Atelier Lydie & Suelle: The Alchemists and the Mysterious Paintings is the third installment of the Mysterious Atelier series, and in my opinion the second best in terms of enjoyment. That said, this game has some…. problems…
Atelier Lydie & Suelle follows the titular characters, a set of twin girls who run an alchemy atelier with their father, their mother having passed away years earlier from an illness. At the beginning, the girls are struggling to keep their atelier afloat, not being the best in their trade and their father being highly unreliable, more interested in his art than his alchemy. The girls are determined to one day have the best atelier in the kingdom though, due to a promise they made with their mother before her passing. They receive their opportunity to truly work towards just this when the leaders of their kingdom introduce a new ranking system for the ateliers of the kingdom.
This is where progression fits in – as you play, you will eventually hit points in the story where you partcipate in challenges/tests to raise your ateleir rank. If at any time you fail, I imagine that is a game over, though in most instances, it is very difficult to fail given that you choose when to start participating in a challenge (I do know for a fact there is definitely an end game state caused by failing one test in particular). Once you raise you rank, you get to then explore one of the mysterious paintings alluded to in the title of the game.
I’ll start with the good points of this game because no one ever wants to lead with the bad news. The game is, of course, quite pretty, same as every other game I’ve encountered thus far in this series. The character designs are colorful and fun, and the locales look like something out of a beautiful picture book.
It also eliminated the game long time limit that Atelier Firis introduced, which thank god, because I don’t think I would have finished this game if it had stuck with that methodology. Part of what I latch onto with these games is just marathoning alchemy synthesis in order to make more stuff and up my alchemy level, which was near impossible in Firis. That said, there is a time limit when participating in the tests to raise your atelier rank; however, they’re so unobtrusive that I didn’t even notice until I was probably 30 hours in.
Lydie & Suelle also prominently features a pleathora of characters from the two previous games in the sereies, all now well into their own lives, the stories of their individual games seemingly years behind them at this point. In all honesty, there is a fair portion of this game that revolves around resolving lingering threads from the first two games through side quests. This is by no means a complaint, as most are centered around the characters from Atelier Sophie, which being my favorite in this story line by a mile delighted me. I loved getting to wrap up the unresolved stories of these characters with a nice, feel good bow. Heck, I spent so long avoiding the end game in part because I wanted to make sure I finished out the story lines for at least all of Sophie’s characters.
Sitting somewhere squarely between the good and the bad is that while this game isn’t explicitly queer, it certainly feels queer in the interplay between some of the characters. The reason this isn’t a resounding positive is simply in its execution. For one thing, it feels very queer bait-y. It’s clear the writers are straddling the line here for the sake of fan service while never having the intent for any of these relationships to be taken seriously. The second thing that makes this more questionable than good is that some of these relationships get…. kind of weird. I’m thinking specifically about the interactions between two characters that are first cousins. It’s just a little uncomfy. Also, some of the sibling relationships are…. weird. I recognize that I don’t fully get sibling interactions as an only child, but I’m pretty sure whoever wrote this game/these chracters doesn’t get them either.
Riding this wave into the bad, let’s start with the aforementioned fan service. There is a distressing amount of it, more than I feel I’ve encountered in any other Atelier games I’ve played thus far. It feels so out of place and just gross and weird. I know there are genres of anime that touch on these same points, but I don’t think they tend to work well with Western audiences, which could also explain why this game was never actually dubbed in English. The only option is to use the original Japanese audio, which was odd after both previous games in this storyline being fully dubbed into English. Given that not evey line has subtitles or dialogue boxes, such as during combo attacks, it also feels like something is lost with this. Finally, if I want to be nitpicky, some of the translation is… poor. Overall, it’s mostly fine. However, there were a few lines of dialogue, most of them buried later in the game, that completely broke my brain because they just didn’t make sense.
The characters specific to this game also leave something to be desired. I didn’t find most of them all that great. Either they were shallow, completely pure personifications of tropes, or just completely, almost unrepentantly awful. The characters from previous games remained mostly true to their originial personalities, thankfully, though one particular character from Firis seemed to get a little worse, seemingly in the name of fan service.
The story in itself holds promise, though much like the chracters, the story remained fairly shallow. There were so many opportunities for something truly interesting to be done, and yet… Also, there are multiple endings to this game, all varying degrees of “good,” achieved through what you manage to accomplish throughout the game. However, the way you actually access these endings is very poorly signaled. You are asked a sort of “what now?” question, and the ending you get is dependant on what you pick, the idea being that you have more options to choose from the more “achievement” boxes you tick off. I had two options, which is fine, except that I didn’t realize the way I answered this question determined the ending I would get, so I picked the one that felt true to what I felt the characters would want. This wound up being the absolute base ending, which was irksome all around in that what felt true was considered the worst ending beyond winding up with one of the fail states along with the fact that it was never well broadcast that through this choice I was picking my ending.
My final assessment of Atelier Lydie & Suelle: The Alchemists and the Mysterious Paintings is that it’s a perfectly serviceable game. The gameplay loop is fun enough, even if the combat portion and all things related to that is very not well balanced. However, it’s not a game I think I can recomennd beyond finishing up the character arcs for the characters that originated in Atelier Sophie. Honestly, I would say once you wrap up those story lines, just turn off the game. It doesn’t do much in its own story that is particularly interesting, anyway.
Allyssa | Slice of Nerd 