Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land
Developer: Gust
Publisher: Koei Tecmo
Platforms: PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S (Reviewed), PC
Release Date: March 21, 2025
Price: $69.99 USD – Available Here $99.95 – Available Here
Overview
Every trilogy of Gust’s Atelier franchise takes new and different takes on the franchise and over the last few iterations we have seen some of the most significant changes in the form of no longer requiring a time limit to modifying the combat system and the way alchemy works, to finally delivering an entire trilogy focusing on a central, extremely popular main character. This character, who anyone familiar with the franchise knows is Ryza, brought the relatively niche RPG to a broader audience and now Gust and Koei Tecmo are taking things a step further now that Ryza’s story has concluded. This time around nearly every aspect of the franchise has undergone a change, be it item synthesis, combat, exploration, to even the storyline itself.
To top all that off, Koei Tecmo is marking the beginning of this likely trilogy with an unprecedented step for the franchise, releasing the game, Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & The Envisioned Land, on the Xbox Series X, the first time it has ever been playable on an Xbox console. With so many revisions to the formula and an entire new audience to tap into, does Atelier Yumia make a successful debut on the console?
Story
Now it is worth noting that players do not need to have any prior knowledge of the Atelier franchise up until Atelier Yumia to get the most out of the title. In fact even the signature “barrel” joke was almost thought lost until a certain gameplay element was introduced. Each trilogy takes place in an entirely different setting, almost always featuring completely original characters as even longtime guest characters including the ghostly Pamela appear to have been left behind this time. That means that newcomers can jump into this version no problem other than possibly missing out on some of the classic items and enemies players will gather and fight.
Atelier Yumia takes place in a world where the strongest civilization, known as the Aladissian Empire, was destroyed long ago by an unknown and extremely powerful force that many claimed was the result of alchemy. This led to the practice of alchemy being seen as taboo and often completely outlawed throughout parts of the world and this only grew worse when three years prior to the start of the game, the town that Yumia Liessfeldt and her mother lived in was involved in a catastrophic explosion that cost the lives of countless civilians, including Yumia’s own mother. When it was found that Yumia’s mother was an alchemist, all blame fell on her and she has spent the last few years living in isolation trying to learn more about the taboo practice.
As such, when Yumia is approached to venture out on an expedition into the fallen empire as part of the research team, she readily accepts, both to prove her own usefulness as well as find out more about her mother’s true skills and the reality of what actually happened with alchemy in this world. Met with side-eyes, snide remarks, and skepticism by her fellow expedition members, it doesn’t take long for Yumia to prove just how useful she fan be and even make a few allies along the way as the investigation slowly proves to be the darkest the franchise has ever seen. While various parts of the Dusk trilogy featured darker themes and alchemy taken to the extreme and most feature some type of dangerous threat that the title character must stop, this one happens to feature dark themes throughout, both in terms of its villains, world set-up, and even many of the side-stories alongside the core storyline.
In many ways this already feels like a departure from Gust’s usual formula as they rarely delved beyond slice-of-life elements and solving simpler quests and tasks or repairing things all while trying to uncover a mystery with good friends. For Yumia however, almost everyone she meets, including all of her allies, distrust her at first, with alchemy seen as taboo and the initial party members, a pair of siblings, being the most outright distrustful thanks to the events that tore apart their family. Of course, throughout the story and side-quests, with character specific side-quests featuring that character’s face as an icon, Yumia will grow closer to her allies and they’ll also come to understand her as well. In many ways, this harsh starting ground serves as the best way to develop these party members and Yumia herself, as seeing her grow to become friends with her party all while struggling to survive the countless dangers and threats that arise and how hard they fight for her as well makes for some truly wonderful moments. It is also nice to note that, outside of a certain annoying Rutger, the small playable cast is all incredibly likable with Lenja being a personal favorite of mine that I wish would have joined the party as early as she was teased.
Anyways, outside of the party members being solidly written, the core storyline is as well, thanks to how dire the situations end up being and the threats posed by the villains. It is also worth noting that in the world of Atelier Yumia, mana used for things such as alchemy comes from memories and while most of this is from memories from those that have passed on, there are far darker implications from this as players will find out as we won’t spoil them here. It is a bit of a shame that it does feel like the primary villains feel a bit underutilized, especially given their outstanding designs and performances, but given what players will be left with and where Gust can take the story from here, Atelier Yumia sets some outstanding ground work here if it stays true to Gust’s usual formula. Now it is worth noting that while this is a darker storyline from what Gust is used to writing, that doesn’t mean everything is still doom and gloom. There is still some signature Gust humor spread throughout and plenty of charming and cute moments between the cast, but don’t expect quite as many slice-of-life moments as usual.
Gameplay
As we mentioned in the beginning, Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & The Envisioned Land makes changes in almost every regard to its various mechanics though they all still remain intact even if they have been expanded, limited, or completely evolved. The biggest of these happens to be exploration. Once players finish off the initial tutorial, they can hit the ground running with Yumia and find that nearly all of the first area in the game can be explored right away. Ironically, if players venture into a story locked location or near the boundary to the next zone they’ll be told they have to gather the rest of the team first and reset their location. What this means is that Atelier Yumia is almost entirely free roam with an open world filled with question marks that players can travel to to find out what they happen to be. They could be shrines with little puzzles that reward Yumia with skill points and special items that can be used to enhance her skills or expand her mana core’s capabilities, mini altars that can be activated or shot with Yumia’s rifle-staff, campsites, ruins, ziplines that can either already be used for quick traveling or repaired, and even simple quick travel landmarks that make navigation even easier.
To adventure like this Yumia will make use of her agile legs and alchemically-enhanced heels to triple jump up walls, eventually zip around on a motorcycle powered by mana, and even trek through poisonous manabond locations protected by her mana core that slowly drains in locations, is used to protect Yumia whenever she falls a significant distance, craft items like healing bandages, fishing lures, and bullets in her travel bag, or even revive the party if they fall in combat if they have enough mana stored up. The mana core, as mentioned before, can be upgraded at shrines using crystal cores but players will need to balance how they use them as these cores are also required to unlock certain higher tier skills in Yumia’s skill tree, which is also leveled up by taking part in various open world aspects such as solving puzzles, completing shrines, synthesizing items, slaying large monsters, or even taking on randomized quests that can appear.
This means that open world exploration is highly incentivized beyond simply going from mission location to mission location, as players will often find tons of ingredients and monsters to fight along the way and rarely does it feel like a reward is useless, beyond the occasional “blueprint” hidden away in a treasure trove but more on that later. There are also various “missions” that are considered side-objectives and part of the investigation into a region that can provide various rewards as well and these generally revolve around many open world aspects such as exploring ruins and solving the puzzles inside that range from simplistic to a bit complicated, slaying specific monsters, synthesizing items, etc. that will reward Yumia with blueprints, materials, skill points, and other bonuses if certain percentage markers are reached. It is worth noting that not everything can be explored immediately, as the title does feature a few somewhat annoying metroidvania style aspects where certain walls cannot be destroyed or locations explored fully until players obtain a specific tool later on in the game.
Now, while exploring Yumia will run into plenty of enemies to fight and combat is similarly something that has undergone a radical transition. First, while it is possible to simply smack an enemy or run into them in the field, players can use bullets to stun an enemy and begin a fight with their opponent already stunned and weakened. Battles will be fought with three characters in the frontline and eventually three in reserve that can be swapped in on a cooldown system and while players can only control Yumia out in the field, they can choose whichever party member they want to actively initially control in combat through the party system or swap to another party member in the middle of a fight. Fights happen in real time with enemies being weak to either physical or magical attacks that, when hit enough times, will leave them stunned and open to powerful elemental attacks, including team-up attacks once players unlock that ability and equip allies with matching attack items that target the foes weakness. Attacks are done by pressing one of the four face-buttons depending on if the character has them unlocked and each attack has a certain number of uses and will be on cooldown after they are exhausted, but this mostly makes it so players try to focus on combo attacks.
Combat on Normal difficulty is almost always an easy affair against normal enemies, in more than a few cases with fights ending in seconds, as long as players know what they are doing and players can choose to block incoming attacks or dodge out of the way of them. Some foes can unleash AoE style blows that display an attack radius that players can run out of or swap from the inner attack ring to the outer attack ring. It is also worth noting that characters will have different attacks depending on their ring placement. As players unlock additional combat abilities they’ll find that they can pull off attacks that swap in allies to counterattack and other powerful magic attacks. It is only really through boss battles and late game locations that proper planning is required as even fighting against enemies below your level in these areas may be challenging if players aren’t properly equipped. That being said, while strategy is required for most late game boss battles and major encounters with stronger foes near the end of the game, it is easy to see that the chaotic combat is something of a drawback at times especially with how quick most encounters end on Normal without any strategy and simply mashing combos.
The alchemy system has also undergone a rather unique change and not just cosmetically. Since alchemy uses the mana from memories, Yumia can only learn non-plot related recipes once she has obtained some of the recipe’s ingredients and then unlocked it using mana particles obtained from fights or exploring the world. As a result, there appear to be far fewer actual recipes that players need to worry about crafting throughout the game, though there are still plenty, it pales in comparison to even the Ryza series. That being said, there are two different kinds of alchemy in Atelier Yumia, simple alchemy that can be performed out during exploration such as using gathered materials to craft bullets, bandages, etc. and complex alchemy used to craft everything from weapons to healing items and of course, other ingredients.
In interesting fashion, the actual synthesis mechanic in Atelier Yumia is quite complex and only gets more detailed and intricate the more players power up Yumia’s skills and progress through the game. Each recipe has separate “cores” that generally require a specific ingredient or type then have extra locations players can put other optional items into that, if high enough quality or meet certain criteria, will reach untapped subcores that provide extra bonuses to the item such as giving it a slot, providing extra uses, stat boosts, and more. The level of customization is very deep and players can spend a lot of time finicking around with proper items and making a recipe exactly how they want it but it is also worth noting that some of this is entirely optional should players choose to go the easy way. The easy way is simply pressing the “auto-fill” option and then selecting a category to aim for, ranging from highest quality, most effective, and bare minimum. Thankfully, should players select this option, the final combined set of ingredients will be shown to players before actually crafting the item, giving players the option to still tweak things if needed or remove a rare item that was accidentally added in.
Another brand new aspect that makes use of Yumia’s alchemical skills is the ability to build things. Literally. As players clear out larger dungeons or discover campsites throughout the world they will find that they can craft and build things on these designated lots, with each building site having a limited amount of total items that can be placed within and a comfort level that can provide various boosts if it reaches a certain level. This means that players can choose to simply drop down their ingredient collection box and mana core recharging station and simply move on, or decide to build a small home from the ground up, choosing the wall styles, flooring, rooftop and all that and then filling it with decorations, furniture, and of course, the signature joke barrel. Building items does require ingredients but it is simple root level stuff such as wood, stone, water, etc. Simple things that make customization and building in locations completely viable if players want. Of course, there is always the option to once again, have pre-built buildings placed down and customize these at will or drop down a valuable greenhouse that can replicate ingredients, a warehouse that increases Yumia’s storage box size, and more.
Our time with Atelier Yumia on the Xbox Series X was mostly flawless but it did have its fair share of bugs though a lot of these seemed to come from trying to navigate the environment. On multiple locations Yumia would find herself stuck in-between a set of rocks, perpetually falling and unable to move but thankfully players can quick-travel out of these situations. Unfortunately, the game also happened to crash to the Xbox Home screen on multiple occasions, completely randomly too. Thankfully, the title does feature a fairly solid auto-save system as well as the ability to save anytime during expiration so even when the title did crash, little progress was lost.
Audio & Visuals
Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & The Envisioned Land is also a solid step in a more intricate direction for their character models as well. While the main characters in the party aren’t anything too special outside of Yumia herself as well as Nina and Linja, the real character designs that shine here are the villains of the game, featuring some of the most standout designs the series has had. The enemy design for standard foes is fairly predictable, especially with many signature enemies making their return. The various environments that players explore are nicely detailed with plenty of little outcroppings to jump up to, caves to explore, and various hidden secrets to try and uncover though it must be said that the first two locales are the best of the bunch, leaving the last few areas a bit disappointing. As mentioned before, combat is fast and frantic with some fights lasting barely a few seconds, so players will either need to pay close attention to what is happening or simply mash away to victory most of the time, though, as mentioned, boss battles do require an extra level of thought and trying to make things out through the noise.
As one would expect given their last few releases in the franchise, Atelier Yumia continues Koei Tecmo’s tradition of only releasing the Japanese voice track to accompany the English subtitles for the game. Thankfully not only does the Japanese voice cast perform extremely well here, with Yumia being an easy standout among the colorful cast, but everything is subtitled, be it in-battle dialogue to random exploration chirps from allies and even Yumia’s alchemical flying lamp assistant Flammi. The soundtrack features some solid background music that works well both during standard field exploration and the brief combat encounters but some of the best music comes from both boss battles as well as the mesmerizing dances that Yumia performs to purify a manabound location from time to time.
Overall
Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & The Envisioned Land take the Atelier franchise forward with a fairly significant first step here, delving into open world waters while mixing in almost complete action combat while also offering both complex and simplified item synthesis, offering a little something for everyone. Combine this with a darker storyline that still has hints of humor and plenty of character growth and Gust has managed to break some new ground here with Atelier Yumia. The combat system may leave a decent amount to be desired at its core but exploring the world in a brand new manner all while keeping the “feeling” of the Atelier franchise alive is a great accomplishment for a title that changes so much while retaining many of the aspects that make the franchise memorable for longtime fans and newcomers.
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