IT'S RYZIN' TIME

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"Alchemist of the End" of course refers to Ryza herself, who is going to build a bomb that cracks the earth like pinata

there's an option in the graphics settings for TAA but it doesn't work lol

haha remember when ryza 2 was like "what if we just removed item charges entirely" so you could just make a bomb that does ten billion damage and then just use it on every single turn

they kept that

ryza 3 is fuckin wild dude they pulled an elden ring and just kitbashed an absurdly gigantic world out of all the assets they've ever made in last 15 years

I'm not sure there's enough game here to even justify being this big, but it's really interesting to see Gust going from "really tightly and carefully scoped low budget rpgs" to "way too ambitious mid-budget jank rpg"

(the latter is my favorite kind of videogame)

this is like the most technically complex animation they've ever made and it's ryza and klaudia being Definitely Totally Straight

it's very funny that klaudia is like 20 and her job is CEO of The Dutch East India Company Except Not Problematic

Generic Anime Fantasy Mercantilism is so compelling dude you've got global trade networks and every commodity you could want but nobody's labor is alienated it's just an entire society of individual craftspeople making shoes or clocks or bread and selling them to their neighbors

these games have always had kinda stilted translations but parts of this one are nearly incomprehensible lol

"The base ground was named exactly after their insolence" honestly sounds like machine translation. Kinda wonder if the devs got basically ripped off by whoever they contracted for localization

lmao the atelier games all have a sort of "training dummy" boss where you're supposed to see how much damage you can inflict in a set number of turns

I accidentally made a combination of equipment that just stunlocks it forever so it never takes a turn

ryza 3 is absolutely wild btw

it's just absurdly, overwhelmingly Gigantic in a way that I've never seen outside of like PS1 games

by which I mean like, low fidelity assets mean we can fit a vast number of distinct environments onto a CD-ROM, but there isn't really all that much to DO in any of them, so we filled it with the only other relatively cheap asset: A Staggering Fuckton Of Text

think FFVII vibes

there's four world maps that are each larger than any of the previous games (one of them IS the map from the first game plus a ton of new stuff)

no aspect of the game's design actually supports anything of this scale. They took a game design that was carefully tuned for a really tightly-scoped series of really low-budget rpgs, and then just.... increased the scope by 10x lol

I wouldn't say it works very well, but it's absolutely fascinating to like... analyze

the extremely bare-bones probably-MTL translation is particularly disappointing given that the first game actually had some really good dialogue

the first two games used the same localization studio, but this one uses a different one

I'm guessing what happened is, they made the game world Gigantic, filled it primarily with dialogue, and then realized they accidentally raised the cost of localization by like 5x or more

>:(

finished ryza 3 a few days ago and have been Pondering it since then

it's... fine? they made the world Huge but didn't really change up the crafting or combat, so the whole thing feels like a sorta super-easy victory lap where you just do the same things you're already good at

tbh the translation is such a mess it like... pretty significantly hurts the game. Got that extremely MTL thing where every sentence is technically valid grammar but almost completely unintelligible

Even in important scenes, I was constantly pausing to reread the text log to try and puzzle out what the original intent must have been

it sucks because the plot is concluding a bunch of really cool arcs that were set up in the first game, but I basically just... can't form an opinion on it

all the characters' individual personalities are lost; everyone's tone is completely homogeneous

you can at least get most of the emotional context from the voice actors' performances. Obviously I don't know japanese but it sounds like they were doing a great job lol

Anyway: As a connoisseur of mid-budget overly-ambitious jank jrpgs, ryza 3 is a really fun example of a talented studio getting a budget increase and having NO idea how to use it lol

really Early Xbox 360 vibes. Whether you think that's a good thing or a bad thing

the first ryza game is really important to me on just sort of a personal level, so I really wish I could be more enthusiastic about The Conclusion Of The Atelier Ryza Trilogy, but eh, oh well