Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land draws inspiration from where you'd least expect

Sitting down to play Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land, Gust President Junzo Hosoi wanted to make one thing clear; while Atelier Ryza's success allowed the series to continue after a series of tumultuous releases, the team isn't merely sitting on their laurels. They want Atelier Yumia to continue the upward trajectory with sales, and almost everything that has gone into the game - from its development, to its release platforms, and even its marketing have all been decided with that one goal in mind. Put another way - just because the Ryza trilogy was a massive success for the studio, the team doesn't want to forget that the series might not have made it this far if it hadn't been a breakout hit.

Speaking bluntly, Hosoi made the situation as clear as day "Atelier Ryza released in a situation where if it hadn't been a success, it might have spelled the end of the series". The team had to make absolutely sure that the series could sell in Japan; and now with the success of Ryza behind them, they've taken a serious look towards the West. While I had just flown up from Los Angeles to demo the game at Koei Tecmo's San Francisco office, Hosoi had flown out from France straight from the Europe leg of the press tour. This was the first time that Gust has directly participated in an International preview tour for one of their games. Atelier Yumia will launch worldwide with 9 supported languages - English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Korean, Japanese and both Simplified and Traditional Chinese.

Part of this worldwide push is the reason that Atelier Yumia will be the first entry in the series to release on Xbox. Though, we get the impression that this wasn't purely just a business decision. While in the past Hosoi has shared his affinity for Master Chief, we underestimated just how much love he has for Halo as a franchise - Yumia's alchemical assistant, Flammi, was explicitly inspired by the relationship between Master Chief and Cortana.

Prior to the preview event proper he expressed an interest in what sort of FPS western players gravitate towards in the current climate, and he seemed genuinely disappointed that Halo has fallen out of favor compared to games like Valorant, Counter Strike, Apex Legends and the like. As an aside; Hosoi also shared that he's always on the lookout for new FPS to play. He hopes that Borderlands 4 will be good - while he enjoyed the first two, he found himself disappointed in Borderlands 3.

"I really love Xbox; I've been a user since the original, and I've always wanted to release something for the platform". Although he would've liked to have released Ryza on the system, it wasn't until after its success that he was able to justify it alongside the worldwide push. He also thought it would be far easier to make the case for a port with a new trilogy, for a new audience, rather than an ongoing one.

If you got started with the Atelier series with Ryza, then it might not be immediately obvious - traditionally, the series has operated on a loose "trilogy" framework. While entries like Atelier Lulua and Atelier Sophie 2 have revisited previous entries, by and large Gust has tackled Atelier 3 games at a time. This means that not only is Atelier Yumia meant to be a new starting point for fans and newcomers, but it's an entirely different world and universe to those that have come before, complete with new gameplay systems, and a completely overhauled Synthesis system.

Expanding from Ryza 3's shift to open-world zones, the entirety of Atelier Yumia is now one big open world. Towns, created outposts and specific landmarks can be used for fast travel; eventually Yumia can gain access to her own motorcycle to zip across the environment. Using crafted gloves you're able to ride repaired ziplines to and from their preset locations. While Atelier has toyed with open world gameplay in the past, Yumia has gone all in on the concept - and you'd be surprised to learn what some of the base inspirations for the gameplay loop were.

In addition to the regular synthesis loop inherent to the series, Atelier Yumia adds a basic synthesis system and a building system that uses basic non-specific resources - Wood, Iron, and so-on - to allow you to create consumables while out exploring the field, or base camps where you can rest and rejuvenate. While Ryza 3 let you edit what sort of Atelier you used in each of the game's regions, it was nowhere near the scope that Yumia offers. While you can choose from a number of presets that you can autopopulate if you have the right amount of resources, players that wish to make their outposts their own can really get their hands dirty and craft them from scratch.

When asking Hosoi about how the Atelier franchise's identity revolves around a core gameplay system, and how that impacts how the team tackles each new project he was quick to bring up that it was actually a realization he had when considering some of the survival crafting games he loves to play. When thinking about games like Valheim, Grounded, or even Fallout 4 their gameplay loops - gathering materials to craft specific objects, gear, items and more - might just fit in with Atelier's identity. That's not to say that the traditional synthesis system has been sidelined, however. If anything, it benefits just as much from the new approach. Thanks to the new open world, specific materials can have dedicated spawn locations marked on the map, with specific enemy dens and especially potent optional bosses marked as well.

Without getting into the weeds, Yumia's synthesis system is quite unlike anything that's come before it. The key word this go around is "Resonance", and the key to successful synthesis revolves around taking advantage of how different materials might have a stronger area of effect - "Resonance" - when added to a synthesis recipe. After placing the core material for a synthesis, additional materials are inserted in key points orbiting that original material. Placing higher quality materials in a slot won't only increase the effectiveness of the final craft on its own, but if the Resonance radius can overlap with other objects on the synthesis map your Resonance rating will also rise, further introducing additional benefits to the finished material, item or equipment.

The end result is a far more free form synthesis system than what Ryza offered; easier to grasp, but still with plenty of depth for players to take advantage of. I also foresee experienced Atelier fans quickly being able to break it over their knee with just a little effort; though during the duration of my preview I wasn't quite able to get that far. What did stand out, however, is how different exploring the world and combat feels compared to previous entries.

Unlike previous entries, Atelier Yumia is based on a real time system with cooldowns, and players can switch between melee and ranged attacks depending on which of two "ranges" they attack from. Enemies have a set amount of shield, which can be whittled down by attacking them with either physical or magical attacks. While it may be a little confusing, this doesn't mean that synthesis items with an element will count as a magical attack - specific skills will have a physical or magical attribute. In Yumia's case, her default moveset has her skills that are used while in the inner circle dealing physical damage, while her skills in the outer circle deal magical damage. When enemies attack, players can make use of a dodge or a parry to avoid attacks; eventually players can unlock Precision Counters that can be activated by reacting to attacks with perfect timing.

As far as exploration goes, the game gives you a lot of leeway to explore the world as you see fit. Dotted across the environment are ruins from the Aladissian Empire, filled with puzzles that make use of Yumia's platforming ability, and her gunstaff. Even outside of these areas that explicitly ask the player to make use of her moveset, players can take advantage of the environment to make their own path. Energy is used to help protect the party while they explore manabound areas (returning briefly to the game's inspirations, Hosoi mentioned that Fallout's irradiated areas were a direct inspiration for this new system), but also to shield you from fall damage. While Yumia can use her gun to gather resources from ore deposits alongside a cliff wall, those same nodes can be used as footholds to either ascend or descend a mountain while making use of Yumia's double-jump. From the few hours we played - which was admittedly split between trying to parse the game's new synthesis system, battle system, and everything else - it seems like Yumia's open world has some genuinely thoughtful design to how it's laid out.

On a similar note, in addition to the few hours we had the chance to demo a near-final PlayStation 5 build of the game at Koei Tecmo's US office, we were also given access to a PC build of the game through Steam. On a Steam Deck OLED, the game maintains a solid 30 FPS on the Standard graphics preset, though we did have to settle for XeSS in Balanced mode. The game does not include AMD's FSR or nVidia's DLSS, which is certainly eyebrow raising - but the XeSS implementation looks better than FSR on either AMD or nVidia hardware, and the game ran great on both my Ryzen 9 5980HX and RX 6800M laptop at 1440p high settings, XeSS on Quality mode, at over 60 FPS - as well as my Ryzen 7 9800x3D and RTX 5090 desktop completely maxed out, and with XeSS set to Native Anti-Aliasing managing 4K at 120FPS without much issue. The game does support an uncapped framerate, though CPU bottlenecks may be a concern for anyone targeting higher framerates.

Even discounting that the game may well receive further optimizations prior to launch, the PC port seems to be in a genuinely great state already. Keyboard and mouse controls are surprisingly solid, too - with all menus having full mouse support. If I had one nitpick, it's a shame that the Dualsense features present in the PlayStation 5 release - including the adaptive triggers - are absent from the PC version, even when using a Dualsense controller with Steam Input disabled. That's a minor nitpick, all told; while the game ran fine on a base PlayStation 5, whatever the game uses for its TAA implementation on console is fairly distracting compared to XeSS on PC.

All told, Atelier Yumia feels like the bold approach I'd expected after Ryza's success - and it's clear that the team is confident that the final product should deliver. While I can't speak for how the full game will stack up to this small slice of the overall package (while Koei Tecmo did supply us with PC save files for later in the game, I opted to stick to the early game in order to maintain the integrity of my playthrough), I'm excited to see more. Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land launches for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X|S and PC on March 21. Stay tuned for our full review, which should drop sometime next month.