Go into this game with an open mind, and allow the gameâs pleasant charm, sweet characters and storytelling, and light, graceful approach to JRPG action to wash over you, and you may just find yourself as in love with the utterly refreshing and pure experience that Atelier Lydie & Suelle has to offer you.
Thereâs a charming story and intricate systems that help make it one of the best entries to date. I canât think of a better way to help celebrate 20 years of this long-running series.
Contrary to tomvs123, I do not see it like that. Atelier Lydie and Sue is an incredible experience, with phenomenal OST music, great setpieces and arguably one of the best alchemy systems in the series. It tackled many themes. Loss, how to cope with it, as well as other aspects. So yeah no, its a great game and doesn't insult one's intelligence. This game is easily one of the better games out there. Get this one over the Ryza duology.
I have not played an Atelier game since Escha and Logy, but i have to say this one was really great. It feels like Gust are really reaching toward the penultimate combination of slice of life elements and chemical crafting and traditional turn based RPG combat. And the art style has really survived the transition from last gen to current gen.
I just hope some day Koei Tecmo gives Gust more of a budget to really expand their formula to even greater heights
Atelier Lydie & Suelle is a lovely relaxing turn based RPG that suffers from some aspects that make it feel rushed but still a welcome improvement from Firis that nearly killed the franchise for me.
Atelier Lydie & Suelle fits right in with the franchiseâs tendency towards quiet, solid competence â and, it should be added, it looks much better than it ever has on the Vita. Personally, though, it has me certain that wherever the series goes next, Iâm only going to follow it if I can play it on a handheld.
Definitely the weakest part of the most recent Atelier trilogy. Almost everything feels outdated. Having said that, the tactical turn-based battles are still fun, though.
I was excited for this game to come out, and decided to buy it on the switch instead of the usual PS4 version like the preceding games. I was disappointed at the graphics quality on the switch. The graphics are kinda blurry when you play using the portable feature of the switch, and it kinda made me sad. I hoped it would be awesome since other games available on the switch, for example Kirby Star Allies, have really good graphics even in portable mode. I recommend this game if you liked the preceding games of this series, but I recommend you buy it on PS4 if you want to fully enjoy the graphics and game experience.
Short review: The character and world writing fall well below the bar set by previous Atelier games.
Long review:
I play Atelier games for their good writing. And by good, I mean a diverse cast of characters, all with their own traits, goals, and issues who all make sense within their well fleshed out world.
This is the first Atelier game that doesn't have that. Atelier Lydie & Suelle is the low-effort cute/comedy Atelier that appears to be trying to appeal to the waifu or moe croud while offering nothing in terms of intelligence.
I was initially worried about this game based on the protagonist character designs. And my worries were unfortunately warranted. The protagonists are dressed as fancy clowns, and they stay dressed that way through the entire game (no clothes changes like the last two games). The clothes make no sense in their world. No one else is dressed like a clown. Most other characters in the game and all protagonists from the prior games are dressed relatively normally, with a few bits of flare here and there, depending on their profession. The protagonists clothes make even less sense since they're supposed to be very poor. In fact, everything in the game indicates that they're the poorest people in the city, so how are they wearing and maintaining such fancy clothes? There is a story reason for their clothes, but like most other story points in the game, it's very weak.
The amount of unbelievable things in the story increase from there. There's not much good unless you want nothing but comedy.
Returning characters from the previous games are mostly one-dimensional comic relief. Liane is no longer a strong mercenary who loves her sister. Now she's a straight-up sister stalker who has no value in the story at all besides telling everyone how cute her sister is - to an absurd and unbelievable level.
Firis, the well-fleshed-out protagonist from the previous game has been reduced to being a travel addict. Now she only talks about traveling or comically eating meat.
Plachta and her rival are mostly ignored. Their histories could have been very interesting in this story, but we get very little of that. But they have plenty of comedy...
The game is suspiciously devoid of masculinity. The most masculine man in the game (ignoring Hagel) is a pretty boy prince who is constantly berated by the other characters for wanting to find a girlfriend. And he fails at this constantly, which doesn't make sense, especially given his position. The much-more feminine male gets all of the girls, and why? For comedy's sake.
All of the above would have been acceptable if the protagonists were well-written. But they're not. They've got the most generic goal of having the best atelier in the kingdom because their mother told them to. And they don't have any real hardships with reaching that goal. The game gives the impression that because of they're cute, things are easy for them and everyone wants to help them.
In previous Atelier games, the protagonist has a goal and has to work hard to reach it: physically, within society, and within hard rules. And sometimes they don't even reach them. Their stories had the theme that hard work results in good things. They didn't progress through society simply by being cute. But not this game. Almost nothing is portrayed as being hard, there is almost no society to work within, since everyone you interact with is comic relief, and the tasks that you must meet are arbitrary and have very little meaning in relation to the world. You're just going through the paces, doing meaningless work, and everything that you want is coming true. Not because any real effort, but because you're cute. It's disturbing to me how much "cute" is mentioned in this game. Is this what all young girls should strive for, instead of hard work? And if you're not cute, are you worthless?
The gameplay and crafting is about what you'd expect, although there's pluses and minuses here and there. Overall it seems not as good as previous entries, but my dislike of the story might by coloring my opinion.
How gameplay is intertwined with the story is another big issue. Your main goal is to raise your atelier's reputation as ordered by the kingdom (who consists of one person, apparently - did I mention that this game has almost no world building?) . You raise your reputation not by doing work for society, but by picking up items, using certain attacks, crafting items with specific traits, and watching comedy cut scenes. There's almost no interaction between you and the city population, which is what would make sense if you were trying to increase your reputation. No other previous Atelier game had this big of a disconnect between the gameplay and story.
So this isn't the game for people looking for intelligent writing. But you might still like it if you like the traditional Atelier combat/crafting or if you're looking for a new moe waifu.
My wife and I played this game for a few hours and I can't say that this game was worth the $100 that we paid to get the collector's edition. The packaging was nice, with the well-done art book, the pins, fabric poster, audio CD, and collectible box, but the packaging can't make up for a very lacking game. After playing through Atelier Sophie and Firis, I had very high hopes Lydie and Suelle. Unfortunately, those hopes took a giant belly flop into a giant pool of burning lava.
The first thing that you notice is that the game lacks a very badly needed English dub. Hearing the characters sound like idiots saying "barrel, barrel" whenever you investigated one was a comedic and entertaining way to break the usual very grindy-feeling gameplay of alchemy games. In Sophie and later in Firis, I would go and gather materials for a few hours and then go and see a barrel just for a quick laugh and refresher from the gathering. I know it sounds stupid and it really is, but it was a classic quality that this game doesn't have. The lack of an English dub is not only a letdown, itâs flat out painful. The Japanese voice actors that Gust used are so bad that I would rather take a motorized cheese grater to my ears than hear their voices. These actresses make the Japanese actress for Taokaka in Blazblue seem like a goddess.
The next thing that I noticed is that the graphics engine breaks the character models. Thereâs nothing like seeing your character slide in from the right or left and say âhold on, I left my boob over thereâ and then having it snap back into place like a rubber band. While this is amusing for first few times it happens, it is most definitely a base system of the game not working properly. Honestly, how did the game get through QA testing with such an obvious problem?
After getting through the obvious graphics problems that the game has, we come to the soundtrack. The songs available in the beginning of the game are flat out bad. Thereâs no sugar coating it, because the infectious pus that it excretes would make it dissolve away. The DLC soundtrack that you get for preordering the game only includes songs from Atelier Firis. It does not include any of the truly awesome songs that come from earlier games. This is a massive setback for this game since the default soundtrack is not good to listen to.
Overall, I honestly canât recommend people buying this game right now. There are just to many things that the game misses on and great packaging does not fix a bad game, the collectorâs edition is a whopping $100 that really is not worth it. If I had known that this game would come out this way, I wouldnât have bought it at all.
SummaryTwin sisters Lydie and Suelle are also alchemists, living in Merveille, the capital of Kingdom of Adalet, and they intend to make their atelier the best atelier in the kingdom.