My first foray with Atelier after several years of saying to myself "I should try those games sometime," and needless to say, yeah, I should have played this sooner.
Buying this game to hold me over on a road trip was the best possible first impression I could get for this game. The lack of access to any sort of walkthrough meant I had to figure everything out myself, and that made things so much more fun. This is the exact type of game that benefits so much from the player experimenting with what they can figure out themselves, adding on several layers of immersion.
Sometimes, I'd spend literal hours, not exaggerating, just making random shit. In all honestly, the combat and story were mostly an afterthought for me, because of how fun it is to just make shit through alchemy with all the stuff I spent the past 30 minutes gathering. This game figured out a way to make doing chores feel rewarding and fun. That's an impressive feat in its own right.
Anyway, I bought the second one, and intend to jump into that after finishing the Xenoblade 3 DLC campaign. Consider me hooked.