Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land PC Review
Summary: Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land introduces many great concepts and features but fails to be wholly entertaining. It contains unnecessarily tedious features and awful performance that will hopefully be fixed post-launch.
3.3
A Middling Adventure
Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land is the latest title in the long-running Atelier series. It notably features several new changes from its characters to its narrative, lore, and more. It also introduces several interesting concepts, but unfortunately, they aren’t executed in ways that make them fun to play.
Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land takes place in a world where the Aladissian Empire was the most prominent empire in the continent. It was an affluent empire that made several advancements and developments through alchemy. However, disaster struck, and the empire fell due to a mysterious cataclysm that was said to have been caused by alchemy. Centuries later, alchemy has since become a lost art that has been banned and is regarded as a taboo. The game follows Yumia Reisfelt, a young alchemist shunned for her passion. Three years ago, after losing her mother in an accident, Yumia discovered that she was from a family of alchemists and decided to follow in her mother’s footsteps.
She then goes on a quest to find answers to what truly happened to Aladis, the mystery behind her mother’s death, and why Alchemy is now taboo. She meets several characters and gets the help of the Aladis Research Team. Several members accompany her on their quest to learn more about the Aladissian Empire, with each member having their own personal goal to accomplish at the same time.
Atelier Yumia’s story offers players an alternate world quite different from previous games. Alchemists aren’t beloved or considered helpful individuals but are shunned for using a forbidden craft. Alchemy’s origins are also different and tied to a past civilization, and the nature of Mana and how alchemy operates are also different. While these new concepts are interesting and unique, they’re not presented or executed in an entertaining way. The plot boils down to Yumia and her friends traveling across the continent discovering the origins of alchemy and Aladis, but not much comes from it, nor are the discoveries that exciting.
Each mission basically involves Yumia’s group moving from one location to the next, clearing up dense miasma-like Manabounds that restrict movement, and helping people with their discoveries. The only exciting moments of the narrative are when players encounter the game’s few bosses, who are all interesting and have their own mysteries to discover. The characters, including Yumia, while endearing in their own ways, are also quite bland and lack depth. And while not overly tropey, they stick to the same basic character tropes seen in anime and JRPGs.
In terms of gameplay, Atelier Yumia is quite a mixed bag. The game includes some new features that are both highly convenient and fun, but some that are almost the complete opposite. For example, the new Simple Synthesis feature allows players to craft things on the field and on the fly, like bandages, camping kits for resting, zip line gloves, and more. These are highly convenient and make exploring less monotonous and tedious. However, the new Energy system is a prime example of an inconvenient and often annoying new element. Yumia has an energy vial that allows her to do basically everything from sprinting to dispelling Manabounds. However, energy runs out quite quickly, especially when traversing Manabound areas, and large jumps, a core part of traversal, becomes impossible until players find structures or plants that refill their Energy vial. While this system isn’t always annoying, it does feel like it was needlessly tacked on to make exploring unnecessarily more tedious in hopes of being more challenging.
Speaking of tedious elements, some of the worst elements of Atelier Yumia are navigation and traversal. Moving across the map is downright torture, as it involves trying to navigate where to go, what structure is climbable and how, whether or not you need to climb things, and how the dynamic weather system heavily affects the visibility at night, which is already quite low. What’s worse is if your energy is completely depleted when navigating confusing flora and forests, and you can’t jump or run, which makes movement miserable.
However, by far, the worst part of Atelier Yumia is its performance on PC. While I didn’t run into any glitches or crashes, the frame rate is atrocious on an RTX 3060 PC, at least on the game’s pre-release build. Moving across levels is marred by consistent and awful frame rate dips that severely affect the gameplay experience. This issue is specifically present in the whole first area of the game and in very populated areas with many flora and monsters. Combat moments also suffer from frame rate dips but less consistently than during exploration.
Other than that, the Synthesis system is mostly similar to modern games like Atelier Ryza. Players collect ingredients as they roam the world and head back to Yumia’s atelier to craft items and gear. You use particles collected during exploration to add more traits such as special effects and elemental bonuses, upgrade already-made items, and learn new useful recipes. The system is notably much faster and streamlined due to the auto craft system and how fast and easy it is to find and use materials. Overall, the crafting system is perhaps the best the series has been in a while.
In terms of combat, fighting enemies and bosses is fun and feels seamless but the combat system notably lacks depth. Each character in Yumia’s party has a handful of skills they can use in combat. However, these skills are limited and get repetitive quickly, and new skills get unlocked very slowly, which is disappointing. Players can also craft elemental combat tools like frost axes or a flamberge, but these tools don’t do much damage compared to regular skills.
As combat is turn-based and characters have few special skills outside linked attacks, fighting enemies in Atelier Yumia is overly simple and gets boring quickly. However, fighting bosses is always fun as players must strategize with their options and find ways to combine them all during these rare, challenging moments.
Regarding visuals, Atelier Yumia sports excellent art direction, beautiful and detailed models, and great character designs. The facial animations and expressions on the characters are especially noteworthy. Finally, the soundtrack is one of the best the series has seen thus far.
Final Thoughts?
All in all, Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land introduces many great concepts and features but fails to be wholly entertaining. It contains unnecessarily tedious features and awful performance that will hopefully be fixed post-launch.
About the Author
Abdul Saad Abdul Saad is a seasoned entertainment journalist and critic, and has been writing for five years on multiple gaming sites. When he isn't writing or playing the latest JRPG, he can be found coding games of his own or tinkering with something electrical.
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