YMMV / Atelier Firis: The Alchemist and the Mysterious Journey

• Contested Sequel: Atelier Firis is one of the most divisive Atelier Series titles. On one hand, many players love it due to introducing a Wide-Open Sandbox format, with the world being much bigger and open-ended than the previous games, granting the player a feeling of freedom unlike any other Atelier game. However, this open-world gameplay is also criticized due to making backtracking much more tedious than in previous games. Although the new characters are often praised (especially Liane and Ilmeria), most character events are reduced to conversations in the atelier, since that's the only location that the player is guaranteed to have constant access to. There's also the return of the time limit, which is already one of the major sources of Atelier's Broken Base: although this time, it only applies to the main story, with unlimited freeplay afterwards, many players still find it stressful, while others think it's a good way to motivate the player to keep the story moving. The result is that although many players consider it one of the best games in the series, others view it as one of the worst.
• Memetic Mutation: Liane's quote "Firis is cute today too!" has become very popular, and is often quoted in reaction to cute fanart of Firis or used as a title for such artwork.
• Mentor Ship: Sophie x Plachta is already all-but-canon, but this game also adds strong Threesome Subtext between them and Firis and a possible ending together, making this a Master-Apprentice Chain Ship.
• Padding: Done to chew up a chunk of Firis' calendar. The delightfully lengthy transport-construction quest is back, which is made up of running back and forth between characters who are only available during the the day and synthesis tasks that take days to complete — not to mention the time it will take to synthesize the ingredients you need, if you haven't been stocking up. The final item will also require a massive amount of materials, meaning you're probably going to spend more time to go shopping or gathering again. It leaves Firis stalled in one particular location for quite a while.
• Porting Disaster:
  • The game already has framerate issues in the open world spaces even on the PS4 Pro, but the Steam version on release had a great deal of performance problems that are speculated to be related to using the Vita version as its base (including using low-res 2D assets). Multiple post-release patches eventually got the game into a usable shape and even updated the 2D assets, though it still plays like a port of a console game and not a proper PC port optimized for the platform.
  • This was the last Atelier game to release on the Vita and it's an absolute nightmare of a port, leaving some of the larger areas almost unplayable.
• Scrappy Mechanic: One thing pretty much no one liked is the recipe levelling system. If you want to add more traits to items without using catalysts, or be able to rotate the components so they can fit in your cauldron, you have to make the same recipe a bunch of times, wasting your time (which is limited until the post-game) and materials, and you have to do this over and over for almost every single recipe. This is especially annoying with recipes that require rare items to make. The Atelier series is known for being Anti-Grinding, which only makes it seem even more out of place. Thankfully, the mechanic was removed in the sequel, Atelier Lydie And Suelle.
• That One Level: Or, rather, "that one main-storyline quest". You can hear Atelier Totori and Atelier Escha & Logy veterans screaming in horror from miles away when they realize that they have to build a specially-reinforced boat.. Well, at least you know what's coming — it's not like they could make it more annoying. Oh, what's that, Game? Not only is this quest going to take you weeks of the calendar to complete, it's going to spend days keeping us running back and forth between characters who are so disorganized that they couldn't run a bath? And the final item — the furnace — is also going to devour a good chunk of the materials you've gathered? So we better be prepared to go gathering or lose all of those high-level traits we were saving? Brilliant. Just what we needed. Thank you. Even better, if you want the flying ship, you have to synthesize TWO MORE of the aforementioned item-guzzling recipes in rapid succession to get the improved furnace. Mitigated by the fact that the time limit won't be a factor at this point in the game...but remember to stock up on metal ingredients, or you'll be left grumbling as you head out to gather/buy the same materials again.