Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist and The White Guardian PS5 Review. The first-ever mobile game under the Atelier banner launched globally in January of 2024, called Atelier Resleriana: Forgotten Alchemy and the Polar Night Liberator. 14 months later, the global version shut down. Now, the Resleriana namesake returns in its own standalone single player RPG called Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist and The White Guardian, building off the world that the mobile game created. Does it have enough meat on its bones to validate a standalone game?
Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist and The White Guardian Review (PS5) – Mixing the Old With The New
Franchise Staples
The game opens up with you choosing between main characters Rias or Slade. The two come together at the entrance to an abandoned atelier in an unexplored cave. While Rias shows immediate promise as an alchemist, there isn’t enough mana to utilize the cauldron at the atelier. So, Rias and Slade need to explore the world around them to find Geist Cores in order to supply the cauldron with mana. The more Geist Cores they find, the more alchemic recipes they can unlock.
In order to progress the story, you must level up the town hub of Hallfein. Every single Atelier game features stop gaps like this, and some flow much more naturally than others. However, Resleriana flows much like the older games where you end up facing hearty upgrade requirements for the town hub before the story can continue. These are always obstacles that longtime fans of the franchise come to expect. Still, they make the pace of the game waiver. Veteran fans will know what to expect with this, but newer players might not jive with this as empathetically.
On a personal note, I always cringe a little when I hit these points in the Atelier games simply because I’m no longer focused on the experience. Instead, I need to pivot in order to making specific things that I wasn’t naturally ready for. If the dev team is open to suggestions, I would suggest having multiple main objectives to do while these upgrade requirements take place. Then, you can stay in the rhythm of the game’s story and flow while still thinking about what other tasks you need to do.
Turn Back the Clock
Combat takes a step back with Resleriana in terms of modernization. Instead of the action-based combat in the later Ryza entry and Yumia, Resleriana returns to the franchise’s roots by taking turns. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. After all, the franchise did come up using turn-based combat. Still, fans of the newer entries will feel this difference right away.
With that said, combat still brings with it some good ideas from previous entries and executes them rather well. You still have fast responses to your inputs, allowing you to fly through commands to keep combat flowing. At the same time, you get the added bonus of manipulating spontaneous buffs and heals. The turn gauge on the right of the screen shows the turn order, but it also shows who benefits from a random heal or boost. If an enemy takes a turn during that time slot, you can delay them or defeat them in order for the next time slot to inherit that heal. It’s not a game-changing mechanic, but it helps to add an element of strategy without making the gameplay loop too demanding or complicated.
Resleriana presents the illusion of an open world to explore. Instead, you get more of a traditional linear map that older franchise entries featured. You still run around and pick things up, with many maps including a couple paths to travel. Still, each map begins and ends in the same place, and is is separated by a loading screen. In fact, a loading screen appears for each cutscene and in between scenes. The loading screen is only a few seconds each time, but it appears so often, since they appear between scene changes as well as map changes.
All Mapped Out
To add to that, the maps are rather basic in structure. Right away, the first area you explore in Hallfein reminded me of the old town maps from the first Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel but with fewer NPCs or things you can interact with on the map. The world maps themselves remind me of the maps found in Ys IX: Lacrimosa of Dana. They are vertical and diverse, but they don’t have the same level of fidelity or detail that the more recent games have. This doesn’t hinder the game, but it’s a visual step back if you’ve played all of the games up to this point.
This does help to make the gameplay loop more simplified. With that said, gathering is quite addicting. In general, you hit a node, the resources drop, and then the resources auto-collect. You don’t need to walk over or interact with each resource that drops. They hit the ground and then go right into your inventory. This makes gathering almost addicting with how efficient the game allows you to be. Hit and run without stopping, and you don’t miss a single pick-up.
At the same time, combining the simplified maps with the faster gathering kind of keeps the focus on farming and not on gathering resources while exploring. There could be a better balance to this. After playing Yumia, the feeling of exploration adds so much to the gathering side of the game, making it feel more natural and more organic simply because you are both exploring new areas AND collecting new things very quickly. It’s just more engaging both in the short term and the long term.
Familiar Territory
Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist and The White Guardian leans into the old staples that the franchise sustained itself on, focusing on turn-based combat and crafting to win the day. Several elements take a step back from what recent titles in the franchise have done, instead focusing more on farming instead of exploring. It’s still about alchemy, but getting to the alchemy is more repetition and less discovery. For longtime fans of the series, the Atelier formula is still there for a good time. With that said, newer fans may recoil a bit if they first jumped into the franchise alongside Ryza, Sophie, and Yumia.