Atelier Ryza 3

Playtime: 5 Hours

FYI: Will probably restart when I get back around to this. Planning on playing through the Dusk trilogy first (have already finished Arland at this time). I've been taking a detour in the Atelier series to go through some of the earlier series; namely the Arland trilogy (which I've completed so far) and probably the Dusk trilogy.

Note: These notes are disorganized, and are also based entirely on my experience from the first few hours of the game only.

Open world, but I'm not sure if it truly justifies it. Pacing of the game has been very strange. Lots of story events, but very little actual crafting required - Quality of gathered items in the first few areas has been terrible (lots of 0/1 element items), makes it very difficult to actually craft anything worthwhile - Don't really know when I'm supposed to get into gathering/crafting mode, you know? - Story keeps dragging me to new cutscenes and areas, but there is so little actual crafting that needs to be done Not sure how to feel about the crafting system in this one. The keys seem a little too much for me. 4 different types of effects that are completely different? - All that, and lots of needless complexity in generating keys from landmarks or monsters, etc. Really don't know how purposeful this is. Map system sucks. There's 3 "layers" of the UI - world map (per region), then a landmark map (?), then a detailed map. The 2nd layer is pointless since the detailed map also shows landmarks - You have to get to the detailed map to actually warp anyway. The extra layer just makes traveling take more time You get Klaudia at the very beginning of the game so all is forgiven