Atelier Sophie 2: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Dream

A role-playing game developed by Gust Studio for the Atelier series, one of the series that has been running for more than 25 years. After the success of the Atelier Ryza series, expectations pointed to further parts of the Ryza story, but the studio announced a return to Atelier Sophie and the release of a second part for the 2015 game. The story of the game is a direct continuation of the events of the first part. You will again play as Sophie and Plachta on a mission to gain more knowledge in alchemy and the skills of crafting and combining materials.

Gameplay and Storyline

The game’s events take place in the world of dreams after the two characters move there. After several events, the two characters separate and Sophie begins to meet new friends and form a new team in a new city to search for her friend Plachta. The combat system in the game is a turn-based system, which is more simplified compared to the previous installments in the series. It still retains some of its shine, but we see that it could be further improved with more enthusiastic and diverse battles.

Improved Crafting System

As usual in the Atelier series, your work is divided into combat, resource gathering, and crafting various materials, weapons, and equipment. In this part, the system for producing various materials has been improved and developed, and some of the ideas of the previous versions have been improved and benefit from the Kufra Ideas Booklet, where you learn little by little, through missions and steps you take in the game world to create new materials. A system for merging and creating materials was also developed, adding colored cubes for each material. You have to try to combine them together in an organized way to get more properties in the manufactured materials.

Diverse Environments and Weather System

The game world is divided into many different and varied regions in environments and terrain, including castles, forests and snowy areas. Each region will contain different types of resources. Also added a weather change system between clear, rainy or other weather Use certain materials to change the weather in that region and when the weather changes. This affects the game world, e.g. Such as the opening of new areas that are inaccessible in other weather conditions, or the appearance of certain monsters, or even certain materials that you use. Collecting can only be done in certain weather conditions, which makes exploration and finding the right path to the Completing the area makes it even more fun.

Quests and Equipment

The game stops your progress in the story in certain areas to ask you to do a certain thing, and sometimes points this out without knowing the materials required. You have to work with ideas in the notebook and try to finish all the ideas that were not completed and return to the previous areas to look for certain resources or certain monsters to develop more ideas to arrive. To craft the materials needed to complete the story.

You can purchase different types of equipment in your capital. You will also have the opportunity to talk to members of your team, strengthen your relationship with them and follow their private stories to gain more cooperative skills in battles. You will also be able to accept many side missions to get money and some resources, but these missions are presented in a very superficial and repetitive way.

Conclusion

The game “Atelier Sophie 2” is a fun and fluid experience full of improvements from the previous installments, but in all areas of the game and its ideas you can feel that the developer has chosen the simplest way to present or fully deliver the game without risk New ideas to increase the fun of the game or even improve the graphics and combat system. Even the development team has not yet made a decision to release the game for the new generation of devices, although the Ryza2 version was available on PS5 devices.

The game was reviewed in the PS4 version via a digital copy provided by the game publisher.