Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & The Envisioned Land Might Be the Series’ Coziest JRPG Yet – Hands-On Preview

Combat seems to be getting the biggest rework, with action-based systems that let you perfect parry, dodge out of the way, and switch to different range bands depending on whether you’d like to thwack enemies in melee or take them down from a distance. At lower levels, combat seemed fairly undemanding, as I was able to just unload every ability I had, swap to other characters to do the same, then repeat it all again, ending most encounters in a matter of seconds, but later on (and especially when I wasn’t properly leveled) I seriously got rinsed if I wasn’t paying attention to enemy attack patterns and working on my timing. It never got especially challenging so long as I was properly leveled, but it was nice to see a less passive combat system that I couldn’t just steamroll through while on autopilot.

Exploration also had some improvements, like having a gun to stun enemies and collect resources at a distance, ziplines that help you navigate the map more easily once you find and activate both sides of the line, and, crucially, a badass motorcycle for you to speed around on that makes getting around much easier. Finally, there’s Synthesis, which in typically Atelier fashion is so dang complicated, you could spend quite a bit of time customizing and min-maxing every aspect of your gear and crafting new items and attacks to use in battle. Or, if you don’t have the patience like me, you can just hit “auto mode” and it’ll automatically optimize all of it for you. Not that I don’t enjoy this aspect of the series, but it’s certainly nice to have the option of leaping back into the action quickly for times where I wasn’t in the mood to tinker.

Atelier Yumia also shakes things up by adding a fourth fairly significant activity to the list of things to do as you explore and level up: the ability to build and customize settlements throughout the world map. That’s right – Atelier Yumia seems to be leaning into the cozy craze, so now you can have a little bit of Animal Crossing or Sims with your JRPG by constructing your fantasy cottage on a patch of land and spending some quality downtime with your party members. I was only able to dabble in this a bit, given the constraint of the resources available to me in the early part of the story, but I could definitely see myself sinking quite a bit of time into taming the wilds with an elaborately decorated home.

Wishlist

With all Atelier has going for it, I will say that it did very little to make itself stand out in terms of story. The characters and foreshadowing of the undoubtedly epic and convoluted story that starts to develop in the opening hours aren’t bad by any means, but at least so far everything has been quite predictable and retreads a lot of ground we’ve seen from JRPGs of the past. This is especially true of the characters I met during my explorations, like the ditzy by wholesome Isla and the stoic and no-nonsense Viktor, both of whom I feel like I’ve seen half a hundred times already. But this is the beginning of a JRPG, so in all likelihood it’s just going to take a while for the story to start rolling or for characters to show their true colors to any level of satisfaction, leaving plenty of opportunity for my concerns to disappear given more time.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Atelier Yumia marks the first time the series will appear on the Xbox platform, and as a Westerner who would quite like more JRPGs to be readily available, that’s pretty awesome to see. Achievement unlocked!