My initial thoughts based on about 20 hours with the game I originally posted here will be quoted at the end of this but I'm now done so I can actually talk about it. Purely on a mechanical level, this is absolutely one of the better games in the series, but that's the one level I can say that. It's just so vacuous and inconsequential on every other front that by the end what I felt playing it was an obligation to finish it more than anything. When this game was announced, I wanted it to be set after Lydie and Suelle. A more mature Atelier protagonist would have been a fun spin on the series, especially for an anniversary game. But instead we get a weird interquel between Sophie and Firis, and that leaves Sophie's character so flaccid and uninteresting. She cannot be allowed to develop because that would ruin the mystique of her maturation in Firis and LySue. She can't entirely go back to the clumsy and airheaded self from the original game either! She developed from that. So we're left with a strange flanderisation. Ramizel is the heart of the game and she's great. Partly I believe this game exists for Ramizel, someone really wanted to make a young hot cool version of Sophie's grandma, hats off to them. Plachta from the past is enjoyable, but she too is mostly static or slightly transforming into the Plachta we already know. It's limiting and dull. That's what the construction of this game is on the conceptual level, limited and existentially dull. And too long. Almost as long as LySue which is also too long but with imaginative locales and interesting scenarios and a genuinely affecting core narrative. All of which this game lacks. Ugh. The biggest backhanded compliment I can give it is that it's the least worst version of a game I didn't want to exist. If this is what I was missing from not playing the Ryza games I'm thankful.

Initial observations:
"I'll save my full thoughts for after having finished this but this is a solid enough game but retains all the thematic uninterestingness of the Mysterious subseries. I got into Atelier with the Dusk series, and what I found really compelling about Dusk was how empathetic and understanding it was of young people. How sensitively it treated depression and loss without even explicitly pointing it out as lesser games aimed at audiences these games are aimed at might do. Dusk was a world dying its second death, but within it, it had a place for people who were torn apart like Ayesha, people who were failed like Logy and people who were broken like Miruca. It expected you to see these people for who they were and accept them as people worth life and love. The world of the 'Mysterious' series has no place for people like that - only 'good' people who want to 'become better'. And nowhere is this more obvious than in the setting of this game, a dream utopia where 'good people' with 'good dreams' can take forever to achieve them. And this is arguably fine. It's comfy and chill and ふわふわ and all that. I also recognise that Dusk was born during and out of the 2011 disasters and it's unfair and impossible to expect them to consistently revisit that trauma just because I find it more compelling. oh well, I suppose. Play Blue Reflection Second Light."