As the dawn of a new Atelier alchemist JRPG entry comes to pass, Koei Tecmo recently invited Wccftech and a few other journalists from RPG Site and IGN, among others, to go hands-on with the upcoming Atelier Yumia. Bearing a moniker befitting a light novel series, Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land marks a new series under the long-running franchise banner, picking up where the Atelier Ryza trilogy left off. In this preview session, we were permitted full access to the first few hours of the latest build on PlayStation 5.
Atelier Yumia opens in media res during an exploration of ancient ruins accompanied by party members who only make a brief appearance as footnotes to this introductory sequence before flashing back to an earlier time when Yumia herself is only just starting out to dabble in the forbidden dark arts of alchemy. It’s here that Yumia is part of an established survey corps sent out to delve into the secrets of the fall of the Aladissian Empire, where this 26th entry in the long-running Atelier series takes place.
Despite a new subseries filled with brand-new mechanics, both in the fields of gathering and crafting as well as combat, Atelier Yumia kicks things off almost immediately with brief tutorials that lead up to Yumia soon taking over an abandoned building to call home as her first Atelier. It’s all in a day’s work for the Survey Corps that Yumia and her fellow compatriots ascribe to serving and doing a little bit of everything from heavy lifting to monster culling and crafting. Even at the beginning of the adventure, Yumia Liessfeldt has already made a small name for herself, both as a friend to those in need with a small advance party and with a couple of other corps members who join her in combat while also being a bit of a black sheep for dabbling in the dark arts. For reasons unknown early on in the story, alchemy is seen as something not to be trusted and from an ancient civilization.
In order to truly engage in proper alchemy, Yumia first needs the right materials to do so. While past Atelier games would limit what players could harvest in their basket and bring back to the alchemy workshops, Yumia gives the players a nigh-endless backpack right from the start, more than capable of holding whatever ore and flowers the player can pick up along the way. Gone is the need for gathering tools, as Yumia and her gunstaff are more than equipped to help gather whatever is on hand. See some ore on a hillside that’s just out of reach? Shoot it down. For the first time in the series, Atelier Yumia gives players the option to take some of the crafting on the road and create field items, such as medicines and ammo, without needing to return to the main workshop.
These workshops themselves are initially little more than stripped bare buildings and structures. It’s up to Yumia and the player to rebuild these areas, first crafting up furniture like storage containers before placing them around freely within the confines of the buildable space. Some of the early ateliers appear to be somewhat limiting in how many props can be installed in each, but in a separate preview Gust showed us during our onboarding, there were the abilities to make the building layouts and designs far more intricate with exterior structures and fortifications. Gust wanted to hit on the sense of expression for players to build out these workshops in their own way, which all also double as fast travel points to get around the open world.
Each Atelier title takes its own spin on how items are actually crafted with alchemy form base materials and Atelier Yumia is no exception. At the heart of each alchemy recipe is the memory of the finished item, which is stored in Yumia’s Memory Vial. By recalling the overall concept of an item, she can then select an Alchemy Core to imbue. In our preview, Yumia only had access to a single alchemy core which could increase the air damage of the crafted tool. From here, players then need to select the key ingredients from the recipe and attach them to nodes within the alchemy core. This is where Yumia gets unusually complex, with mana essence floating about as ingredients are added to the core while extracting mana from these components. Each component added has its own resonance aura and gathers in free flowing mana within that range to boost the effectiveness of the final outcome.
As we only had one Alchemy Core at our disposal, our preview was limited in terms of options for truly being able to customize items. Continuously crafting the same recipe will slowly level it up to a maximum level of 10. Each subsequent level will increase the quality of the item or open up the inclusion of other Alchemy Cores. The same four-element system is at play here, but I couldn’t delve deeply enough to see how the strength of a given ingredient’s element plays into the finished outcome.
New to Atelier Yumia is the ability to craft on the go as well. While she doesn’t have the equipment to craft everything away from an atelier, she can at least craft some of the more useful consumables, such as bullets for her gunstaff. I’m amazed that it’s taken this long for such a simple feature to become an Atelier staple and incentivizes players to spend more time out in the open world and reaching deeper into exploration.
Atelier Yumia’s combat is such a strange beast that is a drastic change from earlier Atelier titles. If nothing else, they’ve taken some inspiration from other action RPGs like Tales. Players take control of Yumia or any of her other party members at a given time. The field of battle takes place at both close and long range with many cast members having different attacks based on range. Players can attack freely while also using abilities that run off cooldown timers. In the case of Yumia, she can create items like Flamia swords and other elemental items, while the head of Gust confirmed in our exclusive interview that they’re trying to move away from bombs being a core part of the alchemist’s toolbag. True to its action RPG roots, Yumia and cast can dodge and block incoming attacks with perfectly timed mitigations, rewarding the player with a damaging counterattack. All of these actions can culminate in a rather modestly named ultimate attack called a Friend Action once a specific battle gauge is filled completely.
In making the combat more free-flowing and the exploration al fresco, Gust has opened up the series to a wider generation, and that’s not including adding the Xbox platform to the mix for the first time. Series veterans may decry the loose nature and lack of a structured calendar that was the backbone of the Atelier series for oh so long, but it’s only the natural evolution of an alchemical nature.
Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land will launch on both PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S|X, Nintendo Switch, and PC (Steam) globally on March 21st, 2025.
[Editor’s Note: Koei Tecmo and Gust provided hotel and travel accomodations to Wccftech to attend their preview event.]
Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land Preview – Alchemy Finally Comes to Xbox
