Waxing poetic about Atelier

With #AtelierRyza2 recently having been announced, and given my abiding fondness for the first game (I actually fibbed in a previous tweet, saying Spike-Chunsoft's game Zanki Zero was my 2019 GOTY -- truth is, it jockeys with Ryza very hard, and my answer depends on what day you ask me), I figured I'd try to explore what's so appealing about it, from the perspective of someone with very little connection to or experience with the series prior to Lulua.

My first experience with the Atelier meta-series was actually in the PS2 era, with a game that didn't even carry the Atelier branding -- Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis. I don't think I was in the right point in my life to properly appreciate it; while I enjoyed the anime OP quite a lot (I'd often load up the game and just let it run), and the music and art design entranced me, the game's story just didn't do it for 20-, 22-year old Claymore.

Fast-forward literally a decade or so, ignoring all the Atelier games that came out post-Khemia, and a streamer I watch goes "Hey, new game coming out; I really like the series, so what say we fire it up?" The game in question was Atelier Lulua, then the latest in the series. I honestly had no expectations, good or bad -- I only barely remembered Khemia, and I don't think I was even aware it belonged to the Atelier meta-series. I was familiar with the streamer by then, though, so I was along for the ride.

Right off the bat, Lulua grabbed me with its character design and overall art presentation (sensing a theme?) -- what can I say, I'm a sucker for cute girls in frills and skirts. It's a bright and pastel world, but it's fully-realized; from the jump, you can sense there's actual consideration given to why things are as they are, down to mundanities such as needing licenses for things prompting an overland journey to the capital.

And this consideration extends to the narrative and mechanics you're presented with -- not to belabor the point, but Lulua is a well-crafted experience, and its flaws only become evident with knowledge that they're (mostly) remediated by the next game.

The year comes and goes, and the same streamer says, "Hey, new game coming out..." It's Ryza, the current Atelier game. Of course I'm down for it at this point, and this brings us to perhaps the meat of my long rant.

Reviews for Ryza (and Lulua, too) talk about the fact that -- compared to other JRPGs in the Atelier games' respective cohort -- the plots are more...personal. Sure, the threats the protagonists face have dire implications, but they're never presented strictly as such. They are noted, but the Atelier games at their core are coming-of-age stories: both Lulua and Ryza want to establish themselves as alchemists. Lulua, because of her mother; Ryza, because she's bored out of her mind being a farmer.

I think the key here is that these resonate a lot more with a lot more people: the desire to be more than one currently is, to step beyond (in Lulua's case, through) one's upbringing, to make one's mark, to make history take note. Tasks complex in the undertaking, to be sure, but fundamentally simple to understand. It's that simplicity, I feel, that makes the games appealing. A game like Final Fantasy VII is, of course, bombastic and engrossing in its own way, but it's not something a lot of us can relate to, I think.

Atelier is a series for those of us trying to find our way. Maybe by watching cute girls do cute things, blowing up cute wildlife with cute bombs -- and, behind that, watching them change and grow, deciding who exactly they want to be and how they'll get from here to there -- we, too, can make the same sort of progress.

I am very excited to learn more about, and eventually play, Atelier Ryza 2: Lost Legends and the Secret Fairy. I hope you will be too.