I did complete Atelier Ryza Ever Darkness and the Secret Hideout. It was overall an enjoyable but average game to play. The story was much more light hearted which is what I expected going into it. While I did like it over all, I felt the middle part of the game felt sluggish and found myself not immediately reaching to play the game and decided to instead read a book or watch tv. When I finally got closer to the end of the game I found myself drawn in again and was able to get through it relatively quickly. The alchemy part was fun at first, but then I just didn’t care about it and made what was necessary to either level up alchemist level or have strong enough item/weapons/armor to finish the game. I didn’t really experiment with that system as much; might just not be my thing.

The music was fine, but I probably won’t be recalling any melodies or tunes from this one.

The battle system was actually a lot of fun for me. Not having to technically worry about issuing commands to other party members unless I wanted to was nice. So I mainly just stuck to playing Ryza for battles, but did feel hamfisted into a certain party group/composition early on to the end of game. Could be because I didn’t want to mess with the alchemy stuff too much after a certain point so that might be on me. I don’t know if the Atelier games are for me after this. The new one coming out (Yumia) does look interesting, but I highly doubt I will be playing the rest of the Ryza trilogy.