One of the greatest atelier games and one of the best relaxing crafting games I have ever played! Just because of this game I decided to play the original Sophie 1 DX first just so I can enjoy this even more! If you ever wanted to try an atelier game this game is near perfection!

5.1 out of 10, yeah it was a close call between a positive and a negative review.
There's so much to like in this game. It has great characters. A very enjoyable story filled with positive messages. Beautiful music and artwork. A challenging battle system that you can use synthesis to overcome the challenges of.
The game and the community that supports it have their challenges though. Most of my frustration involves the random elements surrounding synthesis. I could not find any guides (let alone good guides) on strategy for placing components on the synthesis grid. I was eventually able to piece together bits of several posts to understand how to leverage assist skills and the restricted panel to be able to perfect many of the recipes, but when it came to a few end game items I couldn't find any way around the major gathering mini games. I'm old and I am incapable of any amount of success in those mini games. The only way I could see to achieve items with the number of the correct elements with enough link stars on them was by playing the mini games. I had perfect seeds with perfect quality, and utilized element lv +3 and element lv Max +3 every chance I could but there were still some recipes that I wasn't able to perfect because I didn't have enough link stars. The random chance of rare items dropping from seeds caused me also considerable frustration. I would find myself needing a high quality rare item to complete a recipe and when I'd try and get it from seeds it sometimes took over 100 attempts to get the item (I noticed that the same rare items never seemed to be in short supply after I no longer needed one, I felt like the game knew what I needed and was withholding it). Super Success, what a pain. There's a super success gauge that's supposed to represent the probability of getting a super success at the end of synthesis, but even though I regularly had the gauge above 90% my success rate was about 6 out of 10. I found myself save scumming my synthesis so I didn't waste components when the RNG was mean to me.
Synthesis and gathering should have been the stress free safe haven that could be retreated too if the stress of battle became too much and I needed a break. Instead they were in their own way even more of a frustration than the challenges of battle (not that that was much of a challenge once I used seeds to defeat traits and built decent equipment).
If random number generation was more accurate and if there was some path to synthesise around the mini games, This game would have been a 9 or 10 out of 10.
It's a nice game, probably worth a play for most people, but not as enjoyable for me as the Ryza series (all three of those are an 11 out of 10 for me). Good luck, and I hope you enjoy the game if you decide to play.