PC REVIEW | Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian

It has been a long time since I played an Atelier game. Back on the PS2 I played the series but somehow fell off the bandwagon. Have been looking at them for years, they all look so beautiful! Playing Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian blew me away. I enjoyed it so much more than I remembered from the PS2 days, and the artwork was far more beautiful than the trailers showed.

At the start of the game, you get to choose between Slade and Rias as the main character. However, it doesn’t really matter who you choose, as the story only changes a little. In the opening hour, you stumble on an old alchemy laboratory, and Rias decides that she will become an alchemist to help restore the town, which was destroyed 12 years ago. You’ll go on an adventure of helping the citizens while searching for answers to learn what happened 12 years ago. Soon you’ll be joined by four other people to help you fight all the monsters you come across in your journey. And you’ll meet a lot of other alchemists from the Atelier universe.

Will you be able to restore the town and get answers to the many questions about what happened 12 years ago?

Things I liked!

• Nice entry for newcomers to the series | Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian looks to me like a great entry into this franchise. In this game, a lot of characters from the other Atelier games will visit your town. Some will play a significant role; others will pay a quick visit, ask for your help with something small, or give you some advice, since you have just started as an alchemist. The snippets you get from their own journey intrigued me about their games as well, and I think it is lovely for veterans to see their favourite characters visit this game.

• Beautiful artwork and music | What kept me looking at the Atelier games all those years was the stunning art style. I love the distinctive style of the different alchemists. They always look a bit extra but fabulous. Totally different from each other, but always with so many details in their clothes and hairstyles. I especially love the different eye colours and how beautiful they looked. The music is impressive as well, and you can switch between songs if you don’t like the main ones. However, I was pleased with the main songs, lovely but not too much.

• Exploring areas is rewarding | Atelier Resleriana comes with a bunch of quality-of-life features to make it easy to explore the world. For example, you have a highly detailed map that shows monsters, teleport spots, chests, and merchants. And each map has about four teleport spots that unlock as soon as you reach that area. So when you need to go back to get something later on, there is always a warp spot close by. The game allows you to save almost everywhere. In town, in your lab, in a dungeon. It also has a skip button for cutscenes, very handy for those cutscenes before boss fights, on which you died, and don’t want to go through the whole cutscene again.

• Quality-of-life features inside battles | You can manually defend for a larger reward or auto-defend. In the settings, you have the option between 4 difficulties for the game, from easy to extra hard. Added to that, there are three settings for how fast you want the fight to go. And my favourite, you don’t have to scan enemies to learn their weaknesses, as soon as you start the battle, the game gives you that info.

• There is always something to do | You not only have to focus on the main story, but there are also a lot of side quests. And there are even differences between the sidequests. There is a community center with simple tasks, as well as quests for the other main characters of the story to get to know them better. You can simply choose which quest to track, and then the game will give you all the info on where to go. You’ll never be bored, as there are always multiple leads to work on. And not only do you get a reward for finishing the quest, but over time, you will see the town get restored the further you get into the game.

• No missable achievements | I always appreciate it if a game has no missable achievements. There is an achievement for fighting the final boss in the “extra hard” difficulty. However, after finishing the story, you’ll get the ability to make a new save that will get you back to just before fighting the final boss. Most of the other achievements you’ll just get over time by completing the main story and the side quests. The only achievement I struggled with was for getting 99,999 damage in one attack.

Mixed & disliked!

• Not everything gets explained | This might be a problem only for newcomers to the series, but not everything gets explained. Or maybe some of it was explained, but you get so much info at the start of the game that I might not have remembered it all. There is a section in the game with all the game info; however, some of that is very basic and missing the information you were actually looking for.

• All the side quests hitting all at once | Sometimes, after making some progress in the main story, a lot of side quests pop up directly after it. However, this can leave you feeling a bit overwhelmed, with too many chats with people rather than fighting or configuring new items in the laboratory. You can clear them over time, and there is no time limit on them, but after hitting a roadblock around chapter 6, I felt overwhelmed by how many things got added to my plate when I got past that part.

• One significant difficulty spike | Around act 6, there is a boss fight with two enemies. The first time you meet those 2, you have to lose the battle for the story; however, the second time, you have to win. This was a real roadblock for me. I had no problems with the enemies before or after this point, but this one required some experience grinding. What might not have helped was that by that point, I also didn’t fully understand the alchemy part of the game yet, and how to improve my gear.

• Keeping your storage organized | Keeping your storage organized was a real struggle. At first, it feels totally fine as it looks enormous. On your travels, you can collect a total of 500 items, and at home, you have a total storage of 9,999. However, this will soon get full, and it is hard to know how to clean it. As you kinda always want to save a few of each type because you will probably need them to make new items. But going through almost 10k items to decide what to keep and what to sell is a struggle. Finally, I missed the option to block some items from being sold, so you can’t sell them by accident.

• Chests and how to face them | This is a minor thing, but I have struggled the whole game with opening chests. Somehow, I always ended up at the wrong side of it, and in that case, it will not open. You’ll have to walk around it to the other side to open it. It was almost a skill to end up at the wrong side of the chest in like 80% of the time.

How long did I play the review before publishing? 50 hours
How long to beat the story? Around 40 hours
How many Achievements did I earn before publishing? 42/42
How long to achieve Unlock all achievements? | 40-45 hours
You’ll love this game if you like these | Dragon Quest series, Persona series, Final Fantasy series

CONCLUSION

Score: 80/100

Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian is a fantastic brew of an RPG, with so many things to do, it almost boils over. And the many quality-of-life features make sure that every type of player can enjoy it.