This is one of those strong cases where the characters singly handly carried the game.
The gameplay loop is too tedious and outdated for it's own good.
Having to play Where's Waldo for 40+ hours just to trigger characters events, recipes and story stuff isn't fun at all.
The mediocre and directionless storyline doesn't help much at all, as it's just the typical JRPG stuff that you seen before.
It's just unnecessarily padding for the sake of it.
The game really needed the event/quest markers.

Barring the characters, Alchemy system is excellent and arguably better than the Ryza Trilogy, due to being more complex and rewarding.

Fortunately, Sophie has a decently compelling cast of characters with Sophie, Julio, Corneria and Plachta being the standouts.

Oskar and Monika were okay, but they felt more typical best friend/childhood characters that you have seen before with not much depth to them

Overall, Atelier Sophie is a decent game, that is held back by jarringly outdated gameplay loop and meandering padded storyline.

The characters and alchemy system were the saving graces of Atelier Sophie that ulimately prevented the game from failing for me.