Atelier, Gust’s long-running item synthesis RPG series, reached new heights with the debut of *Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout* in 2019. Gust used that momentum to sincerely attempt to reinvent what Atelier is in terms of systems and scale, leading to the massive and successful *Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land*.
At the same time, the series couldn’t escape a certain albatross hovering above Japanese RPGs. We saw *Atelier Resleriana: Forgotten Alchemy & the Liberator of Polar Night* hit mobile and PC as a free-to-play game with a gacha system. The history here is as important as it is fun to write out all the titles! That’s because *Polar Night* hardly made it a year in the global market before being shut down.
The years 2024 and 2025 have been brutal for mobile spin-offs of RPG giants, with even Square Enix shutting down games left and right—some of which had been around for five or more years. Atelier really had no chance.
Gust seems to have responded to the matter with today’s review subject: *Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian*.
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### Part Two: Atelier Boogaloo
Set in the same world as *Polar Night*, this game is a normal Atelier adventure. It features turn-based combat, characters that join the journey as part of the story, and no online restrictions or currency-adjacent gameplay limitations.
While it’s impossible to know if this was supposed to be a mobile game or some kind of expansion to *Polar Night*, it feels more like a course correction or pivot than an entirely new entity. Unfortunately, it is also held back by systems that feel like a mobile game being fed into a proverbial wood chipper.
*The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian* lets you choose between two characters: Rias, a scrappy girl who sifts through ruins in search of treasure (while avoiding her overprotective sister who works for the local government body), and Slade, a guy whose father passed down a mysterious relic and an empty book that seem to be connected to things lost civilizations have left behind.
The two meet, and their goals immediately intertwine, especially as Rias discovers she can utilize the lost art of alchemy. These characters have a lot of personality and chemistry, making this game feel like an early win.
Rias is an especially fun twist on the typical Atelier protagonist, starting her story running away from a giant, rolling Puni (think a slime from *Dragon Quest* but obnoxiously cuter) in a ruin—a goofy homage to *Indiana Jones.* Slade plays the straight man well against Rias’s antics. I was having a good time just watching these characters bounce off each other.
But soon, the game itself got in the way, catching me off guard with how, well, sloppy it feels.
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### Slapdash Adventure
After the rising quality of the Secret series and the go-for-broke energy of Yumia, *Resleriana 2* (I guess we can call it that?) feels slapped together in almost every way—from its low-budget look to its grind-heavy and menu-heavy systems that are impossible not to associate with mobile game design.
The systems involve running a shop staffed with identical, color-swapped fairies, and a series of simple dungeons you don’t have to think much to get through (where you find an endless array of said fairies to throw money at and recruit for your store).
Everything you need to access is localized to a small hub, the story is told at a very slow pace, and it’s seasoned with shallow bonding relationship scenes with the characters you meet. Alchemy feels held back and de-streamlined compared to other recent games, encouraging grinding and resource management instead.
During Ryza’s rise and Atelier’s growth arc, Gust released other games. We saw a surprise sequel to an earlier Atelier game (*Sophie 2*) and a sequel to Koei Tecmo’s *Fairy Tail* adaptation. While I had my issues with the latter (*Sophie 2* rules), both of these titles still had the “oomph,” fidelity, and strong sense of identity as Gust’s bigger titles.
So this doesn’t feel like a reined-in spin-off, or at least explainable as such. It’s like a massive step backwards—one that would be extremely confusing if not for what you get when you plug *Atelier Resleriana* into a search engine.
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### Combat: The One Bright Spot
One aspect where *Resleriana 2* does shine is combat. It’s a move back to traditional turn-based gameplay from the more active systems in recent games, but the twists it brings to the table are fun to engage with.
It has a big emphasis on characters working together with follow-up attacks, alongside a replenishing Ability Point system that means fights are more about maintaining a flow than worrying about dwindling resources. Combat moves at a fast pace and rewards paying attention to turn order and enemy weaknesses.
It’s also nice to be able to command characters as a party after several years of real-time systems focusing on individual control.
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### Looks Like a Duck, Quacks Like a Duck, But Not a Duck?
Even if this game has its own merits — which it does (it’s still an Atelier game with the same core loop that makes these games fun, to be clear) — it’s almost immediately compromised narratively by its connections to the previous game.
Not only do characters from previous Ateliers show up as dimension-traveling Wanderers (a clear tell of mobage adjacency; sorry, *Octopath* fans, but it’s true), but characters from the first *Resleriana* and allusions to its story also appear and are presented as a big deal.
Unless you played that game before March 2025, it’s impossible to get that context without consulting YouTube or something. That’s a big problem, if you ask me!
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### Final Thoughts
I’ve come to really dig Atelier over the years after initially avoiding them for a long time (time limits stress me out, I’ll be honest). So much so that I imported the physical trilogy cartridges for Nintendo Switch and even pre-ordered the special edition for *Ryza 2* back when I had the means to do so.
I say that to emphasize the weight of my words when I state how much of a step backwards on the series’ evolutionary trajectory this experience feels like.
*Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian* looks and feels cheap (I hate to go there, but it’s unavoidable) to play, and is full of what feel like kitbashed structural systems clumsily molded into a single-player game that suffers from its connection to a failed gacha joint.
It bums me out to say it, but that’s the vibe.
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### Availability
*Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian* is available on September 26, 2025, for PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and PC. A PS5 code was provided by the publisher for this review.
https://www.shacknews.com/article/146079/atelier-resleriana-red-alchemist-white-guardian-review-score