My 4th Atelier game, and the start of my second Atelier sub-series. Story is almost non-existant in this one, world isn't built up at all compared to the world of the Dusk, but Sophie and Plachta are very strong and lovable characters. The combat in this one doesn't have the swapping with the back row characters anymore, and instead has a new Defense and Offense stance system which I never felt as fun or engaging as the combat systems in the previous games and as the game went on, and in most battles can be mostly ignored. The Mysterious games have added a grid system to the crafting, where the grid represents the space in the cauldron, but the glowing bonus nodes aren't taught as well as they could be. You can acquire and swap out different cauldrons for different effects too, but the EXP gain when using anything other than the EXP cauldron feels too low. EXP gain is lower than previous games when using anything else and the exp cauldron boosts it up to around what they were, so using anything else feels bad. Sophie is the weakest entry I've played so far, but I did still have a lot of fun with the crafting despite its annoyances, and the characters and music were real nice. During the back half of my playthrough, my grandmother was taken to the hospital so the focus on what Sophie's grandmother meant to her as a person really hit me in a way.