Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout DX

Klaudia is Love, Klaudia is Life, Klaudia Forever <3

It's a nice update to the already well liked original. If you already have it, but would like to try the new stuff, I would wait for a deep discout, as it's not really worth the full price. For those who are new, it's a really good deal compared to the original.

First Atelier game review, I played this for the love of the game and Ryza's wife material after watching the Anime 1st, and ended up buying the trilogy in the recent sale. Only buy this game on sale, $30 or under. If I would interpret what people meant by "Cozy JRPG", it means it's pretty freakin' slow and boring, no world ending plot/the chosen one type of thing going, a little slice of life. The 1st 20 hours of the game is just small town girl, coming of age, trying to find her place in the world. Then the last 10 hours of the games main story opens up like you just finished a long intro, and had an actual "hook", then game ends. It might be a little too late for most people who already died from boredom. I spent another 20 hours to build a sufficient "mid-game" gear with limited resources. My 100% completion on steam clocks in at 88+ hours but the in-game save is only about 70+ hours. That difference comes from reloading saves figuring out the crafting to not waste limited resources mid-game. There are many things wrong with this game that you need to set your expectations on what you're getting into and need to look forward to playing this type of game to enjoy it. - Running this game at 4k crashes the game (specs attached), with or without 3rd party fix and after hours of fiddling with the settings. My only solution is to run it 1440p@60fps and using Lossless Scaling to scale the window 1.5x on a 4k monitor. Anti-Aliasing doesn't seem to work in this game and support recommends playing the game at 1080p in 2026 LMAO. - An F-ton of asset re-use, enemies get 5 different re-color with the same exact 1-2 attack animations. - Animations/cutscenes are very stiff, low budget, AA quality. - The ATB combat system is half-baked, bad and just trying to overcomplicate itself, I hate it. You can switch characters but then you lose the pending party member "action/extra orders". The lengthy animations of skills lock you from switching characters but then the ATB gauge is still moving and can't switch out. The tactics level is just a contrived system masquerading as "strategy". I never even notice nor cared of the difference in what characters are casting from tactics level 2-4. It's just a means to an end to lock your character from casting "limit breaks" until tactics level 5. - The pacing of this game is abysmal, it's like they stitched together things and shipped it without anybody playing the game from start to finish. The game is braindead easy all throughout until the final boss where you really need to upgrade your gear. - The quests chains, recipes and ingredients are locked from later areas or story progress which doesn't make sense, when at that point it's already useless. - For the "complexity/depth" that people are boasting about the Atelier games' crafting, it's not that deep, it's just you're not given the proper tools to be efficient/proficient at it. There are so many annoying UI BS of managing this crafting system that makes this harder than it should. * Until close to the end of the game, I thought that party formation were fixed, (i.e. you always need a front/rear party member) because the UI can't directly swap the character unless they are both "fronts" or both "rear" characters. It turns out, you would need to remove the character from the party 1st and add any character so that allows you to run all fronts or all rear characters. It's an entire thing, I wasn't able to remove Tao from the party until I got Klaudia. * There are close to 200 recipes, and over 200 ingredients in this game. There's no "tree" to have a better view on when and how you unlock things that you're constantly googling more than half the time to figure which recipe morph tree does this one ingredient you need is coming from. I had to make a Gemini AI Gem and fed an entire excel file export from one website (https://eruciform.com/games/atelier/), of all known materials, recipes so I can just ask the chatbot instead of googling randomly. * There's no sort by alphabetically or sort by anything on the recipe list, like what the F, you would have to constantly scroll up and down from the list of 200 to look for 1 thing you need. * For some reason there's only a limit of 9 items you can duplicate at. There's no multi-item duplicate, and the worst part about this is every time you duplicate, the cursor selector goes back to the first item in the list, so you have to scroll down again to find the item you need to duplicate. Note on 100% Achievement: The "Alchemy Master" achievement. this DX version you would need to unlock ALL party member weapon recipes (Kilo, Agatha and Romy) and including DLC recipes. For the "Fully Fatal Drives" achievement, you only need to execute the primary party members (Ryza, Lent, Tao, Lila, Empel). This series from what I surmised, the developer of this game is all about quantity over quality releasing annually with little iterations. They were saying this Ryza trilogy "saved" Atelier. I do hope they learned their lesson and fix their engine. All that being said, I'm still excited follow along Ryza's next adventure and finish the trilogy. I'm not going to say that I "get" these types of games, but I get some degree of dopamine, crafting that 999 quality items, albeit very mundane and tedious.