Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout

It was my first Atelier's game. It was fun, hardly to understand some of the gameplay mechanics. Gathering materia is not that difficult.

Love it. Easy game and fun to explore the small island. It is such a heartwarming story too. LOVE IT.

An average RPG for fans that want eye candy more than anything groundbreaking or special. The game and characters are very pretty. Let’s get that out of the way. I’m looking at this game from what exactly you can do in the game and how hard it maybe was for the developers to program this. You run around, you press a button to gather some specific resources at the right time, you engage in an auto battle and then you craft. Crafting and battles are the core gameplay. Listen, the story is nothing to write home about. It’s very average, let’s get that out of the way. The crafting, you follow a path in a branch of icons that is based on what materials you have farmed. The items never appear in-game physically in a distinguishing way. Your weapons always look the same and the items are always just icons—2D photos. Mobile games can express a system like this easily. There’s invisible walls, of course, in the shape of fences or rock walls. It’s obviously not a big world but I question whether this game was actually a ground-up creation or an asset-flip. Did the developers just use resources from past games, fine tune them, make it prettier, add revealing costumes for the girls, and create a decent-at-best RPG? I think so, and that’s lame to me. They pump these Atelier games out fast and this game gets praised so highly when it’s objectively very average. Yes, I know that guys love the girl and her friends. Sure, eye candy sells, but let’s not pretend the game is comparable to other great rpgs. It’s average in every sense of the word and does not break any new ground and I’m sure the developer packs on so much fan service, so you, the consumer will look past the lack of actual functions you can do in-game to spend your hard earned money on literal video game fluff. It’s not an 8, not a 7, not a 6, I won’t remember this game next year. It’s not bad and it can be enjoyable, but that’s it and because farming with RnG mechanics is just something in video games that I don’t support because it’s objectively monotonous: biased score of 4. It is in actuality a 5.