YMMV / Atelier Ryza 2: Lost Legends & the Secret Fairy

• Best Known for the Fanservice: Like the previous game, people mostly know the Ryza sub series for its attractive female lead, but this time, the developers have attempted to invoke this trope from the start. Compare this game's box art to the previous ones and notice how much more Ryza's thighs are emphasized. Ryza's more revealing outfit is not only a feature, but the game's marketing also pushes players to buy her swimsuit dlc.
• Continuity Lock-Out: Unlike its predecessor (and most of the older Atelier titles), Atelier Ryza 2 is a terrible Jumping-On Point. Returning characters are introduced with very little explanation of who they are and how they relate to each other, which might leave new players confused. At one point, the game drops the word "Philuscha" in a sentence without explaining what it means; those who have finished the previous game will undoubtedly understand what's being talked about, but new players won't get any kind of explanation until several hours and dungeons later. Overall, you'll probably have a much better experience if you've played the first Atelier Ryza beforehand.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Everything related to alchemy that broke the first game wide open is back and made even easier with Dennis's capability of reinforcing equipment. Simply create and duplicate the items with the desired effects, have Dennis slap them onto a piece of gear, and stack all desired effects on everything for very little effort beyond the initial setup. In addition, unlike the first game, where the final quality of a synth is an average of all the ingredients used (making your creations take penalties if you just cram low-quality filler ingredients in to unlock loops), here every item added will only improve Quality, so hitting the quality cap is much, much easier. Furthermore, you can even reinforce armor and accessories, complete with the option of either replacing a weaker fourth Effect (or adding one if the base item lacks a 4th Effect) with some of the unique Reinforcement effects that can be acquired from using special ingredients.
  • Upgrading a character's Core Crystal allows them to start a battle with more than 0 CC. Get a powerful-enough item with a low(ered) CC cost equipped on a powered-up character, and nearly every regular battle can be won just by opening the item menu and lobbing an Attack All item to instantly kill everything.
  • The Garland effect on Rose Bombs is designed to do more damage to enemies the lower their HP is. Thanks to a Good Bad Bug, the effect is much more powerful than intended, to the point where the bonus damage is absolutely ridiculous even when used on an enemy with full health. Combined with the ability to upgrade your Core Crystal so that it's already partially charged, you can just have everyone throw a Rose Bomb as their first move, which should end most fights very quickly.
  • The essence system makes exploiting the Elemental Loop synthesis the game uses even easier when it comes to making powerful equipment. Celestial Essence ensures that when you morph a recipe into the next tier, you gain 1 additional item to add to the mixture. Going from a tier 1 to tier 5 weapon can yield a canny player more than thirty ingredient slots to stuff ingots into their weapons, so you can easily cram more than twenty Goldterions into a weapon to inflate its stats with the 'Gear Synth All+5' boosts, and the amount of materials you can stuff into accessories can get very impressive if you start from their precursor recipes, for example, going from Polishing Powder up the gemstone recipe morphs to reach the lategame accessories after the Arc en Ciel. Tack on Elemental Essences to unlock the most powerful version of a weapon's Effect and stat boosts, and you can make some unbelievably strong equipment before even factoring Dennis's reinforcing services.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: A common criticism is that once you manage to grasp how the various item crafting mechanics work (which should come very quickly if you've played the previous game), pretty much all challenge goes out the window. Just making semi-decent equipment should let you breeze your way through the whole game, even on Hard difficulty. If you're playing on PC, some players will even recommend downloading a save file that has the Harder Than Hard difficulties unlocked right from the start, which is the only way the game will pose any kind of challenge for an experienced player.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Fatal Drives and their Awesome, but Impractical nature are back from the first game, behave exactly the same way, and brought their cousin, Core Drives, along with them. Like the first game, the vast majority of battles will end long before any of them will ever be used. And, once again, executing all of them is tied to achievements.
• That One Achievement: Obtaining all of the room decorations primarily due to half of them being tied to feeding the Puni in Ryza's atelier. Knowing what combinations of stats result in which items is pure Guide Dang It!.