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Ryza 3 is the pinnacle of the trilogy without a shadow of a doubt, and makes for a very fitting conclusion in that sense. The sense of scale of the world downright dwarfs Ryza 1 & 2, and the Atelier series finally has a fully loaded in interconnected world with no separate loading smaller chunks of areas; and there's even multiple massive areas to explore instead of just one. You are also given so much creative freedom in general compared to the previous entries. For the environments, you're very rarely restricted on where you can go, and you can go anywhere as long as you have the appropriate item to reach it (You are given the vast majority of the exploration items very early on too). For skills and synthesis, you can get ANY skill you want in any order as long as you have the required SP to do so (and branch out the skill tree). Along with that, the titular "Secret Keys" can enhance your items in various ways if you're smart, and can potentially make up for a lack of quality materials to get very good stats earlier on. A big criticism I had with Ryza 1 was how railroaded the game felt both exploration wise and synthesis wise, so Ryza 3 addresses all my complaints and then some. This also helps Ryza feel more in line with the older Atelier games like the Mysterious trilogy which also similarly had lots of creative freedom and exploration despite the smaller areas and scope.

Speaking of that, if you've played Atelier Firis before, it seems to me that Ryza 3 accomplishes what that game set out to do and fell short on. Much like this game, Firis was more focused on larger open environments. However, areas were still separated by loading screens, and Firis' movement speed was pitifully slow with limited fast travel options making getting around to be a chore at times. Ryza's ability to fast travel instantly anywhere with rideable animals that move very fast give just the right amount of pacing, and does Firis' ideas justice. Even other minor things like random sidequests you find by talking to people were also in Firis. Honestly, the fact this game is just not separated by smaller areas loading in helps the pacing a lot.

The combat has also been very refined from Ryza 2 which I already had very little issues with in the first place. Attack animations are very quick, snappy, and satisfying to just watch. You also earn AP & CC much quicker in this game, so it helps to speed up the fighting when you're grinding for materials. If you wanted more depth though, then that also is delivered. The aforementioned Secret Keys are also used in combat to give various stat buffs, and can be equipped on characters as gear to also give buffs. This along with the new Order Drives and up to 5 party members being able to be used in active battle gives a nice healthy dose of freshness to the mostly similar combat, making it more fun to go through.

The only truly negative things I have to say about Ryza 3 is that the soundtrack is not nearly as good or memorable as Ryza 2, maybe even Ryza 1. It's still not bad by any means, but considering Atelier's pedigree of fantastic OSTs, I think it fell short in most instances. Also, when trying to discover landmarks, the world map is covered in clouds until you walk right up to the nearest landmark, and a portion of the clouds are uncovered. This can sometimes make finding the appropriate path to the landmark needlessly confusing as the environments are so much bigger than before with many alternate paths. This means you can sometimes just take the wrong path into a dead end or just flat out not know where the entrance to the area is until you look everywhere first. The map is always uncovered on the mini-map which does help, but it's very zoomed in and doesn't always help you out when you need it.

In short, Ryza 3 surpassed my already high expectations of Ryza 2 and fixed just about any issue I had with the Ryza trilogy in particular. The game does assume you already played the last 2 games because it explains very little and has lots of callbacks, so if you haven't played the other two, play those. Otherwise, Ryza 3 is a no-brainer to purchase.