YMMV / Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout

• Best Known for the Fanservice: Atelier Ryza is the best-selling game in the series and also the fastest-selling, and it's often speculated that the lead character's sexier design is the primary reason for this surge in popularity, despite the game also bringing several improvements to the gameplay and graphics.
• Contested Sequel: Atelier Ryza has had a rather divisive reception among the old fans. It's been praised for its vastly improved graphics, character designs, and fun Item Crafting mechanics. However, the game is also criticized for lacking character events, having a short main plot and little post-game content, and missing voice acting in many scenes (previous Atelier games had nearly every cutscene voiced in the Japanese versions). Another point of contention is how much more accessible Ryza is: new fans and casual players appreciate item duplication and the simplified trait system, but more hardcore players feel like it's too easy even on the Harder Than Hard difficulty levels, with even the Super Bosses being trivial to defeat with good equipment (unlike previous games, where extensive Min-Maxing is required to stand a chance). And then there's the combat system, which is also sometimes accused of being overly simplified, while others praise it for being much faster-paced; the addition of real-time elements is also obviously very divisive. With all that said, the vast majority of people that actually played Ryza were not existing fans of the series and they tend to love the game. As a starting point for Atelier, it's probably the easiest entry point yet and it brought a lot of new fans into the franchise that felt daunted by the limitations of the older games. Hence the "contesting" is usually done by a now-comparatively smaller group of fans that are more interested in the series from the Arland or Dusk eras.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Many people lamented the fact that Bos wasn't a playable character.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Reinforcing your weaponry can result in some insane combos. Most items you can reinforce your weapons with only add stats, but if you reinforce a weapon with a usable item you also gain an ability for the weapon. These can range from the decent (buffs at the start of the battle) all the way to ridiculous. Elemental damage items, for example, give great stats and increase the damage the character does with this particular element. Lila can use any element. So if you reinforce her weapons with three elemental damage items, three of her four skills do significantly increased damage. Special shout-out to the Energianica, which, when used to reinforce a weapon, grants the weapon the "gain extra AP" perk you'd usually need a Support character for.
  • The Philosopher's Stone is the best Synthesis item in the game. It is not a Game-Breaker though, because you can only make it after beating the Final Boss. Crystal Elements, on the other hand? They are almost as good of a Synthesis item (better in some regards as they have more keywords attached and add Synth Quality), unlock much earlier in the game, are significantly easier to create and only cost about a tenth as much as a Philosopher's Stone to duplicate. Once you make a good Crystal Element and dupe it a couple dozen times, you'll suddenly be making significantly better gear and usable items.
  • Item duplication makes it very easy to deck out your entire party with the strongest possible gear. Unlike previous games where you'd have to make a bunch of cloth and ingots with the perfect traits, here you only need to make one batch and duplicate it. The downside is supposed to be that duplication costs gems, and more powerful items are more expensive, but there are ways to earn loads of gems easily. For example:
    • There's a big tree in the southeast corner of Limewick Hill. Hit it with a charged swing from the Scythe Axe (be sure to have the Gathering Up L effect on it) and it'll drop an absurd amount of items. Fast-travel back to the atelier, and reduce these items to get tens of thousands of gems in one quick trip. You can easily get a million gems in about 10 minutes.
    • In the post-game, you can earn gems even more easily by making a Red Stone with the Synth Quantity +2 effect, which causes you to make two extra copies of an item when the Red Stone is used in a synthesis. This effect stacks with itself. Make at least four copies of the Red Stone (which will be costly in gems at first, but you can use the above trick to get you started), then use them to make a Philosopher's Stone. Due to the Synth Quantity +2 effect, you won't make just one, but several Philosopher's Stones at the same time: if you use four Red Stones, that comes out to nine Philosopher's Stones, which earns you more gems when reduced than it cost to make the four Red Stones. Use these gems to duplicate more of your Red Stone, use them to make more Philosopher's Stones, rinse and repeat. You can easily make millions of gems in minutes using this trick, more than enough to turn the supposedly high cost of duplication into basically chump change.
  • Due to a possible glitch, the game considers basic attacks to count as skills. Due to this, the best traits by a huge margin are stacking skill damage multipliers. Not only does this mean your abilities will be absurdly powerful, character's basic attacks will do more damage than any possible item you can make. In some cases, simple attacks can do MORE damage than abilities with this build. Even crazier? There are certain abilities that reduce Wait Time after skill use, which will trigger after basically any action that isn't using an item, so a character with such an ability can attack basically constantly.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: One of the biggest complaints along with the strange lack of traditional character interaction of older games to pad it out about the game's tiny main story. It's also extremely easy to make top level gear for your entire party within a couple of hours of beating the game without leaving the hideout, rendering the postgame almost nonexistent. The DLC episodes only being around 20 minutes long did not go over well either.
• Memetic Mutation: Ryza is THICC/Thighza/The Power of Thighs ^Explanation The fandom near-instantly fell into Perverse Sexual Lust over Ryza's Ms. Fanservice figure as soon as the game was announced, with her voluptuous thighs earning special attention. After the game's release, it went on to become the fastest-selling installment in Atelier history, selling as much in four months as Atelier Sophie did in nearly half a decade; many fans couldn't help but point out (jokingly or otherwise) that Ryza's thighs could very well be the main reason for its strong performance.
• Misaimed Fandom: The producer of the game was actually surprised how much attention Ryza got for her thighs and sexiness as the developers did not design her to be sexy or draw people's attention towards her thighs.
  Junzo Hosoi: Our approach was to make a cute character without any sexual innuendo whatsoever. Everyone sort of looks at her as sort of being sexy, and that’s completely not how we look at her, so that really caught us by surprise. (Laughs)
• Polished Port: The Nintendo Switch version is nearly identical to the PS4 release barring some minor graphical downgrades, and it can be played on the go. Other Atelier games have been ported to Switch with mixed results, so this was a nice surprise for those playing on the go.
  • While not as dramatic, this also represented one of the smoother PC ports on release.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The save system itself has become this to some fans as they see it as outdated. While it always has been Atelier Series tradition to only save at your atelier, in earlier games, this wasn't much of a issue because they were mostly short time management affairs that lasted a few hours on average and never strayed too far from your hub town. However, with later games becoming larger in scope and foregoing time limits entirely, the lack of options to save anywhere has become a hindrance to some players who note that losing to a boss and having to redo all their progress from their last save is a pain. While this game does have a warp system in place to circumvent this should it happen, some fans think that this game should've included either save points in specific spots, the option to save from the pause screen at anytime, or an auto-save feature instead for convenience.
  • It's very hard to find someone who likes the CC item system, as it is seen as the final form of previous Scrappy Mechanic systems that made consumable items much easier to abuse with essentially infinite uses. Never mind that those uses are barely ever necessary as you'll usually have your basket full of materials long before you run out of CC so you'd have to head back anyway. Ultimately the system de-incentivizes item usage versus infinitely spammable abilities, when the core of one of these games is the items you create in the first place.
  • Fatal Drives. They are your super moves and extremely powerful, at the cost of only learning them at Level 40 (50 is the cap), needing to be at max Tactics Level to use them and dealing with the effect of them slapping your Tactics Level down to 1. That's not what lands them here. The issue is that they are tied to That One Achievement, which wants you to use everyone's Fatal Drive at least once. Which is difficult since everything but the game's hardest Super Boss is dead long before you can use one.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Although reception isn't universally negative, a noticeable portion of the fanbase is not happy with the addition of real-time elements to the combat system, after previous games had stuck to strictly turn-based combat where you can take as long as you want planning your next move.
  • The most hated mechanic among the fanbase in the game is the CC item use system, which in practice just exists to annoy the player since dangerous areas can be teleported out of to your base for refills.
  • The Gathering Synthesis system isn't well liked due to being more difficult to do than simply gathering in the world or abusing duplication and gardening. Most agree that the world creation system has a lot of wasted potential.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: One things which many reviews point out is that the graphics have received a noticeable upgrade compared to previous Atelier titles. The new and improved lighting effects elevate the series' art style to a whole new level, with beautiful results.

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