Ultimately a not recommend from me.

Though there is a lot of good in this game, it could not overcome the sheer feeling 'pointlessness' that permeates this entire game.

So first, the pros: The game runs smoothly, the artstyle is beautiful, the character designs are great. Each of the maps that the game puts the player in are beautiful, and the changes in the weather using the tools introduced in this game highlighted that even further. The combat is fun and challenging on the Very Hard difficulty and offer a lot of options for the player to use to solve each battle scenarios and the alchemy is probably one of the best alchemy system out of the entire franchise, affording players a lot of freedom to craft their items. The introduction of the barrier in particular is a great addition as it introduce a new element into the fights, putting pressure on the player to race against time before the enemy deal devastating damages.

But all of these pros are unfortunately weight down and reduced to nothing by the cons.

First of all, the characters. They may be beautifully rendered and well designed, but character-wise, none of them make an impact. They are all flat, predictable with no unique personality traits that makes them memorable or worth caring for. The worst offender of all being Sophie herself who have the personality of a cardboard cutout at this point. And for a game with a story as horrible as this (we will get there), having characters that are this boring is not helping the game at all. And Platcha, being the most interesting character throughout the series just got sidelined so hard in this game, she is not even a late game party member anymore (the old one, not the young one).

Now, the story. It is very much the epitome of pointless and frustrating. The set up is wonderful and imaginative, the main characters being teleported to a constructed world created for people to fulfil their dreams where they can meet with people from different eras throughout time and space. It is a compelling setting that a competent story teller could have done so much with. But there is no competence to be seen here. The achieving dream allowing individuals to go home was mentioned off-handedly and was never an important factor to the story. No heartrending moment where Sophie helps a character to achieve their dream only to have to say goodbye as they go back to their time (except at the end, which is far too late at that point). Sophie even encountered her grandmother, but why bother having that relationship at all when there is no complication or conflict or anything to overcome? All they did was have them acknowledge their relationship and continue being team members. They might as well just use a new character at this point. The story is incompetent, not well written, slow, prodding, lacks even the basic motivation for conflict that it weights down the whole game. Makes me question why the developer refuse to put in a proper villain or opposing characters that we can put a face on and fight against in the Mysterious games?

Then there's the recipe unlock system. The alchemy is great in this game, but to get there, the player have to deal with the most annoying recipe unlock system I have encountered so far in this franchise. Progress to unlock new recipes does not progress until it is unlocked on the tree, which means that the game punishes players that craft and prepare well with forced backtracking to get items to unlock recipes that were arbitrarily locked. This, coupled with beautiful but absurdly long maps that adds nothing but walking to the game makes it feels like this entire system is implemented to be pointless filler to add on play time rather than something fun for the player.

The Mysterious series have been a disappointment. Though this game is better than Firis and L&S, that is not a difficult hurdle to overcome. Get other Ateliers, there are better ones out there.

Don't even need to play this game if you want to play Firis or L&S, the story adds nothing, it is frustrating and pointless.

But if you can ignore the story and the frustratingly long dungeon traversal to get to the next objective marker, the combat and alchemy gameplay is very, very good. But that is a lot of things that you will have to ignore.