Atelier Ryza 3’s world is expansive, vibrant, and free to explore once key locations are unlocked. Ryza and friends spend their time exploring its lush grasslands, lively towns, and luminous mines, gathering crafting materials and seeking answers to their various mysteries. Fast travel landmarks are generous, but leave enough space between them to encourage wandering off the beaten path. There are nooks and crannies filled with rare ingredients and optional side quests at every turn, adding to the intrinsic reward of exploration. Additionally, what would usually be considered “filler” quests serve to flesh out the world, allowing you to spend time with party members and get to know their quirks and histories. For fans of the first two Atelier Ryza titles, these moments likely carry emotional gravitas. For newcomers, they instead enrich the world you’re travelling through with extra context.

Of course, the glorious world of Atelier Ryza 3 is not without its dangers. Peppered across each map is a slew of typical JRPG beasties – happy-go-lucky slimes (here called Punis), haunted suits of armour, and the odd elemental sprite all prowl the Kark Isles and its surrounds. Upon walking into one, you’ll be swiftly launched into a battle. The combat system in the Atelier Ryza trilogy is a mixture of active and turn-based, with a cooldown timer dictating when actions can be taken. Each of the three active party members can spend accrued AP to perform combat skills with varying combo effects and elemental strengths, with particular types of attack potentially triggering powerful Order Skills. This in turn builds up your party’s Tactics Level, which enhances some abilities, gives better battle rewards, and increases your maximum AP capacity. You can use items in combat to damage enemies and buff your allies by accruing CC, and you can even switch out to either of your two reserve party members to continue an attack combo. Each battle becomes a dance of timing, waiting for the perfect moment to block an enemy attack or unleash a powerful ability.

As well as playing an important role in the story, the titular Secret Keys feed into each gameplay system, becoming vital tools in your arsenal. Ryza can create Keys at various Landmarks across the world. Handily, these are also fast-travel points. She can use these Keys at glowing points in the overworld to enhance ingredient collection or cause random events to trigger. Keys can also be used in battle via “Key Modification” to trigger timed abilities, or you can choose to create new Keys from enemies while they’re stunned or vulnerable. It’s especially worth creating Keys while fighting bosses, since these tend to have very useful effects (such as the aforementioned health regeneration). Each Key has a certain number of uses, which can be augmented through Atelier Ryza 3’s intricate crafting system.

Usually, I would hate this kind of “forced crafting” mechanic. However, the entire world of Atelier Ryza 3 is built to enrich and enhance the synthesis mechanic. Every element in the game feeds back into Ryza’s core role as an alchemist: the story quests focus on what she can make next; new weapons for combat must be crafted; each new overworld location contains new crafting materials; and even the titular Keys provide vital abilities and enhancements while synthesising. To get the best weapons and armour, you’ll need to engage with the entire suite of synthesising abilities and figure out how to make entirely new ingredients via Morph pathways on the crafting tree. I found myself obsessing over each new recipe, trying to maximise the ingredients I used so that my crafted items would be of the highest quality with minimal waste. Much like its combat, Atelier Ryza 3’s synthesis system proves extremely satisfying once mastered.

While the world of Atelier Ryza 3 is vast, gorgeously colourful, and beautifully realised, playing on Switch does have its drawbacks. Performance is pretty good in docked mode, and there is a settings option to prioritise framerate over resolution. However, frame drops, a low draw distance, and tiny menu fonts make playing in handheld less pleasant (even on the OLED model). It’s also worth noting that there is no English voice acting available. These issues are minor enough not to be a dealbreaker for most players – however, the infrequent moments of anime fanservice are harder to ignore. You’ll be exploring a lovely, lush forest one minute, only for Ryza to need to crawl through a cave the next and be “treated” to a full five seconds of upskirting. There’s also an unskippable sexualised drawing of Ryza that you need to view whenever you want to change the in-game time. These moments are jarring when they occur, especially considering how wholesome and relaxing the rest of the game feels.