This morning, I beat Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout.

(I played the Switch version because I wanted to play it handheld, although I finally gave up on finding a reasonable price for the physical Switch copy and bought it during an eShop sale.)

Ryza is considered an excellent introduction to the Atelier series, and in a lot of ways I felt like I was trying the series out… even though this isn’t actually my first Atelier game. I played Atelier Firis, which I reviewed for MonsterVine. I wasn’t too captivated by it except for the alchemy system, largely because the time limit for the first part of the game stressed me out. That put me off the whole series for a while, but since Ryza has no time limit, I decided to return.

That turned out to be a great idea.

Atelier Ryza is really fun. The main character, a girl named Ryza, is bored by life in her quiet island community and dreams of going on adventures. When she and her friends meet an alchemist, she discovers she has a talent for alchemy as well and begins pursuing that while exploring the mainland.

The characters and story never became too compelling, but it had some cute moments. More importantly, the gameplay was fun enough that I didn’t mind not being hooked by the plot.

Alchemy requires materials, which you gather using a variety of tools and then bring back to your atelier to craft items. Many recipes have new recipes that can be unlocked from them, so it created a fun gameplay loop of gathering everything in sight, crafting items, unlocking new items that in turn can unlock even more items, and then repeating the progress (with some story progression thrown in to reach new areas and new materials).

Combat took a bit of getting used to. It’s still in the broad category I’d consider “turn-based,” as it uses an ATB system and you pick your moves from a menu. However, it’s a really fast ATB system, and at first it was a bit overwhelming.

Once I adjusted to it, though, I liked it. I would have enjoyed it more with a traditional turn-based or ATB system, but it has a lot of fun features like performing specific actions requested by a character to trigger their follow-up attack. It’s a strange blend, though, to have such a fast-paced combat system in a game that is otherwise pretty laid-back and relaxing.

Overall I enjoyed my time with Atelier Ryza quite a bit and I’m looking forward to the sequel.

It’s also been brought to my attention that most Atelier games with time limits only pass time when you choose to perform an action, rather than the way Firis handled it, so that makes me cautiously interested in trying one of them sometime. Atelier Ryza reintroduced me to the series, and the only question left is which Atelier game I should try next.