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A great send-off to the Secret trilogy and to Ryza herself. While there’s certainly things that could have been improved, overall it’s a culmination of everything that made the first two great with brand new things packed in as well.
With the current sale for Lunar New Year going on I’d recommend picking it up, moreso if you’ve played the first two (and if you haven’t, they’re also on sale and I have reviews out for them too), but really it’s just a nice finale to the series and something I could see myself coming back to in the future.

Pro(s)

- Alchemy: The alchemy has been expanded upon in some ways, but also reduced in others. To start off, all the systems you’ve come to know and love are unlockable from the start, just locked behind a decent chunk of SP in the skill tree. This includes but is not limited to Item Rebuilding, Rebuild Levels, and Item Duplication. Unfortunately the Essences from Ryza 2 do not make a return, but that’s nothing major. Ryza 3 prefers to have you hit the ground running, with a ton of recipes unlocked from the start and not a lot of recipes unlocked by morphing, most of them are unlocked from the skill tree. Honestly I much prefer this method as it essentially means as long as you have the materials. The super traits system is a cool new take on the traits system. Basically, sometimes the materials near a landmark will be special and have a super trait, which can be transferred to your items upon synthesis. These have honestly just an incredible amount of range of what they can do, but they’re very powerful.
- Combat: The real-time turn-based combat returns yet again, but this time it’s better than ever. The combat in Ryza 3 essentially expands upon Ryza 2’s system. You’ve got 3 on-fielders and 2 back-liners (up from 1 in Ryza 2 and 0 in Ryza 1), which can swap in at any time after a cooldown.You’ve got the skill chains, action orders, core items (in which they’ve changed the Core Crystal upgrade system to be several upgrades of miscellaneous types instead of just 5 general upgrades), and the new key system, which can be used in battle as well, which I’ll cover in another section because the keys are used in several parts of the game.
- Graphics: The graphics (and performance) continue to get better with every installment. Not much to say here really, all the environments and models look great, each area really has it’s own theme.
- Difficulty: Ryza 3 is almost definitely the easiest game of the three to ‘break’. The new super traits system as well as almost full freedom very quickly allows you to get overpowered gear and items FAST. Not to mention you can get ‘infinite’ gems and complete the skill tree in record time. The difficulty options are nice to have, but with just a bit of planning I was using like 4 items to bully every enemy and boss even on the hardest difficulty I was able to select.
- Price: Not that bad, honestly. A full playthrough will bring you pretty close to the $1:1 hour ratio that is the ‘goal’, and the missing parts of that are easily made up for with the quality of content in the game.

Pro/Con (Person-Dependent)

- Story/Lore: The story continues a year after Ryza 2 as a mysterious set of islands have appeared near Kurken Island, so you’d think that the majority of the game would be investigating these islands. Wrong. The archipelago is actually pretty small and you explore the whole area pretty quickly into the game, with only one thing at the end of your look around that leaves you with questions. Ryza and co. then travel through a few areas in search of a single thing. Yeah, one thing, that they aren’t even sure what exactly it is. It feels like they kind of forgot what they were doing in the first place. I will say, however, that the plot itself is pretty good, but it just kind of forgets where it’s going sometimes. There’s a lot of areas left unexplored or even mentioned in the story, which is backed up by some World Quests and Character Quests, which does help fill in the world a bit more. Overall I wouldn’t say it’s a bad story, but again, it really just forgets what the goal is sometimes, and really only gets back to the original plan about two-thirds through.
- Secret Keys: Here it is, the title of the game, the Secret Keys. Keys are created via either a Hollow (bad) or Pristine (good) key at landmarks (your fast travel waypoints in this game), and have a randomized set of effects that apply to numerous parts of the game. You can equip certain keys as Symbols to your characters which can provide stat boosts or change their role (which provides a special buff), activate them in the open world to increase gathering quality/quantity or open locked doors to get to chests, use (or create) them mid-battle via Key Modification (or Key Creation), which lets you infinitely combo basic attacks to gain massive amounts of AP to use your skills for a limited item, and most importantly use them during Synthesis to get some extra buffs on your gear. Now this all sounds great, doesn’t it? Well the thing is - I didn’t really use the keys that much. Outside of the story progression, occasional time I ended up in front of a locked door, or some party quests or tricky fights to use keys in battle or synthesis, there wasn’t any time I thought to myself ‘Ah! I should use a key’ Maybe when you play you’ll do something more worthwhile with them but to me it was a bit of a let-down how much the game hyped them up with all the tutorials just for them to not really stand out.
- Completion Experience: Overall the completion is pretty easy, but there are a few things that can trip you up, such as manifesting all roles or completing the requests of the sword master brothers. Nothing is missable except maybe for a glitch I heard about, see here. At the very end of your completion journey there’s just gonna be those few achievements so I recommend using the Barrel Wisdom site to clear up any confusion.

Con(s)

- Exploration: Honestly, exploration is the biggest downside about the game for me. Ryza 3 is semi-open world (as opposed to segmented open world like the first two), as in you can travel across the entire map without a single loading screen, but the map also isn’t just a giant circle, it’s essentially a bunch of linear paths with a few large open areas every so often. Combine this with the fact that the map is so large, having not only the entirety of the Ryza 1 map, but also 3 entirely new regions (and even a part of Ryza 2’s map in a free DLC), which means they have to spread materials out more, which means that most of the areas you’ll almost never return to save for when there’s a quest objective to go there or you need one material you managed to miss the first time around. The fact that it’s open world also doesn’t help with locating items, as when you try and find it in the in-game guide, it just tells you the landmark it’s closest to, which can be a pretty large area with a few different climates, so I ended up resorting to YouTube or GameFAQs for other people’s documentation of item locations.
- Characters: Characters are overall pretty good, and you’ve got a total of 11 party members to pick from, which is absurd. But really the reason this is in cons is kind of just a nitpick, but Clifford and Serri from Ryza 2 are the only characters out of all of Ryza’s companions to not be present in this game, which as a huge Clifford/Serri fan, I find quite offensive.

Extras