Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land

Atelier Yumia was provided by Koei Tecmo for review. Thank you!

When I play survival games, I tend to always gravitate towards gathering as much as I can and hoarding my materials. I like to make sure I am prepared for any circumstance and have enough materials to keep me occupied. Naturally, this got me into crafting a lot, which is how I started my journey into the Atelier series. A JRPG that revolves around gathering, crafting, and exploring easily roped me in, and Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land does a great job at keeping me engaged while also expanding on what is expected of this franchise.

When I think of any Atelier games, the first thing that comes to my mind is alchemy. The core of each game revolves around using alchemy to synthesize and create different items for both yourself and others. So, with that in mind, I wanted to see an alchemy system that is easy to understand but has the complexity to make the items I want more powerful in unique ways. I feel Atelier Yumia finds a way to balance this, making the system feel rewarding both during and after the process.

There are two key factors that make items stronger when synthesizing: resonance and mana. Increasing these will improve your item with better quality, stat upgrades, and more powerful item traits. These increase depending on the items you use as ingredients, which vary in size and quality themselves. The better quality the ingredients are, with a larger resonance area, the more Resonance and Mana will be accumulated. These ingredients can also have their own individual effects that further buff your item, like a further boost to the resonance area or increased health or defense.

Each item can have multiple cores, which improve different aspects of each item. For example, with Yumia’s weapon, we can have a core for attack power, one to give it extra trait slots, and one to specifically increase quality. All of these can have ingredients poured into them, giving many chances to increase their power and give them new effects like slowing down enemies, increasing your speed, and more.

To get the ingredients to craft, you have to find them in the open world, which has been refined to be quick and efficient for the most part. You run around a pretty gigantic open world, finding plants to pick, rocks to mine, trees to hit, and monsters to hunt, all to gather the best ingredients to improve your alchemy. Gathering is relatively quick with immediate pickups, but mining requires a 1-2 second animation. Luckily, most animations can be avoided by shooting the materials with your trusty gunstaff instead of mining them.

The combat in Atelier Yumia has been iterated on a bit as well while still retaining the flair from the previous entries. I would consider this real-time combat on rails. You can move around in a circle around the enemy you are fighting with a selection of close-up and far-away attacks. Your choice of attack is important, as it can stun enemies, which gives you a chance to see what they are weak against and do some big damage. You can also swap to one of your teammates in real-time, with three of your six actively fighting and the other three taking on a support role.

It took me a little longer to get into the combat as much as I should have, but it is a lot of fun as you level up and get new mechanics. It can feel a little floaty at times as well due to main attacks not showing as much of an impact on the monster's health, but once you unlock Friend Actions, Precision Countering, and more powerful items, it gets way better. I found basic attacks and skills to be meaningless other than to stun the enemy to get their weakness and deal massive damage to them. But it is enjoyable to watch play out and swap between different allies.

However, the gorgeous open world is one of my favorite parts of the game. There are so many activities spread throughout the world, all dictated by question marks on the map. It felt rewarding to go out and find treasure chests, discover ruins, take on side quests, and restore shrines to earn new ingredients and skill points. I like how big the world is with the four distinct regions, and the ability to build bases and customize them the way you want to is nice. I appreciate that we can build energy generators to replenish the energy you use to navigate the world and Simple Synthesis to make smaller items you may use more often, like bullets or repair kits.

To encourage us to explore more, we also have the Pioneering Effort, which does a great job at giving a reason to keep exploring the regions. This list of actions to complete gives you bonuses the more you do and requires some travel around the world. This can unlock new recipes, different ammo types, and new buildings to create that can help you store items and cultivate ingredients.

I did find it a little hard to traverse the landscape at times. You can do triple jumps on some surfaces but not others, and the motorcycle you get later on doesn't have as much use as I expected. Using the motorcycle does help getting around on roads and flatter surfaces, but exploring cliffs and more condensed areas won't be as easy to get around.

Then, we have the skill tree, which is used to improve your synthesizing, exploration, and combat skills. There are some essential skills to get here, like the Friend Actions mentioned earlier or increasing the quality of all gathered items, so the upgrades make a difference in your gameplay. I much prefer this over the usual increased stats or combat abilities. However, the only way to get points is by completing quests and finding activities in the open world, and it can feel like a slog to get for later skills since it gets more expensive to unlock. Even still, it's a fun time to go around the world, and it's easy to get lost in all of the activities.

The story itself didn't hook me until the first 45 minutes were done, but after that, I was pretty intrigued throughout. The tale is based around Yumia investigating a new continent to further a research team's efforts to discover what happened on this land and why Alchemy is so stigmatized. Figuring out what happened to the Aladissian Empire and the atrocities that may or may not have been committed leading to the current state of the world is captivating to learn about.

I also liked how the characters were portrayed. I was worried that our protagonist, Yumia, would be a more stereotypical ditsy anime girl, and while she does have her moments, there were more times than I expected that she showed some backbone. None of the core team of six were too stereotypical, except for Lenja; she is a stereotypical timid, shy anime girl. Even still, I enjoyed learning about them and going through their personal side quests to discover more about who they are and their past.

Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land - Steam Deck Performance

While Atelier Yumia is a fun game, it’s a bit of a mixed bag on the Steam Deck. At the default settings with XeSS upscaling on balanced, we mostly get an average of 40 FPS, with some areas going to 26 FPS (like at your Atelier and some fights) and some going to 60 FPS (like at the Willeks Village). It can vary wildly, and it was hard to figure out my favorite way to play since I was constantly swapping back and forth between stability at a lower frame rate and varying smoothness at a higher rate.

There's not a ton of leeway since the CPU and GPU are being pushed pretty hard. However, I can only choose one group of recommended settings, and in the end, I preferred stability.

Recommended Settings

In the end, we do have to make do with some slight performance drops no matter what, which takes place mostly in the first region, but we can still have an enjoyable time in the game. I discovered that setting the in-game framerate limit helped performance more than a lot of the other settings, so with that set to 30 FPS and a mix of Standard and Low quality settings, we can play at a mostly solid 30 FPS with XeSS on Quality. This gives us solid visuals that aren't too blurry with XeSS.

However, we do need to utilize as much power as possible. There are enough areas and fights where the framerate drops, and to get the most stable experience, we need as much power as possible. So, we do have some high battery drain that fluctuates between 17W and 24W. I am not surprised by how demanding the game is, but there isn't much more we can do to enhance the experience without sacrificing quality. I did also try the Dynamic Resolution option, and while it works a little better, it also makes the game much blurrier.

Because it was nearly impossible to get to a solid 30 FPS without making some drastic changes that would make the visuals so much worse, I recommend playing this way:

I also noticed some minor stutters when picking up resources in region 3. It doesn't affect region 1 and 2. While it isn't the end of the world, it's still a little obnoxious.

Super Stable Settings

This was more of a last-minute add, but after some testing, I feel it's a viable way to play the game. It will require a little more compromise, which is a bummer, but I was able to get a near stable 30 FPS in the areas that were having issues before. So, for this group of settings, we will need to actually bring the resolution down to 1024x576 and use the low-quality preset, along with XeSS at Balanced. It does make the game a little blurry, but due to the aesthetics of the game, we can use SteamOS FSR upscaling to make it look better.

It sounds weird to use two upscaling methods, and it can introduce a little bit of ghosting here and there, but it does keep the game more stable and still looks okay. You can bring the resolution down to 960x540 for more savings, but it does introduce more ghosting, and we will still need a 30 FPS lock. Still, it works, and it's more stable:

Accessibility

There are many settings we can change to customize our experience. For battles, we can toggle focus camera, auto guard, holding to flee, and skill camera. We can also change the camera controls, aiming speed, camera shake, map rotation, auto-save, aiming mode, auto-sprint, text size (set to 3), text color, and audio sliders.

The game doesn't support 16:10 resolutions, so there are black bars at the top and bottom, but it does have cloud saves and controller support. There are no HDR settings.

Conclusion

Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land is a fantastic experience with engaging mechanics and a solid story. Synthesizing items is addicting, the story is interesting, and the activities around the open world are fulfilling. Combat gets enjoyable later on, but it can feel a little floaty in general with basic attacks. Apart from some minor issues traversing the landscape, I didn't find much I disliked about the game, and I would recommend checking it out if you enjoy the series or just like JRPGs in general.

Playing on the Steam Deck is almost completely solid, with a fluctuating framerate. But outside of some areas in the first region and some very flashy combat, we can get a stable 30 FPS with the game looking quite solid. It needs some compromises, but in the end, it is playable and enjoyable.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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