Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian can’t escape the issues of post-time limit Atelier, or its connection to a gacha game

The Atelier franchise has shifted in a number of directions over its life, though it’s always had alchemy as a key pillar. Atelier Yumia almost felt like it started to move away from even that, vastly dumbing down item synthesis in the move to an open world. Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian brings things back a little, offering the older style of small zones and (slightly) more involved alchemy.

Gacha-free

Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian is a spin-off title for the gacha game Atelier Resleriana: Forgotten Alchemy & the Liberator of Polar Night (I’m going to refer to the former as Atelier Resleriana for the rest of this review.) It features a new set of protagonists, fledgling alchemist Rias and the spear user Slade, as they rebuild the town of Hallfein. Most of Hallfein’s residents disappeared during a mysterious incident during the pair’s childhood, with the town struggling to recover.

As someone that never touched the gacha game, it’s hard to really connect with Atelier Resleriana‘s world. You’re told of events that presumably happened in the main game, and visit a selection of areas that I also think are taken from it too. But for the most part you’re only left with Hallfein as an area that’s actually relevant, along with a handful of characters unique to this game — a meagre 6 to be exact.

The story of Rias’s journey as a new alchemist is not exactly a new one with many Atelier games featuring a similar setup, though you do at least get a few twists along the way. It also ties in alright with the fact that most characters in Atelier Resleriana are either from previous entries in the franchise, or from the gacha game.

Rias gets to meet alchemists from other worlds, learn from them, and grow over the course of the story. It’s probably the best justification this game could give for having all these characters without any sort of gacha mechanic, even if I’d still call it a downgrade over having an original cast. Meeting previous characters again also has its moments, despite the lack of an English dub being jarring when meeting anyone from the dubbed titles.

To be honest, the connections to the gacha game are easily Atelier Resleriana‘s worst aspect. Outside of the crossover characters, it handles elements from the gacha’s story poorly. There are multiple moments that almost feel like an advertisement for the gacha — a game that isn’t even available in English now — as characters pop up for a brief moment then leave. There’s an especially egregious example of this halfway through that I still can’t believe was included.

I also think that Slade is another weak link in the story. When starting Atelier Resleriana you’re given the option to pick either Rias or Slade as your starting character, but it’s clear Rias is the only real main character here. It doesn’t help that the game tries to push romance heavily with them most of the time, only for that to lead pretty much nowhere.

A Mix of Old and New

When it comes to the general gameplay loop in Atelier Resleriana, it’s a mix of older Atelier’s smaller zones with turn-based combat, and new Atelier’s emphasis on gathering hundreds of materials. You travel through areas, hitting things with your weapon (or synthesised tools) to gather alchemy ingredients. There are a handful of chests and blocked sections, but for the most part you don’t get to explore much.

Battles are alright, certainly a step up from the mash-fest that is Atelier Yumia. Your party is split into two rows, letting you chain together multiple actions on a single turn by spending TP that builds as you deal damage. The selection of playable character feature a good blend of buffs and elemental attacks, giving you an incentive to switch characters on the fly to deal with different enemies.

Difficulty is still mostly on the lower side, but a couple of boss fights will require you to make decent gear every now and them. Items are generally more nice to have than a necessity on normal, so turn up the difficulty if you want to be made to use every tool in your arsenal.

Taking your stack of materials back to the Atelier lets you synthesise them into items and gear. Atelier Resleriana makes use of a colour system, where everything is made up of two colours. By linking together ingredients with the right colours, you can transfer traits over to the finished item. Items are part of larger crafting trees, letting you transform them into new ones if you add the correct ingredient.

I’m in two minds on how alchemy works in Atelier Resleriana. The colour system is easy to understand but still has a few twists (you can find catalysts to change some of the colour and item type requirements), requiring a little more thought than anything in Atelier Yumia.

However, it doesn’t mesh that well with the modern style of ingredient collecting. Compared to the earlier games, you’ll easily gather thousands of materials. And yet, unlike Atelier Ryza or Yumia, you rarely actually need to use many of them. Things like ingots or cloth can easily be duplicated using money, with most ingredients left to rot at the bottom of your storage. And this all leads into a bigger issue the series has had for a while now.

Atelier Still Doesn’t Know Where to Go Without Time-Limits

The Arland and Dusk era of Atelier (plus a couple of other entries) made use of time limits for their main stories. Travelling to areas, gathering, and synthesising all took in-game time, with main story goals having a limit to complete them. This meant you had to plan out what you were doing next, from which side requests you took to the areas you’d visit.

While I can absolutely see why some people didn’t like this, the time limits were never actually that bad for the most part, especially if you aimed to just complete main objectives. You also had access to new game plus making later runs easier, with multiple endings as another incentive to keep playing.

With modern Atelier, these limits are no longer there. But instead of trying to balance this out with more in-depth alchemy systems or challenging encounters, Atelier Resleriana has… essentially nothing. Sure, you can manage a shop to sell items and build up the town across different categories, or run through random dungeons for extra materials. My problem with this is that these systems are just far too basic. You don’t need to think about how you manage the shop as it always makes you more than enough money, and the random dungeons end up making most regular zones a waste of time. I’m also not a fan of developing the town, as outside of occasionally requiring certain items it’s relegated to a few menus.

I think building up a town could actually be a really good system for the newer style of Atelier games. It would justify gathering so many materials, perhaps letting you customise things to your own liking — think a mix of Atelier Yumia‘s building system and Nelke & the Legendary Alchemists‘s town management. Yet in Atelier Resleriana, you’re never really given much of a reason to care about how the town actually develops. Outside of a few visual changes, Hallfein is generally just empty spaces with a handful of NPCs that stand around unblinking.

Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian Review – Final Thoughts

Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian‘s connection to the gacha is both a blessing and a curse. While the reuse of assets likely made developing another game alongside Yumia possible, it also hampers any possible world building. Characters appear and events are mentioned that you’ll never learn more about in the game itself, all connected to something you can’t even play here any more.

There’s still a lot to like here — I appreciate combat and alchemy systems that make you think at least a little bit. I just wish this had either been a direct adaption of Forgotten Alchemy & the Liberator of Polar Night, or a completely original game instead.

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We reviewed Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian on PC using a code provided by the publisher. It’s also available on PS5 and Switch.

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