Ryza 1 was a biggest piece of dogshit produced by Gust.
This one is a big glow up: battle system is great, character writing exists and managed to fix all my negative perception for every character, new characters are cool and likeable, UI and QoL improvements.
Unfortunately good things end here:
alchemy is still the worst in the series (i'd take mysterious tetris over this torture), but you don't ever lose quality so making 999 quality items is effortless. Still going through 7 loops to make an item sucks big time. Like you miss one ingredient and have to go get it and then spend another 5 minutes for loops and repeat. Fuck recipe morph, all my homies hate recipe morph.
Giant maps without warp points, selling early game shoes as DLC is a crime.
Dungeon exploration is worst shit ever: do 5 weird arbitrary tasks for half a dungeon, then go back to the beginning to collect 15+ clues per map (There are 3 per dungeon!!!)
BTW monster placements are awful: there are 5+ monsters near every gathering point, the game forces you to jump off the cliff one time and the other to go back to atelier so you miss the fucking clue and have to spend 5 minutes running through monster infested corridors. SMT has less monsters per square meter then this right here.
After that comes MANDATORY time wasting clue matching minigame with 30 clues. This shit makes the game a fucking dungeon crawler and breaks the gameplay loop: spend 3 hours doing stupid dungeon shit, then go back and watch 2 hours of cutscenes.
It's like persona 5, but worse, since there is no friendship system and time passage you can get 10+ events in a row, go to sleep and get another 10 events.
This one is a big glow up: battle system is great, character writing exists and managed to fix all my negative perception for every character, new characters are cool and likeable, UI and QoL improvements.
Unfortunately good things end here:
alchemy is still the worst in the series (i'd take mysterious tetris over this torture), but you don't ever lose quality so making 999 quality items is effortless. Still going through 7 loops to make an item sucks big time. Like you miss one ingredient and have to go get it and then spend another 5 minutes for loops and repeat. Fuck recipe morph, all my homies hate recipe morph.
Giant maps without warp points, selling early game shoes as DLC is a crime.
Dungeon exploration is worst shit ever: do 5 weird arbitrary tasks for half a dungeon, then go back to the beginning to collect 15+ clues per map (There are 3 per dungeon!!!)
BTW monster placements are awful: there are 5+ monsters near every gathering point, the game forces you to jump off the cliff one time and the other to go back to atelier so you miss the fucking clue and have to spend 5 minutes running through monster infested corridors. SMT has less monsters per square meter then this right here.
After that comes MANDATORY time wasting clue matching minigame with 30 clues. This shit makes the game a fucking dungeon crawler and breaks the gameplay loop: spend 3 hours doing stupid dungeon shit, then go back and watch 2 hours of cutscenes.
It's like persona 5, but worse, since there is no friendship system and time passage you can get 10+ events in a row, go to sleep and get another 10 events.