37.5 hours later, I've finished the main story. Post-game time!
I don't really know how to feel about this one. On the one hand, Ryza represents a pretty big overhaul of the franchise's gameplay, and in a lot of ways change is a welcome thing. The story, while straightforward, is decently executed, and you get closer to the characters here than in most Atelier games. They feel more human, with more convincing motivations and nuanced characterization than usual, even from NPCs. As a result, Kurken Island feels more like a real place than any prior Atelier setting I've played. And while no one's ever going to mistake Ryza for a triple-A game, the graphics do look pretty good (though shadowing on faces continues to be a weak spot for the franchise).
On the other hand, Ryza also feels like the first draft of a new Atelier experience, a necessary stepping stone to the really good Atelier game that's hopefully in our future. There are too many new systems, and it's easy to get through the whole game without really interacting with all of them. Atelier customization turns out to be even less consequential than it was in Firis, with effects too vague to notice. The gathering synthesizer is too fiddly and competes with too many other gem sinks to feel worth the trouble. Money has never felt more pointless than in Ryza, especially since there are so few recipe books you buy from normal vendors. Speaking of pointless, why do exploration logs exist? Do they even grant rewards of any kind?
Bizarrely, in other ways, the game feels pared down. Too much of the story feels like strings of cutscenes connected by fast travel jumps, making it feel like one of the shortest Atelier games in recent memory (though it's really about the same length as OG Rorona and Totori). There are no branching endings of any sort, as far as I can tell, which means no conditions you need to fulfill or character endings to see. Combat feels pretty good once you figure out the rhythm, but feels like it wants you to rely on your weapons and gear instead of items. This has the perverse effect of making alchemy seem less important, and I didn't end up making a lot of items.
Even making weapons and armor feels weirdly underwhelming this time around, mostly because the ability to combine traits has disappeared. Instead, you stack the various Stat Charge traits until you've maxed out their levels, and call it a day. That said, I suspect at least some of the old complexity has just migrated over to the forge, rather than disappearing entirely; you can apply new effects to weapons as well as raising their stats via the forge. I'll have to do some experimenting with it in post-game, but so far the effects I've been able to attach seem underwhelming. Also, you can only forge weapons, not armor.
And then there are the various UI issues, which are nothing new to Atelier games but because so many systems have changed in Ryza, there's even less polish than usual. The encyclopedia has taken a step or two back in Ryza; finding out which enemies drop what ingredients is more obscure and less informative at a glance now. Developing new recipes by making old ones is an inspired twist on the Mysterious trilogy's recipe tasks concept, but an unfortunate side effect is it's harder to know when there's a recipe you just haven't discovered yet, versus an ingredient you haven't found in the world. Similarly, the idea of having multiple collection tools is neat and adds new layers of discovery to areas you've been to before, but it also means it's harder than ever to know exactly what you can find in an area and from what types of gathering points.
The good news is that none of these problems are dealbreakers, and all seem like things that can be solved with some TLC in the next installment. Ryza definitely feels better than Firis, the last time the series got a little experimental, and I think there's a good foundation here that just needs some tweaks to really shine. I'm still not sure if I like it more than Lulua--weirdly, despite coming out just a few months ago, Lulua feels like a very different game than Ryza and I find myself wishing for some kind of hybrid of the two. Looking at the trophy list, it looks like nothing is particularly difficult to do if the completion percentages are any indication, but I'm less enthused about trying to platinum Ryza than I was Lulua. But Lulua's story is clearly worse than Ryza's, so that counts for a lot.
