Atelier Firis: The Alchemist and the Mysterious Journey DX

Atelier Firis is a game I wished I loved. Just like Atelier Sophie, the characters shine in this game. With fun and interesting cutscenes where by time you learn more about them. Unfortunately the main story is very barebones. Firis needs to take the alchemist exam and needs at least 3 recommendations to get them. The end. There is a lot more character development post exam but I didn't want to keep playing. Let me explain why. The biggest difference with Atelier Sophie is the new semi open world. You have a lot of different areas to explore with different enemies and ingredients to find. It looks very nice, but because of the time limit you can't take your time. The limit is still lenient enough to get all recs. But I didn't felt the want to explore because of it. There is no decent fast travel pre exam, you can travel to camps or some points of interest. But often they are not located near map entrances and exits which makes backtracking a pain. The alchemy minigame is fun. But because they got rid of item duplicates or bulk alchemy it gets very grindy without real substance. In addition to that, to get trait transfers on items, you have to gain proficiency (multiple levels). …

I am going to recommend this game BUT I'm also going to warn ya'll that it's grindy AF thanks to the recipe proficiency and mass synthesis features, and it has a pointless time limit that you have to try to fail. You can literally get to Reisenberg with all three letters of recommendation in a third of the time that they give you if you know what you're doing. This is the last game in the atelier franchise to have an english dub as of 2026. I hope that Gust changes their minds and gives us english dubs for future atelier games. ANYWAY. Firis and the rest of the side characters hard carry this game, and the exam itself to make Firis a licensed alchemist is actually fun to go through. Especially when you get to fight the protagonist of the previous game if you score high enough. The storylines, world building, and individual side character stories are a joy to play through. The open world isn't a true open world like future games in Atelier, but there's a lot of varied zones to explore. I had fun building a broom after the exam and zipping around the world on it. While it's easily the weakest in the Mysterious saga, I still liked it for the characters and story. 5/10. If only …

Game is good.

The [b]time limit[/b] is the worst part of this game. I do not care if people report that they had 100 days left. I think this is highly dependent on how much you explore, if you are the type of person to focus on the main plot, skip recommendation letters, etc. The reality is, [b]there IS an optimal way through the game[/b]. Sometimes gathering is pointless, other times it is not. There is no way to know the value of your actions until AFTER you gain knowledge. For example, if you knew in advance that you would have to get dozens of Lumber to build a boat, you would have collected them back in the Dona region, but there is no way to know that at the time you are in Dona. One recipe requires Blue Steel Stones, and you could have searched a lot of ore deposits and caves and never found one, only to realize after wasting 12 days that a merchant sells them and that you HAD to buy them from this merchant (because I swear to god, I could not find them). If there was no time limit, I would have combed every optional cave and zone, and I might have found those Blue Steel Stones, but [b]because of the time limit, I didn't[/b]. After tons and tons of backtracking and flubbing, I still ha…

Salah satu OP song Aterlier yang terbaik Seperti biasa story bagus, ost lumayan, grafis juga masih bagus, sistem alchemist yang seru

Should games care about quality of life? Not if your Atelier Firis Where to start, it's a grind upon grind system where there are no attempts to make life easy. No fast travel till very end of game. Post game? So if you need a material, you have to travel zone by zone by zone. It gets old No item duplication. None. There is an item that duplicates materials, but you will be constantly remaking stuff, mainly bombs. Bombs. Nothing else really does DPS, if you have melee characters be prepared to see the word 'resist' Because of no duplication you will just spend the rest of your life making bombs. I really liked it at first, it felt honest. But the lack of QoL meant that after about 60 hours I just saw the rest of my time as running from zone to zone and making bombs again and again Add to the fact that you have to make and remake ALL items to get them to 3 traits. It's improved a bit by the precision research desk. How easy is that to miss, I only just found out about it by accident many hours into the game duh. There's tons of other annoyances, these are the main ones. It's just too much like hard work, I have been playing shorter and shorter sessions but I'm done now…