Atelier Ryza 3: Alchemist of the End and the Secret Key Review

It’s almost undeniable that the Atelier Ryza series is the reason why the Atelier franchise as a whole has managed to bring new light to its developer, Gust. As such, some might find it a bummer that Atelier Ryza 3: Alchemist of the End and the Secret Key is the last entry in this particular series.

Granted, this series has seen a massive departure and experimental phase across its iterations. In the second game, it began to move away from its counterparts by making a slightly more streamlined (but not less confusing) Synthesis system and also introducing more dialogue-heavy sequences to justify its rather mundane storyline with deceptively high stakes. It’s what I call the “Gust RPG formula,” where basic life lessons are learned through opening the gates of hell. It is also the first game in the Atelier franchise to get a sequel.

And now we have the third installment, which, in my opinion, anyone with a knack for more involved crafting mechanics in RPGs and fans of RPGs, can enjoy. While this game has definitely made some sacrifices regarding “staying true” to the Atelier formula, it also has managed to end this particular series within the franchise with a massive bang that invites even non-Atelier fans to join in and celebrate this final installment.

So yes, dropping the conclusion earlier here, Atelier Ryza 3 is the best in the series and a great way to send off Reisalin Stout and her ever-expanding jolly gang of friends.

Last time in Atelier Ryza 2, we saw Fi being sent away after the gates to the Underworld were opened (don’t ask) by Ryza and bringing peace once again to the Kark Isles. That blessing lasted for only one year, though, as a mysterious bunch of islands appeared out of nowhere, and they began to bring monsters in. As such, Ryza, Tao, and Lent set off with the accompanying Bos (now a playable character) to see where these islands came from.

Ryza and her party then notice that the islands also have a gate much like the one in Kark Isles. However, once the door fails to open, Ryza suddenly begins to hear a voice in her head that tells her to unlock the Code of the Universe while also garnering the powers of a mysterious key that can extract the essence of the landmarks and monsters she fights to create new keys that can be used to aid in her adventure by unlocking chests and even aiding her in combat and alchemy.

The objective is pretty straightforward from this point on. Go on a journey across several islands across the continent of Ransenboden, figure out the mystery behind the Code of the Universe and this mysterious Secret Key, recruit several friends along the way to aid on the adventure, and then leave wondering what kind of drug you took to have this trip and a half to learn a basic life lesson that wouldn’t be out of place in an episode of My Little Pony.

Yes, the story in Atelier Ryza 3 doesn’t take itself that seriously. From the first moments, you can tell that despite the higher and higher stakes the plot takes, this game is more focused on the relationships between Ryza and her group of friends and the inhabitants of the game’s multiple locales. A lot of the elements of the main story take a backseat as you’re left to focus on something like Sardonica’s 100-year celebration before you’re hit with the reminder “Oh yeah, the main plot is going on.”

Honestly, it’s rather cute to see that over the course of 20+ years, Gust has still managed to make its own formula work when it comes to character development as well. You see how much the cast has matured over the course of the three games, and more often than not, characters like Bos, Tao, Ryza, and Lent are often reflective of their circumstances before their journey began all that long time ago in the first game.

More hilarious is the clear camaraderie that has also been building between them. You can tell these guys are friends because they often tease each other and love to jeer at each other a lot. They also will not hesitate to put Ryza’s ego in check whenever she begins to act smug or overconfident around them. One of my favorite interactions consists of Ryza smugly telling a village elder that Lent defeated one of the best warriors in the village and referring to him as her “Right-hand man,” to which Lent bluntly and almost coldly responds with “Who are you calling your right-hand man?” Interactions like this can be found everywhere, and they never cease to amuse.

Of course, this camaraderie also extends to helping each other out whenever they doubt themselves and being proper supporting characters to each other. Bos and Ryza will certainly not hesitate to advise their friends whenever they see them doubting themselves, and they also will give each other credit whenever it’s due. You will see this primarily during their battle interactions as they continue encouraging each other to keep the party’s morale up instead of ragging about each other’s mistakes.

Atelier Ryza 3 is a game about interactions, and it has done them way better than any other installment in the franchise. Every character feels real and manages to pull you in, so you become part of its world compared to other RPGs that get straight to the point.

It’s time to move on to what I think is the highlight of Atelier Ryza 3: the combat. This is a massive departure from what other Gust RPGs have done in general. The game has ditched the timeline for a new system that works according to AP. Basic actions can be done once your gauge (represented by a circle) is filled up; you then get access to skills by pressing and holding a button and selecting them; each skill takes a certain quantity of AP to be executed, and this also extends to Skills executed by your friendly party members.

With this new action-based combat approach, your allies will always be acting on their own while facing off against the enemies. Because of this, you can freely use two “combat modes” to tell your friends what to do in each. In Support Mode, your friends will focus on delivering standard attacks and helping build AP. In Aggressive Mode, they will instead focus on spending AP by using items or their Skills during combos to dispatch enemies faster.

Just because you have two partners controlled by AI doesn’t mean you can’t control them either because you can switch between any active party members at any time by pressing the left or right trigger. If you want to mitigate damage, this is the only way you’ll be able to do so, as most attacks are single-target and can be blocked to be mitigated but can end up doing a lot of damage if they are not blocked, which the AI won’t do by itself. As such, it’s essential to stay aware of what the enemy will do and promptly switch between party members to block incoming blows.

As you go along with the game, you also gain access to Order Drives, a special order that can be issued by pressing any of the buttons on the D-Pad. Order Drives allow characters in or outside the party to perform a special attack that has different effects on the field. It can be something like an elemental imperil to an additional buff for the character you’re currently controlling that’s exclusive to that party member. In the majority of cases, it can help turn the tide of battle.

The Secret Key also plays a role in combat in two different ways. First, you can extract the essence of the enemy at any point during the battle and use it to create a Key that can bring multiple benefits to you and the party. The benefits can range from buff effects for combat, specific timed buffs for when you’re out exploring and gathering resources, and set stat boosts for your characters to particular effects that help with effectiveness in Synthesis. We’ll talk about that last one for later, but in terms of combat, the buff effects can make your party overpowered to the extreme should you find a very good key to use.

The best part is that your AP meter charge becomes faster, and your abilities gain a massive boost in effectiveness once you activate them, triggering a Key Modification. This effect extends to your whole party and will allow you to perform harder-hitting attacks and fill up your T.Lv. gauge way faster. Once you reach 5 levels, you will be able to perform a Fatal Drive, which is a fancier way of describing the character’s Ultimate Attack that is almost guaranteed to destroy your enemy but can only be used once in battle per character, with the exception of Bos, who has the particular ability to use his Fatal Drive as many times as he wants so long as he meets the conditions.

Needless to say, this approach to combat is way more streamlined and simple than previous Atelier games. While you no longer have access to a myriad of moves like before, the strategy becomes more reliant on using the adequate party combination, which each brings particular gimmicks to the table, such as damage that scales with the DEF stat and characters that strike harder according to the number of debuffs the enemy has. Without a doubt, this game allows any party composition to take advantage of the situation, allowing any variety of playstyles to stand out.

Additionally, you can even modify the character’s Core Element focus and alter their stats so they focus on a particular subset of actions. You can have Bos be a massive attack dealer who does big numbers or have Lent be more partial toward Support and Agility. Thanks to this system, you can bring whoever you like and even leave Ryza in the background as your other party members go to town. Since everyone levels up across the board, you don’t have to worry about having to carry anyone when they join your party, letting you experiment right away.

Atelier Ryza 3’s combat is the most fun I’ve had in years when it comes to RPGs, trouncing even Xenoblade Chronicles 3 with how engaging and quick it is despite its deceptively simplistic nature. The enemies adapt to your current level, and as such, it definitely feels like it’s a world that grows alongside you and provides a challenge with every encounter. It can get a bit repetitive, especially when you’re trying to gather resources, but most of the combat can be avoided as well if you’re not particularly interested in fighting off enemies.

In Atelier Ryza 3, you have to explore the world around you and gather materials with a bunch of tools that you can craft. What resources you get depends on the level of your tools. The game encourages players to explore the world to gather new resources and come back frequently as they slowly unlock new abilities that give them access to more resources to collect. There is also an encyclopedia feature that allows you to track which areas contain specific resources, with a tracker for specific resources should you need a particular material or enemy drop.

I often found myself going out of my way to unlock more and more areas of the world once it opened up so I could get more resources. This, in turn, led to me getting more materials to experiment with and expanding my choices when it comes to alchemy and synthesis. Perhaps I did a bit too much as I quickly found myself carrying near-endgame gear with my collecting resources getting maxed out as I got to the second island (the playthrough video speaks for itself).

Don’t get me wrong, this was a long process, but the way this game is structured rewards players for going out of their way and finding new landmarks while collecting more resources. As you re-visit locales from your previous adventures and explore the new ones that this game has to offer, you’ll also find new dialogue sequences in which the main cast reflects upon how much they’ve grown and how interesting the story behind a particular landmark is. This is great for people who love character development and every other character just grows organically, letting players soak in the atmosphere and become part of the world.

The vistas are particularly breathtaking, with detail that, while looking rather rudimentary at points, also manages to look breathtaking in a lot of areas. This game runs at 120FPS with maximum settings in 1440p with my PC that rocks an i7 13700KF and a 3070, but it should also run well on less powerful PCs while still maintaining the beautiful detail and gorgeous environments Gust RPGs have been widely known for.

I think the best part about this game would also have to be the way it handles itself, thanks to the buffs you can have while exploring. The Secret Key comes back once again to give Ryza and her party multiple abilities while out in the field. These buffs range from better pickups while she’s using a particular tool to granting the ability to send all the items you collected so far to the container, allowing you to empty your basket so you can collect MORE resources without interrupting your pace.

You can also extract the essence of the landmarks themselves to gain access to new keys that, much like the ones in combat, allow you to gather a variety of buffs for combat and synthesis. Once again, you will find yourself revisiting various locales just to see what key they get you. This is just fantastic and it addresses so many of the complaints that I had while reviewing Atelier Sophie 2 when it comes to resource gathering for Synthesis.

Even better, as you explore, you will also be able to unlock Random Quests, which are essentially quick mini-quests that can improve your party stats or provide you with Synthesis Points to further upgrade your alchemy prowess or Cole, which can be used to purchase resources in shops. The Random Quests can range from beating a bunch of enemies to trading resources with an NPC, and they can make the process of getting upgrades to your arsenal way quicker as well.

You still have the more intricate World Quests, which are far more involved, but Random Quests will allow you to keep the flow of the game going if you want to focus purely on the main story. And again, thanks to how this game works, it also organically rewards players for going out of their way to explore and being thorough with more rewards and faster character building. Atelier Ryza 3 makes everything flow well in and out of combat.

And now, to what’s the highlight of this review, the Synthesis system is once again the most interesting and intricate aspect and the most straightforward ever. Not only does it remove any unnecessary hurdles by pointing out which materials are needed in specific parts of the chain, but it also has clear Elemental Values that allow you to adapt your resources. As always, doing alchemy increases your SP, allowing you to gain new abilities and unlock new recipes.

But just because the process has been simplified, it doesn’t mean it isn’t involved, as now Recipes can be Link Morphed to provide additional buffs and new chains through other elements, allowing alchemists to provide new layers to their items while also providing more buffs for stats, Quality, or specific gimmick buffs such as Jinxed stats (stats that increase one particular stat but decrease another) or downgrades. Thus, you need to pay attention to which ingredients you will add to your item lest you want to have 5 debuffs placed on you at the beginning of each fight.

Creating new items will also increase their Quality, making them more effective. Additionally, you can have those items inherit various status effects, such as higher Crit Rates/damage. Every item you create can also be reduced to Gems, which you can use to duplicate your more effective items, allowing you to recycle your useless resources and create better items and accessories for you and your party.

Whenever you’re synthesizing any new items, every ingredient you use will give you a variety of increases on a particular stat. While there’s an automatic fill option, it only tries to give you the best quality item instead of the item with bigger stat increases. Thus, it’s much better to do the process manually yourself while converting your previous gear to Gems so you can duplicate other created Synthesis ingredients and increase their elemental values as you go on.

As mentioned multiple times, the Secret Key also plays a role in Atelier Ryza 3’s Synthesis system by helping you further improve the Quality and other aspects of your items according to the Rarity of the Key and its Elemental Affinity with the item you’re trying to create. Some keys are better at the job than others, but the Synthesis Effect varies and can give you an advantage that can let you bypass certain elemental thresholds, such as Ice Increase, allowing you to put various marks on whatever part of the Chain has an Ice element.

Even if you fail to fill up every element of the chain in time, you also gain access to an Item Rebuild system that lets you pick up where you left off and, through a Gem expenditure that increases depending on the value of the items you use, increase the quality of the items even further and even engage on Morph Links to let you convert your items into other, even wilder recipes.

This Synthesis system is a great way to introduce players to the Alchemy aspect of Atelier Ryza 3 without overly complicating things like in the previous two installments. The game loves letting users go wild with their ingredients on most occasions, and you’re also heavily rewarded for paying attention and going out of your way to create new recipes through Link Morphing and the usage of the Secret Key.

Unfortunately, despite this, the cost of item duplication can make you have to sacrifice several materials that you intend to use for Synthesizing other items. While this issue is mitigated when you get the Higher Quality pick-up effect from the Skill Tree, it also means that if any item you picked up failed to meet your standards, you will have to get back to the map and proceed to try and find whatever item it was that you’re missing… Again.

This is also where my issues with the way this game works begin. While this problem extends to RPGs in general (Western and Eastern alike), this game has a bad habit of overly complicating things in the tutorial, overwhelming players with information and confusing them as to the right approach for whatever new system is introduced.

This, admittedly, made me not understand the intricacies behind the Synthesis system at the beginning despite how simple they are. Thus, I was stuck wondering if I was ready to tackle the next area or if I was going to be hard-walled into collecting resources. It wasn’t until my first (and only) grinding session, where I experimented through things and learned more about how things worked in my own way, that I began to make better items and weapons and aced the Gem system.

But that also extends to another problem I mentioned before. For the love of whatever God inhabits Ryza’s world, please don’t make the mistake I made and spend time optimizing resources until after you get the Secret Key. I bashed my head against the wall dumping many wasted resources into items that I synthesized, and ended up finding out that I had yet to unlock the most vital aspect of the Synthesis system as a whole.

The game doesn’t tell you that you can even craft Pristine Keys, keys that essentially increase the capabilities of your Secret Key, until later on. At that point, I was already making extremely valuable items and duplicating them (I don’t think you’re supposed to have manually crafted Synthesis Materials with 8+ Elemental Values and ++ stats until endgame), but that’s just how easy the game is to break once you actually get the Secret Key and go out of your way to explore.

There’s also the issue of extremely awkward pacing when it comes to certain dialogue sequences. If you’re pretty well into the game, you will trigger sequences where the characters will reflect upon their journey thus far… When you literally first reach the area you’re in. Even more comedically, the next sequence that plays is the one where players first reach the area you’re exploring. This happened to me three times over the course of my journey, and it made me bust out laughing.

I praised the way this game designed its encounters. Still, it can also be daunting for new players who are used to the Timeline System found in the previous two Atelier Ryza games and even more so for other Atelier games. I get it, this is a far easier way to do RPG mechanics, and I don’t fault the developers at Gust for going for a more stylish approach that evolves the franchise. But it definitely will alienate some of the longstanding Atelier fans as well.

At least the gratuitous fan service is finally kept low. While it’s still there, you no longer have to worry about female characters with overly obvious jiggle physics or underskirt shorts. It seems like Gust finally learned from Blue Reflection: Second Light that the best way to make a game is to make one that doesn’t appeal to horny 90% of the time and instead focusing an experience that’s both fun and encourages players to engage with its systems.

On that note, I also will have to praise Atelier Ryza 3 for more organically working with its male cast instead of making the mistake Second Light did, where every male character was a huge jerk that often antagonized the female cast in some fashion. Every character has a deep bond, and I am glad to see that there’s no clear favoritism when it comes to interactions or combat mechanics.

If it wasn’t clear by how thorough I have been with this review, I adore Atelier Ryza 3: Alchemist of the End & The Secret Key. This is one of the best RPGs that even non-Gust RPG fans will be able to dip into and enjoy. The overall pacing and mechanics have all been streamlined to become enjoyable for casual players while also allowing hardcore players to be rewarded for going out of their way in their adventure.

While the story can get ridiculous thanks to its implications, the tone of it remains as chill as ever. I believe that the interactions between the characters do an excellent job of immersing the players in the world and allowing anyone to be the protagonist. While this game ultimately focuses on Ryza, it allows every other character to stand out in the journey and to have significance to the plot.

The playable characters (a grand total of 11) bring several new faces and old acquaintances and encourage players to mix and match all the possible combinations available and suit them to their abilities. Whether you make a team composed of dodge tanks or one where damage is key, you will have fun using every unit your way and taking advantage of your own choices.

Atelier Ryza 3 is one of those games that have been a highlight of this year, coupled with Hi-Fi Rush, and while it certainly is a bummer to see Ryza go away, it certainly makes me wonder what the future will hold for the Atelier series. I am definitely looking forward to what the next installment has to offer so long as it keeps improving on these mechanics that will help attract new players to the franchise and also help keep long-term fans invested.

Reviewed on PC (code provided by the publisher).

Atelier Ryza 3: Alchemist of the End & the Secret Key has to be one of the most straightforward and beautiful RPGs in the series as a whole while also being way friendlier to new players than other installments in the series. This is a game that even non Atelier fans will be able to sink their teeth into easily while being able to fully customize their experience through the game’s new Synthesis system and its Secret Key mechanic.

Buy for $59.99 from Amazon

The links above are affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, Wccftech.com may earn from qualifying purchases.