izigame.me

TL;DR: A beautiful game that doesn't quite live up to it's predecessors. Gameplay has been refined to new heights, but a disappointing lack of character development and nothingburger of a story make this one less than the sum of it's parts.
If you haven't played the first two games, go do that before you even think of touching this one. All of the most important character arcs for the core cast happen in those two games, leaving most of them without much to work through in this game. It's certainly great to be able to spend more time with these wonderful characters, but they're almost all resting on their laurels at this point, with most character quests being limited to short scenes where they pat each other on the back over how far they've already come. None of the series' handful of romantic parings get a definitive resolution here either, so temper your expectations accordingly.
The story serves as a pretext to reunite the main characters and send them on a new adventure, but really lacks the same sense of urgency or consequence the previous games had. In Ryza 1, you were trying to save your home from a seemingly unstoppable natural disaster. In Ryza 2, you were doing everything in your power to save a precious companion and help them return home. In Ryza 3, you go on a meandering, often directionless journey to turn off a long dead civilization's emergency broadcast system. It's implied that the sudden appearance of the new Kark Isles might be destabilizing Ryza's hometown of Kurken Island, but there's no real timetable or any indication the stakes are getting higher as the game progresses. There just isn't a strong or immediate emotional hook this time to keep things interesting.
In terms of gameplay though, this is easily the best in the series. The existing combat system has been fine-tuned to perfection with the added ability to block at any time, allowing you to mitigate damage with good timing. Alchemy has been given a shot in the arm as well with the addition of the key system, which allows you to add new effects and elements to existing recipes in order to create more varied concoctions. Each of the game's four regions can now be explored continuously without scene transitions or loading screens, including the entire overworld map of Ryza 1 as an added bonus. The only thing I did not like here is that there seems to be some kind of adaptive difficulty or level scaling at play for enemies. I encountered situations where common enemies often had exponentially more health than the story bosses they were standing right next to. I enjoy grinding out the best equipment and items possible with alchemy as soon as possible, but the scaling at work here made it a bit less satisfying than in the previous games.
As a final note, the localization of this game is very disappointing. The English script frequently suffers from strange word choices and grammatical errors. I wish the publisher had spent more time and effort on this front, but I can kind of understand why they didn't. This series is not broadly well known, and a vocal minority of perverts are making sure that many people's first exposure to it is the 'Ryza Thighza' meme. These games are actually very sweet and wholesome with only a tiny amount of very tame fan service. Anyone looking for actual 'echi' content is not going to be satisfied, and anyone disgusted by lewdness might give these games a wide berth because of their undeserved reputation. I know it's pointless to talk about and people are going to meme for the lulz, but I really wish these games had the all popularity and success they truly deserve at this point.