It’s been an exciting journey playing through Ryza Stout’s journey through Kurken Island and out to Ashra-am Baird, and for the third entry we return home to explore the Kurken Islands even further. It’s incredible how big Atelier Ryza 3: Alchemist of the End & the Secret Key is compared to the previous two games. Having you travel not just between Kurken Island and the mainland, but new islands never discovered, new regions that couldn’t have existed in the first game, and even exploring a larger section of the underworld. Ryza 3 is a great callback to the first game, exploring areas you’ve already visited briefly only to find brand new regions hidden in plain sight. But is the sense of scale enough to warrant revisiting these characters and their story again?
Atelier Ryza 3: Alchemist of the End & the Secret Key
Developer: Gust
Price: $60
Platforms: PS5 (reviewed), Nintendo Switch, and PC.
MonsterVine was provided with a PS5 code for review
I was excited to get back into Atelier Ryza when Alchemist of the End & the Secret Key came about. When I played through Lost Legends & the Secret Fairy several years ago, it felt very refreshing and new. I was meeting new and interesting characters, in a new setting and different world I was content to explore. Returning to the Kurken Isles, with the same characters, and a lot of the same stories was supposed to be a welcoming and familiar experience, but it turned me off completely.
Don’t get me wrong, Alchemist of the End & the Secret Key has new characters, new worlds to explore, some new enemies and new elements, but I couldn’t shake that initial feeling of being too familiar with what was going on. The central story surrounds new islands showing up all over the world, or perhaps, just the immediate area, it’s hard to tell. Ryza and co. decide that since they’ve already solved two great mysteries, one good turn deserves another. These new islands appear to be messing with the main island, Kurken Island, so it’s of the utmost importance that this mystery be solved.
Ryza 3 introduces a new mechanic surrounding keys created either at landmarks or during battle. I felt like Gust was a bit overzealous in making the keys important, and caused me a bit of a headache. If you’re really into item management, I feel like the keys are going to be your bread and butter. They offer buffs to characters you equip with them, and you can change the buffs/elements by modifying them in battle. Likewise, they can be used on the field to unlock supply points and barriers, allowing you to get around the map easier. While Ryza 3 did a very good job of explaining this mechanic to me, it felt overworked. The keys didn’t feel particularly compelling to me, just as an item. And as a mechanic, it felt overfunctioning. The amount of things related to using the keys, how to get them, how to modify them, exploring the skill tree to make them better. For a good portion of Ryza 3, I felt in over-my-head with these keys.
Along with the key feeling, I also felt like I was doing worse in battle. While the Atelier series has always felt more compelling to me when focusing on the crafting, battle never felt so one-sided. I was dying a lot. I realized my gear was wildly out of date, and while I had recipes for the next set of gear up, I had no way to make it. This led to my first main gripe, a world so big it’s impossible to find a lot of the materials on your own. Exploration is great, and when I was exploring in Ryza 3, I was having a lot of fun. Provided I had the right keys to unlock barriers, I was having a lot of fun. However, once you hit a wall in the story and you look back at the previous maps to see if you missed anything, you start to see just how much there is to explore. You can spend a lot of time just unlocking landmarks and ziplines.
Along with all of the other ways you were allowed to travel quickly in the first two games, Ryza 3 introduces ziplines and gliding. Gliding is exactly what you’d expect, a little coast when running and jumping followed by skating on the ground. Ziplines have two points that need to be activated before you can use them. Gliding is boring, ziplining is fun. I found that while these niceties were great to have, they seldom made exploration easier. Ziplines did make grinding for materials a bit easier, and I was happy to have them. But on such a massive scale, I was overwhelmed by how much there was to do.
Ryza 3 didn’t resonate with me. The excitement of a new series had worn off, I had hit a wall personally. But even still, Ryza 3 was exciting in thinking about the next Atelier game and how the series has evolved. Considering just how big Ryza 3 is, all the different exploration and crafting techniques, new enemies and items to collect, new worlds to explore, it feels like the next Atelier series is going to be incredible. I didn’t find the key system very engaging and felt like crafting progression was stifled over providing too many options for exploration off the beaten path.
The Final Word
Atelier Ryza 3: Alchemist of the End & the Secret Key offers so much and is really the ultimate game in the Ryza series. It just wasn’t for me.
MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
