Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land suffers from a complete lack of friction. Its systems feel designed to be easy to engage with, but that results in a lack of depth. For an experience as long as this one, that easy reading quickly turns into tedium. Combine that with a bland story that does have at least likable characters with good chemistry, Atelier Yumia has little to offer outside of having a ton of content.
Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land
Developer: Koei Tecmo Games
Price: $70
Platforms: Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S (reviewed), PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, and PC
An Xbox Series X code was provided by the publisher for review
Atelier Yumia’s Story and Characters – A Likeable Cast in a Bland Narrative
Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land is a prime example of a game that has plenty of content, but most of it is incredibly bland. It’s not a bad game by any means, but the majority of its systems are either incredibly shallow or in the rare case where there is depth, you aren’t required to engage with it and are encouraged not to. As far as narratives go, the central mystery provides enough intrigue to keep moving and the characters have great chemistry together, but nothing here is going to make pushing through this massive game necessarily worth it.
Atelier Yumia follows Yumia, an Alchemist in a world where the practice is banned and taboo due to a tragic incident believed to be caused by Alchemy. Yumia’s mother was killed in that same incident and was also an Alchemist, motivating her to join the research team, which aims to explore the lands and try and uncover the truth. The bits of information you get about the main narrative are pretty paint by numbers and the idea that Alchemy is frowned upon has no impact on gameplay, just mentioned constantly in story cutscenes.
The game takes place in a massive open-world, covered in question marks for you to discover. These can be tough enemies, puzzles to solve, or items to collect. Combat is one of the least engaging systems in Atelier Yumia, as it revolves around you button-mashing different abilities that all basically do the same thing. You can break an enemy’s guard and deal extra damage with items you craft via Alchemy, but that’s also completely unnecessary. Even boss fights don’t require you to engage with that system, and the extra damage you would get is so minimal that it’s not worth doing. To call the combat mindless would ignore the fact that you do need to occasionally dodge, but the fights are identical from start to finish in such a boring way.
The puzzles you find throughout the game are just about the same as the combat, simple and the same throughout, but there are at least a few different versions. In some cases, you need to rotate tiles to create a path, rotate parts of a circle to create a path, or memorize a pattern and repeat it. The only compliment I can give the puzzles is that they are short, so you can get in and out quickly, which lessens the tedium of seeing the same handful of simple puzzles constantly.
Alchemy and base-building are the two systems that offer some actual depth, but you are also given an easy way to skip these systems with zero punishment. Starting with Alchemy, you can use materials collected in the open-world to create items. Some items, like furniture or quest items, can be made with a simple set of materials, but weapons, armor, and other combat items can be fed additional items to increase their quality, increasing their stats. You can get into the nitty gritty and pick every individual aspect to your liking, but ultimately this only impacts the numbers in combat, and not how you actually engage with it. Because of that lack of meaningful impact on the gameplay, I quickly swapped over to using the auto-build feature, which can be set to maximize quality. You may get slightly battle items doing it manually, but when combat asked so little of me anyway, I didn’t feel compelled to do so.
The base-building falls into a similar issue. As you clear Manabound areas to progress the story, the rest of the research team will set up there and you will be given a space to build a base for them. Now, there are no gameplay benefits to doing this, but the tools are simple enough and I liked decorating enough to do it myself the first time. But you quickly will have more and more bases you could build and I never felt compelled to go through that process again, since I had my fun the first time. You can also auto-build a setup, which I did a few times, just to see, but again, no incentive to engage with the system outside of however much enjoyment you get from it.
The saving grace here is the characters that join your party. You start with Viktor and Isla, siblings, quickly adding a few more members as the game goes on. Each character is one dimensional when it comes to motivations and personality, but they have fun interactions with each other. A few genuine emotional moments between them in the middle-to-late part of the game had me caring more than I expected for the party, although the main narrative never gets there. The tone for most character interactions is a bit silly, but that fun at least brings some interest to the cutscenes outside of the fine story.
The Final Word
Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land ultimately suffers from being too simple. While it does avoid making engaging with any of its systems frustrating, this creates a complete lack of depth, resulting in most aspects of the game feeling identical whether you are doing them in hour 1 or hour 50. It has tons to do, and if you want something simple and mindless, it does work in that mold, but I can’t imagine wanting to play for more than a few hours, since you have seen everything it has to offer.
– MonsterVine Rating: 2.5 out of 5 – Mediocre
