Atelier Ryza thread

it's Mid Budget Anime Time

it's the Girl Run Cycle

I've never played any of the ateliers so I'm kinda curious how this is gonna go

I've never really enjoyed Crafting Systems in most games, which is apparently atelier's whole thing

I've seen people saying it manages to create something interesting out of a usually-boring concept though, by being, like, good at design

suddenly, anime man

YOU UNDERESTIMATE ME

I like these buildings

this man's jacket situation is absolutely incredible

generic townsperson npc girl is extremely cute

there are like 5 of her in every area

ryza just now finding out that alchemy exists at like age 17

I

wh

googling "how do I heal" and finding inconclusive results

I've received word that the way you heal in Atelier Ryza is:
- Craft Biscuits
- Affix them to your polearm
- Hit your friends with it

just looting fistfuls of water from this pond

I like her

Let Ryza Craft a Gun

They'll be fine.

I'm like 9 hours into this game and it still absolutely REFUSES to open up, like, at all

got a pretty good handle on the crafting system but I can't use 90% of the cool stuff I can make because every single quest is "go talk to this dude and then make 3 Wheats"

there's no point in even trying to make GOOD Wheats bc you're just turning them in to complete quests

I've had recipes since the very beginning that I still can't craft because it won't allow me to GO to any of the places that have their ingredients

you try to go anywhere on the overworld and the characters are like "WE SHOULDN'T HEAD THIS WAY YET"

I want to get killed by a dragon 40 levels above me and then spend two days assembling ingredients for some insane dragonkiller bomb and the game just WILL NOT let me play it

obviously this is all normal "first act of a JRPG" stuff but why won't it stop

so "Paper" falls under the category of "Fuel" which leads to this kid having extremely normal concerns

googling basically anything about this game always lands on pages that look like this

in fairness "breaking the game" seems to be more or less the point of the game anyway

the gathering/crafting system is so elaborate that it'd be basically impossible to balance, and balancing it would be less fun anyway

pretty sure the designers ultimately want you to figure out some way to craft A Bomb To Kill God

boiling cauldron producing ever more kickass flutes

Dark Souls (2011)

normal stat allocation

so last night the game added a new party member and she seemed kinda underpowered and then I spent.... probably an hour and a half? crafting gear for her

now she does something like 4-6x the damage of her default equipment

happy to report that the core design of this game Works

they really did it

they made a game where the Crafting System is legitimately fun

when i tweet

lmao ryza is... one of my fav jrpg protagonists in a while

I like this game a lot but I'm getting towards the end of it and I'm.... really losing steam towards actually finishing it lol

crafting late-game items takes an INSANE amount of time, and the game's not really paced to incentivize it beyond making numbers go up

like on the one hand it keeps giving me more tools to craft ever more powerful gear, but actually engaging with those systems blew out the level curve in like the first chapter, so all the story bosses die in like four rounds of me just hitting Attack

There are a handful of superbosses that instakill my whole party, but I'd much rather the game was able to present a consistent challenge somewhere between "faceroll" and "15-page gamefaqs guide to minmaxing your whole party for this one specific superboss"

There's like... a very specific type of JRPG player whose brain goes all-in on these types of deeply intricate theorycrafting minmax puzzles

I am VERY NOT one of those players, so it's super impressive that the designers managed to make this stuff fun for a wider audience

so like I'm kinda bummed that it's running into serious pacing issues, but like, the fact that they pulled off this much is still remarkable, particularly given the budget

can't even *imagine* the effort it would take to balance into an FF-style rising-and-falling challenge arc

one hilarious thing about this game is the first chapter has a clear theme running through it, where every kid has a different, uniquely terrible relationship with their parents

this is *completely* dropped on the floor and never addressed as soon as the plot kicks off lmao

like Ryza hates farming and is mad/hurt that her Very Trad parents refuse to accept that alchemy is her actual passion

she then builds the titular Secret Hideout, in a forest on a different landmass like 20 miles away, and just... moves there. The parents never come up again lol

Subsequent cutscenes sort of imply that she's SUPPOSEDLY still living with her parents and their relationship improves a bit but like........ the hideout/atelier has a bed and the actual plot definitely requires her to be there for like weeks at a time lmao

The final boss, regrettably, is finally requiring me to rethink my "three DPS, armor from like 30 hours ago, only craft weapons and accessories that boost ATK" pro gamer strategy

ah

trying to whip up some half-decent armor so the final boss's Big Move doesn't kill me and instead I'm rabbit-holing down the infinite fractal of possibilities that is this game's crafting system

after like 45 hours I've finally truly grasped the nature of how Traits vs Effects work, and how you can ferry a desired buff through layer upon layer of converging paths until you can.... basically apply any arbitrary stats onto any piece of equipment with enough planning

like.... in late game the difference between crafting a piece of armor out of whatever you've got lying around, or actually galaxybraining out the full dependency tree for every component, is something like.... 10x stronger? 50x? I don't even know but it's like another planet lol

oh hey I'm still missing one material for the top tier weapons, wonder what I need to craft that

*googles*

𝕱𝖎𝖗𝖘𝖙, 𝖈𝖔𝖒𝖕𝖑𝖊𝖙𝖊 𝖊𝖛𝖊𝖗𝖞 𝖘𝖎𝖉𝖊 𝖖𝖚𝖊𝖘𝖙 𝖎𝖓 𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖊𝖓𝖙𝖎𝖗𝖊 𝖌𝖆𝖒𝖊,

lmao everything online is casually dropping "craft a 999 quality x" and I'm like, I'm at alchemy level 60 and I can't get above like 250 quality, what's the deal

turns out you make a quality-boosting item, use it to craft another item that can be used as an ingredient FOR quality-boosting items, and transfer the boost, then iterate

you just keep feeding back the same buff on top of itself in a loop until it hits 999 lol

once you've got ONE 999-quality ingredient you can dupe it and use it to craft 999 versions of most other things, by carefully plotting out elaborate crafting routes to ferry its effect around

this is apparently the prerequisite for every forum post that's like "use a 999 x"

imagining skyrim if bethesda found out about the Gloves of Enhance Potions -> Potions of Enhance Gloves trick during dev and decided to just design entire boss fights around it

videogames are good lol

esports

Pictured: Game Design Document for Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout (2019)

so I still haven't made any armor because I made some 999-quality materials and then realized there's an entire EXTRA PANEL of the galaxy-brain meme going on here that I hadn't even noticed before

Maxing quality via feedback loops isn't an exploit; it unlocks a whole new puzzle

I won't explain the details on twitter because it took me 40 hours to understand them lol

but once you've got one or two max-quality materials, actually USING them to craft OTHER maxed items is a gigantic puzzle, and clearly an intentionally-designed one

there's a whole pile of systems that guide and constrain the ways a material can transfer its strengths to the crafted item. These make it extremely difficult *but not impossible* to construct vast pyramids of max-strength components that assemble one absurdly OP superweapon

It's an incredibly interesting approach to game balance?

I thought originally that the devs just didn't really mind permitting "broken" builds, but it's deeper and cleverer than that

They assume you'll WANT to break the systems, because they made crafting *fun*, so even relatively casual players will likely try

instead of trying to prevent broken strats, they made breaking things both *really complicated* and *really interesting*

me: look I just need to craft one half-decent Ingot and then dupe it a bunch for some armor and then kill the final boss

hooded kermit dot jpeg: but if you spent the next three hours traversing graph cycles you could craft a PERFECT Ingot

I am normally not at all one of Those Kinds of rpg players so, like, shoutouts to this game for making this stuff both compelling and accessible enough that I'm actually considering it

Having borne witness to the Future of Gaming, we return now to the Present of Gaming, where I have been spending the past three evenings constructing immensely powerful Ingots

IM GOOD AT VIDEOSGMA

This game has a weird procgen system where you can, like, generate environments to raid for materials by inputting seed values

I found a good one

Okay so instead of making armor I spent three days making massively more powerful weapons for everyone, and also some decent healing items

Armor is for cowards and swords have nonzero DEF so I'm hoping this is enough of an upgrade to kill the final boss lol

lmao so to recap: the boss killed me, and then I spent three (3) days making four (4) items, and then I killed the boss so hard it managed to attack exactly two (2) times before dying

this game owns

Okay finished Atelier Ryza

it actually has a whole bunch of plot stuff after the final boss where you go around talking to people and finishing up plot stuff, which is really neat?

usually games end super abruptly as soon as combat's done but this actually gave its ending space

So yeah Atelier Ryza is great

Art's cute, plot's generally fun, it's super low budget but uses its resources really effectively

It's secretly not a JRPG but is in fact an incredibly elaborate puzzle game about traversing cyclic directed graphs?? This rules???