With Atelier being my favourite JRPG series, I’m usually excited and optimistic whenever a new entry is announced. I’ve felt the exact opposite about Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian, though. There’s good reason for this, as this game is a successor to the free-to-play gacha spin-off Atelier Resleriana: Forgotten Alchemy and the Polar Night Liberator, which was quickly shut down in the West. This new release is mostly presented as a standalone adventure, but it’s still got a mish-mash of mechanics and lore-elements from this now Japan-only gacha game and a sprinkling of cameos from across the franchise. As a result, it ends up feeling far more like an anniversary adventure made out of obligation than a fresh new Atelier world.
Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian is a dual-protagonist story, and you don’t need any context from prior games to understand their adventure. I was immediately a fan of one of them, the bubbly air-headed adventurer Rias. She’s got a lot of the quirky, silly personality of some prior protagonists like Ryza and Meruru, but with absolutely no understanding or passion for alchemy at the start of her journey. She’s just interested in getting lost in caves and finding something exciting to bring home to her adoptive sister and her fixer-upper shop. She runs into a young man named Slade on one of these adventures, who’s a bit less immediately charming, but brings a lot more intrigue and mystery with him. He’s returned to the town of Hallfein to fulfill his father’s last wishes, and has been given a mysterious arm band called the Geist Core to do so. The two of them uncover a hidden alchemist’s atelier full of tools and tomes, but in their world, alchemy hasn’t been practiced for ages.
In every Atelier game, there’s a different context and understanding of alchemy, its place in the world, and why the protagonists end up mastering it. I do love the idea of a world where alchemy is more of a myth, and there’s a lot of mystery behind why Rias ends up having such a natural talent for seeing mana and using alchemy tools.
What’s weird to me, though, is that unexplained convenience that runs through so much of the game. One example of this that really bothered me is that, in this game’s world, there are people called wanderers. A wanderer is someone who has literally come here from another world, and this is how the game contextualises so much of the main cast being familiar protagonists from older Atelier entries. One specific character is the protagonist from a far older entry in the series called Mana Khemia 2, which blew me away. The thing is, everyone brushes past the idea of “wanderers” almost instantly – not to mention the implications that they were plucked from another world and have been forced to make a new life here for who knows how long. There’s a lot to explore behind this idea of a wanderer, and the depth of emotions or struggle that come with being one. Instead, it feels like a relic of world-building from the gacha game, and it’s almost exclusively used as a plot device to justify these cameos.
As Rias and Slade’s party grows, their duties mirror plenty of the previous Atelier games. You’ve got a variety of fields and dungeons to explore where you can gather materials for alchemy or fight monsters that are in your way. Combat in this game borrows from Atelier Sophie 2, giving you a 6-person squad where there are 3 front-row party members and 3 back-row members. While combat is pretty traditionally turn-based, there are a few layered on mechanics that add some exciting ways to interact with the flow of combat. Your turn order bar also has random stat buffs sitting on certain parts of the bar, and whoever acts on that turn gets the buff. If you can use attacks or abilities to delay enemy turns or make yours earlier, you can manipulate the turn order and stack up buffs. You can even use Multi-action or Interrupt during battle to select a group of party members, a special ability or item for each, and watch as they all attack in unison. It never achieves the speed or frenetic energy from Atelier Ryza or Atelier Yumia that I enjoy, but the satisfaction I get from these combo mechanics never gets old.
On the alchemy side, there’s one major new feature in Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian that I’m obsessed with. Typically, your only reasons for alchemy in these games are to make gear for use in battle, or items to turn in for requests to NPCs. In this entry, though, you get a new reason to do alchemy – the shop. The town of Hallfein is in rough shape, and so is the shop that Rias runs. You’re able to stock a shelf in the store with any items you’ve created, and lining them up on the shelf so the color attributes of each items left-and-right sides match up gives you bonuses. You’ve also got shop cleaning and customer service to worry about, which you deal with by assigning worker fairies. You can recruit new fairies by diving into special dungeons, and each one will have different skills or shop preferences.
I want this system to be expanded on so badly in a future game. In its current form, it’s a menu you set up options in and then press confirm to receive an amount of money based on your choices. I would love to run the shop in real-time, like Recettear or Moonlighter. I would also love to see some of the base decoration and customisation features from Atelier Yumia come into play for designing my own shop. And having a bigger variety of characters or recognisable NPCs I can employ at the shop would be great too. Every fairy looks the same, and they don’t look that good to begin with.
I do enjoy the overall flow and gameplay loop of Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian. I love a lot of the characters, too – there are plenty of fun personalities in this game, and the returning wanderer characters are so fun to see bouncing off of the rest of the cast. I just wish the fuller narrative did a better job at making every element of the story feel more realised, at least when it comes to the worldbuilding. Rias and Slade go through a satisfying adventure of growth and understanding, but so much of the worldbuilding and background that fuels that journey feels so under-explained that I’m left wishing I still had a way to play that defunct gacha game so I could at least attempt to get a better understanding of the bigger picture.
