with Ryza 1 and 2 at about 45 hours.
I was very impressed with Gust trying out an open world style game. There are 4 regions that are very large and, unlike previous Atelier games, are not divided up with loading zones. The first region is the entire Ryza 1 map + a huge new area added to it.
Of course, the worldās can be a little ājankyā and āwartyā. You can climb up certain things by jumping a lot and end up walking on invisible platforms for example. This can be amusing but it does show this was a very ambitious game for Gust.
The exploration is fun, there is a variety of things to see and landmarks to visit similar to Xenoblade. One big con though, is that while the worlds are filled with treasure chests to reward you for exploring, they are all filled with trash materials that you find anywhere.
As I said before, this game is long. Atelier games are usually small scale āhomelyā stories, but this is a full globe trotting adventure. You even build more Ateliers in the various regions you visit.
I love how far the characters have come since the first game. Ryza herself has become an awesome and cool leader. 4 years have passed since the first game, so the characters are now in their 20s, I played the first one when it was new it was nice seeing them grow up.
One issue I had with the story though is that it dragged on for longer than it needed to. By the time I had all regions 100% explored, crafted the best gear, etc, there was still like 10 hours of story left, and a big chunk of it was filler.
The gameplay is more or less the same as the previous Ryza games. Very flashy āATBā combat (Final Fantasy style) with a lot of button mashing out your combos. In true Atelier fashion the battles revolve around your crafted gear and the thing I love about these games is conjuring up obscenely powerful and broken gear, which this game allows for almost too easily lol.
This was mentioned on the Xboxera review already, but the map screen is pretty annoying. Pointless āputting menus inside menusā kind of thing, same with getting to the equipment screen which ironically wasnāt a problem in Ryza 2. So the UI is overall not great.
Lastly I should talk about the ākeysā system they introduced. It is pretty poorly explained and by the time I actually started engaging with it was the point when I was able to break it apart and make broken ākeysā. You can use them to unlock barriers in the world and also use them as powerups in battle. It seems overall best to just basically ignore the system until you get the ability to create Super Rare keys 100% of the time as those are kind of the only useful ones.
So overall Iād give the game an 8/10. Itās not as ācompact/tightlyā designed as Iām used to an Atelier game being, but Gust made something Iād never expect from them and I think it mostly turned out fantastic. I am interested to see how the next Atelier series turns out now that the Ryza series has concluded.
