Gust is now following in the footsteps of Square, Sony, and Bandai and is now selling out their Atelier franchise's identity to chase global trends. Instead of making an Atelier game, they instead made a generic action JRPG and branded it as an Atelier game.
https://archive.fo/gPlSz
Around the middle of the development of "Atelier Ryza 3" , the idea of "next time, we will make an Atelier that can be enjoyed even more globally " came up, and that was the beginning of the project. The concept we decided on was " to have the Atelier series accepted globally as a game more than ever before".
By making it an action game with a shounen story? Like every other JRPG? The devs have lost the plot. What made Atelier standout was that it was different and did stuff that other JRPGs weren't doing. Ofcourse it had the cute girl doing cute things fluff, and the relaxing turn based combat, but it also had less shouneny stories and more grounded stuff, be it with Arland and the democratization of kingdoms, or Totori just trying to find her mom, or Dusk with the struggling world and the protagonists working for a cynical buercracy, or the water crisis in Shallie's village, etc. No grandiose "battle the dark lord/god and save the universe" plots or intense action chases or some such. The focus was on being a normal person with a lot of focus on a non-combat profession such as blacksmithing or alchemy or cooking in this fantasy world, who just so happened to also be able to fight, rather than just being another epic warrior hero.
The lantern monster pet is admittedly neat. Shame about the protagonist's design, though.
As I mentioned earlier, to make an RPG that can be played by more people globally, we needed a protagonist with a new and easy-to-accept design, so we thought about it a lot... As a result, we decided on a design that emphasizes coolness, such as being an independent, strong woman who uses footwork.
They've lost the plot.
Hosoi As for Victor, I wanted to make him a type of righteous man that hasn't appeared much in the Atelier series so far .
Sterk doesn't exist to you? Gio? Juris?
Ugly modernist UI.
Hosoi Like previous titles, if you are based in one place, it is natural to place an alchemy pot in the atelier and perform synthesis there... but in a game design like this one, where you investigate and travel around various places, the presence of an alchemy pot doesn't fit. So we made the bold decision not to include an alchemy pot.
It's official. We have an Atelier game without an Atelier. If they wanted to do a game about travelling around, then the protagonist could have been part of a travelling merchant caravan and had a wagon stall. Like a Spice & Wolf Atelier game. But they're just tossing out the franchise to make a generic shounen action JRPG.
