Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land takes the long-running Atelier series in a new direction. With a huge open world to explore and a more somber tone than recent entries, it feels like a completely new adventure. Will this new direction work well? I set out to investigate the land of Aladiss to find out.
Memories of Mother
Atelier Yumia takes place in a world where alchemy is taboo. A massive alchemy-related disaster occurred that claimed the lives of many. Alchemy going out of control was even said to be the cause of the destruction of the entire Aladissian Empire.
Yumia joins the Aladiss research team, who are looking into what happened. Despite the taboo, she’s given special permission to use alchemy, but she’s not trusted by the rest of the team. They even assign two knights to observe her, Viktor and Isla. It’s to the point that some of the team members even think she’ll curse them as if she were a witch.
She wants to find out what really happened. Can alchemy really be such a bad thing, especially when she has fond memories of her mother who used it to make tools? This is an important struggle for Yumia throughout the story.
Yumia certainly had some moments I enjoyed, especially when she relaxed a little and her smug expression appeared or had an amusingly sarcastic back and forth with her companion tool Flammi. That said, the more plot-relevant parts were often focused on the idea of carrying the sins of the past. While certain other characters are immediately somewhat dismissive when the question comes up, treating alchemy like a tool that could be used for good or evil, Yumia seems to take on the burden of every time alchemy was used for nefarious reasons throughout history. Sadly, I found this made it hard to connect with Yumia as a character.
The story continues with a slowly growing party that explores the four regions of Aladiss, gradually uncovering what happened in the past, along with a plot ongoing in the background. The story felt serviceable enough, but quite slow until the final quarter. At that point, it did pick up and actually get very interesting, drawing on the details that had been slowly revealed over time.
Each party member had a moment to shine, but some felt far less important than others, and I can’t say that any stood out too much, even when completing their side quests to add slightly more depth. It didn’t help that Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land feels quite low on slice-of-life content compared to some of the other series titles, but even their more plot-centric moments felt like they were over quickly. Viktor and Isla introduced a connection to a fairly one-dimensional nemesis, Rutger an idea about something alchemy can do, Nina an important plot point, and Lenja’s primarily character traits of lacking confidence but being adorable overshadows what little else there is about her. There is more to it than that, but it felt like those were the highlights and I didn’t really know the characters beyond a surface level by the end. Perhaps some will find more meaning in the character’s short arcs than I did, but I felt like much of the messaging about things like moving forward wasn’t particularly well represented.
Exploring for Alchemy
One thing that Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land does brilliantly is create the feeling of exploration. We’re given four huge maps to roam and it seems that there’s something to find around every corner. There are shrines with puzzles, hidden objects to activate, ruins to explore, building sites to create mini-bases, unique/fixed quests, random quests, and more. It seems to have even more than Final Fantasy VII Rebirth did. If you enjoy exploring this sort of optional content, there’s plenty to find here. Beyond these, there are plenty of components for alchemy, chests, and hidden areas.
The land of Aladiss isn’t one that’s easy to explore at spots, however. There are tons of cliffs and other rough terrain. While some paths are easy, there are places where it’s intended and ones where it perhaps wasn’t intended, where you need to scale mountainsides and make awkward jumps to proceed. Finding a working path to get up a difficult climb could be rewarding at times and helped to add to the feeling that it’s not a land built for convenience. And sometimes those rare flowers or other components could be found in those out-of-the-way places.
Doing a lot of these tasks rewards you not only with items, but also skill points, so it always felt worth it. These can be used to unlock a number of bonuses in exploration, combat, and synthesis.
It didn’t always work out well though. The freedom to explore did occasionally mean I had already almost entirely some cleared ruins that were later story-relevant, making it somewhat anti-climatic when I could just jump to the already unlocked fast-travel point to proceed in the story. A lot of the optional content wasn’t really mentioned until finding it either, such as how to camp and cook meals for buffs. This does make it feel like more of a reward for exploring, but makes the game feel bare if you don’t do it.
More generally speaking though, one of the big rewards of exploring was the chance to pick up a lot of components for alchemy. Having a lot to hand was always helpful.
Alchemy for Dummies
Alchemy is very simple to understand in Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land. While additional systems unlock as you proceed through the game that slightly expand or supplement the alchemy system, it primarily comes down using a single specific ingredient as one of several cores. You then surround those cores with slots filled with an appropriate ingredient, though these can be almost any item in most cases. Later on, more cores and slots appear. There’s slightly more to it and you can also synthesize components to use as components in more powerful items, but it’s generally fairly basic and straightforward.
There are no complex systems like creating chains of items to get very specific traits on equipment or absurdly powerful equipment. This unfortunately also means that equipment and items aren’t particularly different from each other. It doesn’t help that many of the systems to unlock more features may only appear fairly late on and are completely optional.
On top of that, I never felt the need to engage much with alchemy until the end. Each character has one weapon and a few sets of armor per region. Until late-game when I unlocked more systems and skills, the weapons I made weren’t significantly better than those I occasionally found in treasure chests. Items never felt overly important to use in combat either, outside of having a range of them to exploit weaknesses.
More positively, unlocking recipes ties in nicely with exploring. You can only unlock them if you have the correct ‘particles’, which can be found in a few ways, but primarily by finding places to collect them. As well as that, you’ll need to have found the correct components at least once. That’s another way that exploring feels rewarding.
Stylish Dodges and Staff Damage
Combat in Atelier Yumia looks very flashy, and it is perhaps a bit more style over substance. It’s a real-time system where you have to wait for a cooldown to end to use a certain attack more than a specific number of times. I mostly found myself falling into the routine of pressing rotating buttons without thinking about it much, then occasionally dodging to the side when I saw an attack coming. Sometimes these are telegraphed with red marks. There is some complexity to it though.
You can move between the inner and outer range which allows you to change the type of attack. Enemies are stunned when using the right type of attack a certain amount of times. Item effects can also change completely based on range. You can also unlock a skill to stun enemies on a precision dodge, which also switches you to play as that character. With that said, it doesn’t help that combat can be so chaotic at times with so many explosions and flashes of light that it’s hard to see what’s going on.
It’s also worth noting that leveling is absurdly fast in this game. I reached level 100 before the end and I avoided the vast majority of enemies I saw.
I can’t say that combat is anything too engaging, but it was fun enough. I just never found myself needing to think too much about it.
I should note that playing on Normal is quite easy. I only needed to even use Yumia’s special skill twice throughout the entire game, both on bosses with difficulty spikes. If you do want a challenge, clearing the game unlocks an additional difficulty mode with the option of starting a New Game+.
Are Bugs An Alchemy Component Too?
Unfortunately, I did come across enough technical issues in Atelier Yumia to mention them at length. For clarity, I played the entire game on the PlayStation 5. I did begin my playthrough before the official release, but I’m only mentioning issues that I still came across post-release.
Many of the issues I came across are ones fairly common in open-world games. I came across the occasional particle fountain and enemy that seemed to spawn underground or inside a cliff, I managed to activate switches from the wrong side of the wall, and certain NPCs had issues. It was amusing to see a random quest be issued by a monster who was certainly not a member of our team, but less so to find the occasional quest-issuing NPC missing until after saving and loading to spawn them in.
Issues regarding movement weren’t uncommon either. Falling through cliffs happened occasionally, especially when trying to scale them in unusual places. While running on a mostly flat surface I found I couldn’t move on a couple of occasions. I even once fell through an elevator and then got stuck and had to fast travel to escape. Sometimes the camera violently shook in certain places too.
Some issues were more serious, however. For example, a key item for learning a recipe disappeared from my inventory before it let me synthesize the item I needed. The game autosaved after that happened, so I couldn’t proceed. Luckily I had a recent manual save, but lost about 30 minutes of progress. Interactions just stopped working on certain objects like ladders at one point. Luckily, saving and restarting got it to work again. I did experience a couple of freezes and crashes too. Sometimes issues just happened at the absolute worst time too, like when during the final boss fight, the screen just went black for about two minutes after a scripted scene. Luckily it came back on and continued.
Atelier Yumia is certainly a very ambitious game and a lot of good has come of that when it comes to exploring the huge world, but it does seem like it needed a bit more work before release. These issues did impact my experience and caused a good amount of frustration.
A Beautiful Country
For the most part, Atelier Yumia looks great. Each region looks distinct with an interesting design, the character and enemy models all look detailed, and the performance is generally fairly smooth. I have noticed some rare occasions when character models seem somewhat blurred temporarily as if there is a filter over them, but these soon resolve themselves.
The selection of background music fits the situation well and the voice actors all play their parts well. I particularly liked the voice of Flammi, who by design isn’t supposed to sound emotional, but still managed to get across an interesting personality.
Verdict
Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land is perhaps not what long-time Atelier fans or even those who joined with Atelier Ryza would expect, but it’s an ambitious new take on the Atelier series. It does a wonderful job of creating a sense of exploration and rewarding it, which creates a fun experience. It could however improve certain aspects, particularly around systems like alchemy and how little it links to combat and gameplay, as well as by fixing technical problems. It’s something new for the series and a solid base to build on and improve for future titles.
ATELIER YUMIA: THE ALCHEMIST OF MEMORIES & THE ENVISIONED LAND IS RECOMMENDED
Cooking & Camping Guide: Click Here
If you are looking for reviews of other Atelier titles, you can check those out here. Or, if you’re looking for a different longrunning JRPG series, check out our reviews of The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak I and Daybreak II.
Many thanks go to Koei Tecmo for a PlayStation 5 review code for Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land.
A gamer since the days of Amstrad and DOS and someone who has dabbled in a variety of professions. He enjoys a wide variety of genres, but has been focusing on visual novels and virtual reality in recent years. Head Editor of NookGaming. Follow him and the website on @NookSite.
