Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian Review - Fear of Commitment
Atelier fans have been eating good at the moment. Consistent releases, re-releases of older games with newer content, and a glut of older games to enjoy, even if you burn through all of that. The games have gone from a relatively unknown series to something people recognise, a transformation that the Trails series also underwent within the last few years. Atelier Resleriana is the next in line, based on the world from the failed gacha game, whose global servers closed only 10 months after the start of service.
Don’t be put off though. Despite its roots, Resleriana is a fully fledged title. You play as Rias or Slade, an ultimately meaningless choice that only defines whether you want to play as male or female. I’m actually glad Slade was included, as it’s been a long time since we had a male protagonist. In fairly typical fashion, you stumble across alchemy, find out there’s some big issue going on and set out to solve it with your newfound calling. As with almost all games in the series, though, it’s not about the destination; it’s about the journey.
In something oddly reminiscent of the very recently released Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar, you’ll spend a good deal of your time making goods, going out and gathering materials and the like, and the latter part of it in the shop, selling items to customers. I didn’t mind the shop mechanic, but it was pretty light on. There are trends you could follow, various fairies you could hire to give boosts and furniture to give other boosts, but I found most of the time you could just ignore them and let the fairies do everything under some basic instruction. I wished it were a bit more in-depth, but that’s going to be a common complaint across this game.
It’s the same for the town. At the beginning, you’re sold on the idea of levelling up the town and bringing life back to it via extra sales. In reality, this just isn’t the case. Other than people selling more items (which does make gathering easier!), gaining extra levels in the town just seemed to really raise the quality of the goods and unlock extra story beats. I was a bit disappointed, as I was expecting some actual town development.
I did enjoy the cast, though. Rias is full of life and curious about almost everything, and Slade, while more level-headed, is still fun. The basic cast is also supplemented by many characters from other games in the series, which, while very cool to see their little vignettes, you usually just end up having a couple of conversations with them before they’re relegated to passive item collection.
Rather than the large open world of Yumia, you’re back to smaller areas with set themes in the world. I actually much prefer this, as it means they don’t have to fill in a bunch of wasted space, one of the larger complaints I had about Yumia. Areas are split into two types: the overworld – these are your bog standard normal areas, and Dimensional Paths – these are special areas unlocked via progression that act as mini dungeons. They’re broken into rooms and are usually about 4-5 floors big, culminating in a boss fight. These are important for a few reasons. Firstly, they’re the only place to recruit fairies, who are the pillars of your workers. Secondly, there are plenty of materials unique to them. You’re only ever really going to revisit them to find materials, but they’re fun enough.
If you’re an Atelier fan, though, you’re here for the meat. Synthesis. Synthesis is quite a bit more interesting than Yumia, but I can’t say it’s the best in class. You select the base of the item you want to make – each item is a tree of recipes now, and each new recipe is found via morphing an existing recipe, or in some instances, finding a recipe book in the world. When you’re synthesising items, you need to select ingredients based on both category, but also what colour crystals they have. If you match the colours of the crystal across the recipe, new attributes will be unlocked for that synthesis. This means there’s a good deal to consider when adding ingredients (unless you’re adding blindly for the base bonuses), and as you progress through the game, you’ll find new ways to offset ingredients that don’t match the colour or category of the synthesis, which makes it quite a bit more complex. The game wasn’t the most difficult thing in the world, to need to futz with the alchemy system, but I think those playing on the harder difficulties, or those that enjoy breaking the systems apart, will find some enjoyment in the crafting element.
Finally, combat and skills themselves. You have a skill tree to unlock new abilities and buffs, some of which are locked behind story progression, some of which are unlocked behind recipe progression. Again, it’s all fine. It wasn’t until quite late game that I found myself able to unlock everything, as I was point-gated for that, but there’s not exactly a ton of customisation there. Combat itself is back to turn-based, and every enemy has weaknesses and strengths you’ll need to exploit. With three front-line and three rear-line characters in total, you can mix up character setups to use Burst attacks, but generally, each character sticks to their lane of their elemental attack. Surprise, I wish this was more involved, as I didn’t really feel the pressure (despite playing on Hard) to bring in any real strategy outside of use skill, block attack at the right time, repeat until the enemy is dead.
All in all, Atelier Resleriana is fine. It’s got some neat ideas, but never really seems to go all-in on expanding upon them. It wasn’t a slog like Yumia was, but it didn’t give me the feverish itch that other games had to burn through them as quickly as possible because I was having that much fun. I think this will have a cult appeal, even within the niche that is the Atelier fanbase, but I was pretty indifferent about it most of the time.
Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian was reviewed on PC with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
