izigame.me

Fun gameplay loop but there are several flaws that may hinder your enjoyment depending on what you are looking for in a game.
Graphics: As a preface, I'm not saying the game should have AAA graphics but rather the graphics quality should reflect in the price. Realistically a smaller studio from a niche franchise won't feasibly create a graphical marvel, but they are asking the same price (way more if you consider DLC) as several other AAA games and that is not justifiable. Objectively bad blocky textures all over the place and extremely poor lighting implementation to the point where it looks better when you turn bloom off. If bloom is on and morning/evening lighting change occurs Yumia will look like she's radioactive. Night time and fog look decent but any bright lighting fully overwhelms your screen with yellow, washing out literally all color in your FOV and making all textures appear blacked out as if a massive shadow is cast over them.
Anyone who tells you the graphics are good is stuck in the 3ds era of niche JRPGs. Not trying to be condescending but those games cost $40 at the time for a reason. Take a nature walk in the open world and you're met with jank foliage and rocks everywhere. Look closely and they are jagged, blurry, clip other objects, etc. Long distance views are alright but anything in your immediate vicinity cheapens the environment.
Character models are low polygon count. This example may be a bit craven but Yumia's butt in the beach skin looks like two conjoined shapes that weren't smoothed out properly. Several jrpgs released prior to 2020, maybe even 2016 look much better. Whether or not you can still enjoy the game is solely up to you, but as someone who likes to tweak game engines and search for mods to improve quality and performance the game's graphics were the most detrimental aspect to my enjoyment of the game.
Controller controls: many people will swap B (crouch) and Y (interact) on third party controllers to make the pick up button closer to the right joystick since crouch isn't used often, and pretty much every other open world game in existence has interact on A/B depending on button orientation. This however leads to several issues because you cannot separate field, combat, and menu controls. If you remap one button via in-game settings it will swap ALL the relevant controls. This means that B to exit the map will also be B for fast travel (originally Y). There is a workaround since you can press X to open filters, then press and hold B to close it and initiate fast travel, but it's a serious oversight.
Aim mode also has a strangely large deadzone, so it's hard to aim with precision. Movement has a significantly smaller deadzone so you can still ever so slightly tilt the stick to walk. In comparison, aiming requires you to go over half of the joystick's radius to move the reticle.
Base design: Feels very restricted. There isn't really one big massive base anywhere, you're given multiple relatively small scale ones that are limited to 1 major structure (greenhouse, storehouse) and several campsites which are completely pointless when you can just fast travel to and from bases and campsites. Was hoping this aspect of the game would be more enjoyable but it's fairly limiting in scope.
Gameplay: Regular mobs typically come in packs of 3 where you and each of your other 2 active party members will 1v1 the mobs. I don't think you can switch targets to gang up on other mobs until they die and camera is wonky. Feels very fluid in terms of cancelling skills with guard/evasion but unfortunately skills seem to be very limited compared to other rpgs in the genre. You learn up to 4 close range and 4 far range skills with no customization. You can equip up to 4 combat items and 4 support items (start with less but unlock via skill tree) but they all serve similar functions such as doing damage or enhancing your character respectively.
Things like camping/cooking are useless at worst and relatively unnecessary at best.
Also, I'm not a fan of friend skill and precision counter having cutscenes. They're not really cool or anything and you see them constantly if you choose to use them proactively. They interrupt the gameplay flow repeatedly and they don't feel good to use for that reason, but they are strong abilities for dealing elemental damage and stun damage.
I have to say I enjoyed Atelier Sophie 2 much more, the difficulty balancing is much better in turn based gameplay where received damage is unavoidable. In Atelier Yumia you can pretty much kill anything with the weakest gear in the game if you're patient because it's really easy to just spam dodge whenever you hear the sound cue for an enemy attack. Western-adapting Japanese games such as Yumia or FFXVI that try to mix traditional JRPG elements (skill/gear progression, party members, etc.) and action games tend to fall short in implementation. Yumia's isn't nearly as embarrassing as XVI's but things like lack of skill customization and poorly thought out chest rewards are present in both games.
Atelier Yumia also does not have the party members roam the field with you as they would in other non-turn based JRPGs such as Xenoblade, Nier, FF7R, etc. which causes the game to feel less lively.
Difficulty: I'm on very hard (the maximum vanilla difficulty) and it's a cakewalk. In the skill tree I prioritized particles --> gathering/shooting item quality -> synthesis skills -> synthesis max quality. Game constantly throws particles at you and it's very quick to max out recipes to obtain extremely overpowered gear and items via alchemy. I was hitting the quality cap of 999 and one-shotting everything before advancing the story to the second region of the game, of which there are four. Greenhouse trivializes the material collection because it infinitely duplicates materials and requires almost no time at all to give you stacks of hundreds of any material you come across.
Final verdict: In my honest opinion I think Atelier WAY overcharges for their games. $40 would be reasonable for this but in no way do I think this should ever be close to $70 given its low graphical fidelity, let alone $120 for the ultimate edition DLC pass. Despite this I do think the game is fun, story is alright (so far), character designs are great, and exploration/combat/alchemy aren't as monotonous as some other open world games. I would only recommend getting this on sale, or if you are a big fan of the Atelier series and want to support its continued development. Atelier could have the potential to be one of the greatest franchises but it feels more like the developers focus on pumping out or re-releasing several games in short intervals instead of focusing resources into developing one solid game.
The issue with creating open world games with a smaller team is that the expectation of the player is for it to look beautiful. The precedent was set with BOTW, then in later years we had games like Elden Ring, Ghost of Tsushima, and even gacha games like Wuthering Waves that blow you away with the visuals. Releasing a title in this genre with subpar visuals is an immediate turn off for most people and does not stimulate growth outside of the immediate fanbase.