Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land sees the Atelier series reaching new heights with a huge open-world style map and a deep focus on exploration. And in today's new trailer, Koei Tecmo has detailed many of the game's new and returning features.
Focusing on the new to start with, Atelier Yumia sees the titular alchemist explore a vast and "seamless" open-world, meaning she has multiple ways of getting around. This includes the ability to double jump, a motorbike that she can just magic out of thin air, and... a gun?
Out in the world, you'll need to keep an eye on your energy, a resource that helps with both exploration and crafting. While exploring, you can craft simple recipes by using your energy, but it also allows you to take reduced fall damage while jumping down from large cliffs.
Energy is also consumed when you enter 'manabound areas', locations that are overrun with dense mana. This slowly drains your energy and also restricts the type of movement you can do in any given area. Fortunately, there are ways to restore energy in the world, such as picking up Alstahlia Flowers and finding landmarks.
Dotted around the world are dungeons, where Yumia will need to solve puzzles to progress. Inside these dungeons, you'll find rare materials and 'memory vials', the latter of which will help you discover even more secrets.
Combat has also shifted into real-time action here, with attacks (essentially, items that you craft to use in battle) assigned to face buttons. You can also swap between characters mid-battle, and change between short and long-ranged mode. The aim is to stun the enemy to deal a huge amount of damage.
One feature we're very excited about doesn't involve exploring or battling, however. New to Atelier Yumia, you can now build your own base, which seems to consist of different builds. Basically, you can make your own town, and that'll dish out even more rewards for Yumia and friends.
That's a lot to pack into a four-minute trailer, but it looks like Atelier Yumia, Gust, and Koei Tecmo are going big here. The game looks fantastic, and we loved the Atelier Ryza trilogy, so we're excited to see where the series can go from here.
Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land launches on Switch on 21st March 2025. Will you be crafting your way through the spring season? Let us know in the comments.
Comments 29
It look FANTASTIC
2nd solid contender for the GotY after Phantom Brave
What a treat
This needs a NS2 version badly, performance is not looking great on Switch.
Atelier games are always an insta-buy for me so I was already sold when it got announced. I find it kinda impressive how they're able to release games as frequently as they do while still changing up the gameplay a fair bit each time. This one feels particularly ambitious so hopefully it all comes together well. Looking forward to it.
Looks great, looking forward to my discounted physical copy to arrive and playing it when I can - at this point I'll most likely start playing the Atelier series with Yumia (the only other game I already have is Ryza 3 which is obviously not a good starting point)!
@HugoGED If you're referring to that trailer, it seems they're showing the Playstation version. And I'm guessing the fluidity of the trailer doesn't reflect actual final performance.
Damn, I have been resisting further binge queue breaks here through the whole Ryza trilogy, aided in no small part by the Marie release... but Yumia's adventure is tempting all across the board. Can you believe we're getting something like this AND Xenoblade X in less than a fortnight? Switch really just won't stop asserting its status as the ultimate RPG machine.
@HugoGED the game will be playable on next gen out the gate anyway, defeating the pragmatic purposes of porting the game anew. And personally, I'd only bother playing it there if reluctant to juggle the storage space for it on Switch itself.
As happy as I am this is coming to Switch, I think I'm going to have to buy it for my laptop. It looks way too impressive for me to believe it will run well. I wish Switch 2 was out already.
@HugoGED That was a Playstation trailer, bruh.
@MirrorFate2 Which means the Switch version will fair much worse.
Shaping up to be the best entry in the franchise. Very excited.
As a long term fan of the series, i want to love this but everything i see this, i just can't seem to get hyped. It just seems to be losing what makes the series so fun to me. It will probably be great, but, i don't understand why this isn't hitting the same.
@ArcticEcho Can I get your crystal ball?
@tanaka2687 I really liked the Arland and Dusk Trilogy... but not the Mysterious Trilogy. Ryza Trilogy didn't interest me so I didn't play it yet. This one looks really cool, imo.
@MirrorFate2 Why would a game run worse on PS5 than Switch, like seriously? It's like 20x more powerful.
@ArcticEcho How the game is crafted matters. Devs can tailor the experience for each console. We've seen Switch games do better before. Not often but sometimes. And sometimes it's as simple as choosing the wrong default resolution. The PS5 could be much higher res but be overextending itself compared to a lower res but smoother Switch version. It's a real thing.
Either way, I doubt what you see in the trailer is reflective of final performance at all. Chill until release.
@Ainze "We've seen Switch games do better before." When?
This is looking really good and it's shaping up how I have hoped it would. The tone of the game has a bit of a feel of the Dusk series, the alchemy has the creativity and wonder of the Mysterious series, and has a focus on exploration as in Ryza's secret series.
Now I'm wondering, with the Switch 2 being right around the corner, as well as being backwards compatible, would there be a Switch 2 version of Atelier Yumia? Or would it be something like an upgrade patch?
@ArcticEcho Honestly, I don't remember specifically and I can't be bothered to Google something you could search for yourself. And often these discrepancies are fixed after launch, but the point is they can happen. It's a dev choice, nothing to do with the hardware. And you can prove this at home. If you have a PC, run a game and change the settings. You can go for low settings and smooth performance, crank the settings and tank your performance, and everything in between. The Switch is more limited than other consoles by a fair margin, but dev choices matter on every platform. Never was this more obvious than N64 vs Playstation. Always a coin flip back then.
Anyway, just wait and see what we get. Can't stress this enough!
@ArcticEcho "Trust me bro" - ^
@ArcticEcho The one time of note I can think of is the Switch/PS4 version of Alien Isolation, where the Switch had a better image quality.
@Indielink @ArcticEcho
It's not unheard of. If you're game is targeting 60fps on PS4/Xbox One but only 30fps on Switch, what's being rendered on the Switch might look "better" and still be less resource intensive.
It's also important to note that "better" is extremely subjective. A lot of Switch ports turn off global illumination, SSR, and / or complex shadow mapping, which can free up resources for other rendering techniques. Depending on your eye for detail and personal preference, that might look "better" to you. Like how a game with obviously messed up reflections and low polygon shadows might look "worse" then a game where they are both just turned off., or how a game with really bad texture pop in might look worse then a game that just has lower res textures.
DOOM is another edge case. Screen shots of that game look horrible and nowhere near Xbox One, plus it's lower resolution, but they completely reworked the motion blurring for the Switch. It so much more advanced then the Xbox One version that you could argue it looks better being played.
Graphics are complicated, and at the end of the day, it's really the choices the devs make and the resources they devote to finding creative solutions that determine the quality of the port.
Never played a game from this franchise, but this looks like a mix of Zelda TotK and Xenoblade 3 lol.
It actually looks cool, but I'll have way too many games to play this year... Maybe for later.
@the_beaver Xenoblade 3 is not too far off, but the focus of the franchise is collecting ingredients to craft items to complete quests and fight with. The ingredients all have properties and quality ratings and you have to stack them to get the effects you need. An RPG combined with that Potion Craft game basically.
I was interested in this til I saw the combat. No thanks. Why does everything have to become an action game?
@jesse_dylan
It looks like Ryza's combat, which is active time based, not an action game. You don't move your characters around or have complete control, you issue commands that are executed in order. There is a complex web of chains and reactions, which is why it looks so ... busy.
Personally I think Ryza has some of the best and most gratifying combat in an RPG, so if this is building on that system it should great.
@HeadPirate I certainly hope so. I liked Ryza 1’s combat (which I don’t think has a huge amount in common with Ryza 3). The combat in blue reflection 2’s demo kind of confused me too, but I didnt hate it.
But if it’s more like these games where you control one character and the rest control themselves at the same time, I’m so out. 😂
@HeadPirate it better be like ryza's combat, I hate true real-time combat :/ everything else looked great but if it isn't basically turn-based like Ryza and all other atelier games... it's a hard no.
There's a reason i play chill games. So I don't have to mash like mad or spend all my brain power within 1 second
Atelier is always one of those seires that seems interesting that I just never have time to get into but this looks like it might scratch some specific itchs I've been having so I might have to pick it up.
@HeadPirate Combat is Realtime Action with Cooldown skills. There is movement this time around unlike the Ryza games. There is no Wait Time in Yumia. I completely understand why many have the idea that it's similar to Ryza 2 & 3 combat since Koei Tecmo never mentions this bit of information anywhere in their Press release info.
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