Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land | Review

Forbidden Artes, Mana, and (Yu)mia

Genghis "Solidus Kraken" HusameddinMarch 14, 2025Last Updated: March 14, 2025

10 minutes read

I like to think that, at this point, any long-running game series has taken its core formula and given it a good shake. For a lot of said franchises, that has seemingly come in the form of delving into this industry’s favourite world mechanic: open worlds. Developer GUST and publisher KOEI TECMO have been toying with this concept in their games for years, the former pushing for larger map zones in ‘Atelier Ryza 3‘ and the latter making the open world jump with ‘Dynasty Warriors 9’ (not quite good that one, it explains Origins). All this has culminated to the latest Atelier series yet—welcome to ‘Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land’, taking the IP onto a more serious tone where the world despises alchemy and those who practice it and the young woman who gets to bear the weight of all that hatred.

Well, not without a good group of friends, at the very least.

The many faces of Atelier Yumia. (GUST/KOEI TECMO)

A World in Ruin

In previous Atelier games, nothing made our playable Alchemists more at home than empty fields filled to the brim with crafting materials and ancient ruins from long time past seen. Now multiply that by a grand total of 200 times and you get the Aladiss and the Aladissian Empire, a fairly massive open world split up across four regions. Yumia Liessfeldt first makes landfall at the Ligneus Region, a place of blue skies, green grass, and cute slash very angry monsters mingling amongst each other. Yumia, however, would likely find more comfort being with said monsters as the group of folks she’s joining, the Research Team, largely view her with fear and disgust. Unlike Ryza’s game, the world here has a harsher tone, even down to the more downtrodden melodic beats of returning and new composers Yanagawa, Yumemi, and Tateyama.

But before I delve into that mess, let me walk you through Atelier Yumia’s core gameplay mechanics. Starting with the major one: the Aladiss region is effectively a freely explorable open world map with virtually zero loading screens. If you can see a place, you can most definitely walk to it—and developer GUST hasn’t just taken a liking to the idea of an open world map being a big, sprawling place. No no, they’ve gone the whole mile and have marked just about every corner of the world with massive hills and mountains that contrast against low reaching travelled paths. Yumia’s world is as big as it is vertically deep—you will not only be taking a lot of detours but also doing plenty of mountain goat-ing to boot.

Yumia herself is… Fairly agile. Let me put this in better terms: she’s got the best character controller of any 3D Atelier game yet, but it isn’t as perfect as it should be. And yes, I had to confirm my theory by at least reinstalling Ryza 3 once or twice. Yumia can walk, run, and jump really high when faced straight with any sort of collision. Her staff is good for breaking down craftables in the open world, bonking creatures out in the open, and can even become a rifle! In this mode, players can shoot crafting material and sigils that are out of reach, giving the player another element of control out in the open.

The world is torture for those who walk and can’t jump. Thankfully, Yumia has mana-powered high heels that let her double and even triple jump when faced with an obstacle. This lets you scale up mountains and hills far more easily than even in the likes of Skyrim. Once you can get the hang of it, you’ll be able to scale regions of the game that you’d otherwise have to find paths for (and boy, is that a bit of an issue at times). Later on in the game, the player also gets ahold of a motorcycle that they can use to traverse the Aladiss (I need to put this in my dictionary) region. Yumia’s bike, Procella, is a mana-powered powerhouse that can get you across regions even faster, provided you’re on flat terrain. It can jump if you get snared and Yumia can even pull out her staff-turned-rifle thingy while on it.

Yumia offers a wide variety of expressions, particularly her cowlick. (GUST/KOEI TECMO)

There’s more to the open world than just simply being a place for monsters and crafting material to exist. As you progress through the game, you’ll unlock little housing zones in which Yumia can freely build her very own atelier or a tiny campsite with the bare necessities. This is one of my favourite parts of the whole open world (besides the open world, which I feel very strongly about). You can easily spend a good hour or so building the best-looking flat you can possibly make, setting it up with Ms. Liessfeldt’s tools all the while slapping a bunch of plants, paintings, anything you can make the place look like home. Her party will even do the bare minimum and interact with whatever chairs or bookshelves you got lined up. If setting up your own abode is too much of a hassle (or you’ve got no creative bone in your body like I do) you can start off with a prefab as well and work from there.

Building a house is advised, because while you can fast travel between places with ease (and very quickly on the Xbox Series X), it gives you more control over how fast you can get down to your alchemist business. Because let’s be frank, the “alchemist” part of Yumia’s tagline is not for show—a good portion of your time will be spent crafting, upgrading, and learning new recipes to strengthen your party and break enemy weaknesses for massive damage alongside helping out townsfolk and your own party members across the game world. Your most pushed and slammed buttons will be the X and Y buttons as you break everything and anything that has a collectible icon over it. Seriously, your way to the main objective will always be sidetracked by the tens of hundreds of crafting material you’ll be busy collecting.

These aren’t just plants you’ll be picking up, either. In ruins, you’ll find rare parts or keys that can be used to open up little shrines with treasures and recipes for Yumia to recall. Learning recipes requires some mana-related resource (I forgot what they’re called) that can only be found through mana geysers and specific monster strongholds. You’ll shoot treasure chests and stones off walls every chance you get, and to use your gun you’ll need resources to craft new bullets, heals, camping equipment, you name it. Describing the full crafting experience is honestly beyond the scope of this article. Not that’s its difficult, but it’s a lot to take in at first. The gist of it is, you pick up materials that start off at a low rank, use those to build better materials, and use those materials to craft high quality gear for your party. Said craftables are influenced by cores that can improve said materials in a particular direction, such as better defence or attack properties. Crafted gear can see further enhancements through jewels that add up on the stats. It’s creative and very detailed, another fun aspect of the Atelier games.

You will have to engage with this side of the game, by the way. Gear is rarely found out in the open and all though you can trudge along the main path for a while, around halfway is when you’ll really feel the pain of getting whooped. You’re gonna be glued to this game for a good 50 hours or so anyway, so strap in and figure out this game’s super fun crafting system—once you have all your party members, I highly suggest going all in.

That’s rad. (GUST/KOEI TECMO)

Alchemy Rules!

So, Yumia’s got the moves, the world of Aladissian is as open as it can get. I really love this open world thanks to its verticality and how varied aspects of a region can be in terms of biome and scenery. The world lets you plant your flags through the housing system, we have character and sidequests aplenty that expand upon Yumia’s party and their backgrounds along with the rest of the world and its hatred for alchemy. So… What’s that bit of dissent I put on display earlier, you might ask? Well, the best way to put it would be to say that controlling Yumia is a blessing as it is a curse.

Yumia is unique in that she’s got plenty of mobility. Compared to the wheel of cheese that is Reisalin, she’s fairly nimble! But she and the world don’t get along—namely, she gets stuck on geometry quite a bit, even just by walking up and down stairs. I’m no stranger to getting stuck on a funny angle of a map in video games, Bahamut knows how many games that problem afflicts, it’s no biggie. But I couldn’t help but notice just how frequently she would get stuck on anything. And even pushing past getting stuck on the world for a minute, Ms. Liessfeldt would sometimes fail to pick up crafting materials that I would try to pick up while running past, forcing me to turn tail multiple times or stop moving to reset whatever was holding her up. This “input eating” problem also happens in combat as well, but I’ll touch on that in a bit.

And let me talk about her wall-scaling boots for a moment. Yes, it’s really nice to have a triple jump in a game. And at times, you can master it to clamber up just about a number of surfaces in the game. But! These boots will only trigger when Yumia is faced with collision. She cannot jump any higher than her first jump otherwise and sometimes, this jumping mechanism will fail to trigger and/or you’ll find yourself getting caught in geometry and sent back down the way you came. And this one is more of a nitpick, but Yumia is susceptible to fall damage, sort of. Falling down a great distance eats away at the energy stored up in her floating companion Flammi (or somewhere/something on her person). You need to watch this meter for your own health as areas of the Aladiss region are dangerous due to uncontrolled mana coating the greater world—but I digress. Gust, it’s nice of you to take inspiration from ‘Halo’ for Yumia, but I’d just like to point out that real spartans don’t take fall damage. Yes, I’m aware our protagonist wasn’t tortured by the UNSC to become a super soldier but food for thought for future games, yes?

I’ve also run into a few goofs and some bugs. Most were just amusing, like combat zones getting a bit funny to the more rare and annoying issues like getting stuck with no way to reset but to close the game.

He’s got a *fur* to pick with you. Hmm, no that doesn’t work. (GUST/KOEI TECMO)

Thankfully, the technical glitches weren’t common. And they don’t overshadow the game’s simple yet fun combat system. Yumia features a full, almost real-time battle system where enemies will engage with the party on the very open world they walk. In this mode, Yumia and her friends have a couple of ways to engage with the enemy: they can engage head-on with their available skills or back off and fight via support skills. Unlike the overworld, you can change between all characters on the battlefield and each one have their own mechanics that you’ll need to pick up on to maximise all damage dealt—Rutger, our resident shark-toothed brat, can take damage and expel that stored pain right back at his enemies through items. Yumia can build her meter to do the same, but rather than taking a beating, all she has to do is keep up the pressure.

Like the last GUST title I played, ‘Fairy Tail 2‘, the developer really wants you to swap between party members when possible. And that you should, as you can not only better haul back a character who is taking a beating better than themselves (all though it is important to note that you can create your own AI parameters for the party, and it comes in handy!) but also because your skills are in limited usage and will refill overtime. Get stuck with someone out of moves? No problem, just swap mates! This is also very useful with items you can craft as you can assign different specials to different characters and better take advantage of elemental weaknesses of enemies that have been staggered.

Your best shot against enemy attacks will be your dodge and block. Nailing these just through visuals can be tricky as the game loves to fill the screen with particle effects, so you’ll need to become reliant on the red circles that fill the floor and the specific incoming attack sound effect to avoid damage. Speaking of annoyances, sometimes, trying to pull up certain menus, like the support menu, can become tricky as the game will ignore inputs or focus on others until you’ve come to a complete stop and left open for a smack or two. Combat zones can also overlap with the environment and make things harder to see, which is unfortunate—at this point in gaming, the camera should be more than capable of removing these obstructions during combat. But otherwise, when things aren’t getting a bit silly, the combat is engaging as it is fast-paced and the bosses are pretty awesome.

You can tell who is my favourite. (GUST/KOEI TECMO)

Under One Banner of Trauma

Getting back to the game’s story, Yumia is placed under a magnifying glass of suspicion throughout the game. It’ll be no secret why as you progress—let’s just say benevolence appears to be a lost art amongst practitioners. Ms. Liessfeldt is nothing like anyone believes, with a heart of gold and platinum, but good luck convincing anyone otherwise—this weighs on her heavily over the course of the game, especially as her party builds up with likeminded trauma of sorts. Viktor and Isla, siblings in arms, are the first to give Yumia somewhat of a stink eye but open up over time (particularly the former) as they begin to see that alchemy isn’t as bad as they may have thought. Yumia’s kindness wins over all.

All of the game’s main characters will open up over time and you’ll get to see the struggles that got them to where they are now, on the Research Team. Said team is looking to clearing up the manabound plates that only Yumia can take care of, courtesy of the trust and appreciation of the Team Leader. I found everyone’s struggles to be relatable (as relatable as magic can be, really) and how the party bounces off one another makes for a good dynamic. Our party develops over the course of the game as they unlock access to new regions, learn more about the history of Aladiss and its relation to alchemy, and as for Yumia herself—coming closer to answer related to the Mana Disaster that has haunted her since.

Atelier Yumia’s first bout is a fun, open world crafting game that offers more than just clearing icons on a map—its verticality while offering player creativity through movement and housing tools make for a good time. It’s everything its developer has been building towards, and I’ve come away quite impressed with what they’ve got to offer. ∎