This is a review of the DX version on Nintendo Switch

After the disappointment that was Atelier Sophie, i am pleased to say that Atelier Firis was a much better improvement. While it's not quite as good as some of the other titles, it still proved to be a very chill game and it was that chillness that really helps it with it's rather unique structure. See, Atelier Firis is really weird in that the post-game is the real meat and bones of the game. Everything else prior to that is basically a prologue and while that may sound bad on paper, the "main story" is honestly really short compared to the amount of time i spent getting all the character events in the post-game. Said main story is the first time Atelier has had a legitimate time-limit since Atelier Escha & Logy and this is probably the easiest time-limit in the entire series. I've seen a lot of Atelier fans say that it's way too easy but admittedly, i did get lost more than a few times so i can feasibly see someone run out of time and get locked out of the post-game. And because of this structure, i found playing on and off with this game. I started playing this game on the first week of June 2021 and if you look at my Backloggd journal, you will see just how many games i've played between them and now. Atelier Firis' "post-game is the real game" completely changed my mindset as to how i would approach this game.

Now playing this game in a post-Atelier Ryza world is really interesting to me because it's very clear to me that this game basically served as a prototype to what would eventually be in the Ryza games, Ryza 2 especially. This was the first Atelier game to update the engine after sticking to it for several years and Gust took advantage of it by making this an open-world-lite game. Now of course, these games have never had much of a budget in the first place so the areas are not that big but compared to Atelier's usual bite-sized areas, this was something new for the series at the time. Firis would be able to craft vehicles to traverse these lands faster and even find a way to walk underwater and pretty much all of this would return and be expanded upon in Atelier Ryza and Atelier Ryza 2 and it gives me some newfound appreciation for both this game and two games it would directly inspire later in the series (at least i think that's what happened).

As for the combat and synthesis itself, i personally found it to be rather weak. Synthesis is explained horribly to you so i pretty much winged it the entire game. I was playing on easy as a result but that's fine, i don't play this series for the difficulty. But because i was winging it with the synthesis, i couldn't really bring the combat to it's full potential, a mistake on my part.

As far as characters go, it's a fairly decent improvement over Atelier Sophie. I enjoyed a lot more of the characters this time around although some other games in the series still have it beat. I'd say the character quality is comparable to that of Atelier Shallie. That being said, Firis is honestly in the top tier of Atelier protagonists because damn bro, her optimism is extremely infectious. She can be too loud at times but man, i just know i'm going to miss her for the time being (she shows up in the next game).

Atelier Firis is a decent, relaxing game, complete with the banger Atelier soundtrack from Gust. I still have one more Mysterious title to play and the improvements that this game saw over Atelier Sophie have given me hope that this trilogy isn't a bust.