Atelier Escha & Logy: Alchemists of the Dusk Sky is one of the most common answers if you ask fans what their favorite Atelier game is. It’s not hard to see why. It sits between the more complicated older games and more approachable newer games and delivers an experience that has the best of both worlds. It provides a ton of depth from simple systems that don’t waste your time.
Like all games in the series, Atelier Escha & Logy is primarily driven by its crafting system. The version here will look absurdly simple compared to some other games if you’re just glancing from a screenshot. Every recipe consists of no more than 4 items, and your input is limited to choosing those items from specific categories, choosing the order to add them to the pot, applying skills, and finally choosing the item’s inherited properties. It’ll probably seem like you’re just pressing a lot of buttons to get a pre-determined effect the first time you do it, but as the game goes on and you get more ingredients and skills, you start to realize that optimizing the order of your actions to get the best stats can actually be quite a puzzle. Then you’ll notice that inherited properties can combine into stronger versions and be further inherited by recipes you make later and you realize how deep this system is. Item power can differ by orders of magnitude depending on how well you make use of it.
The battle system is similarly deceptive. At face value, you have two lines of three characters and can swap any character with the character behind them for free during your turn. Otherwise, all characters have three skills and a basic attack, and the two alchemists can use items. It sounds like a system where you’d just end up mashing attack all the time, and you can play some normal fights that way, but it becomes very strategic once you start fighting tougher enemies and preparing better items. The rhythm of combat ends up feeling a bit like Octopath Traveler thanks to a synergy system that lets you save up points to use for defensive assists or extremely powerful combination attacks. You may not get as many skills as in your average JRPG, but you have a lot more levels to pull when you put everything together.
Outside of combat and crafting, gameplay in Atelier Escha & Logy consists of receiving tasks at the start of each period and then getting about 100 days to complete them. Most will require you to go out into the field, where you’ll lose some days to travel and then smaller amounts of time every time you fight or gather ingredients. It sounds like a system that would punish exploration, but tasks are typically related to each other, so it’s easy to have plenty of time to spare as long as you’re not being wasteful with overworld travel. Completing tasks leads to all sorts of immediate and long term rewards, so on top of it being satisfying to tick boxes, you also end up unlocking new abilities that help you with the next task. It’s a very satisfying loop.
I’ve gone this long without mentioning the story at all because, unfortunately, it’s the game’s weakest part. This is part of the Dusk trilogy of games about a world facing environmental collapse, but where Ayesha goes to great lengths to show you the world and Shallie confronts the collapse head-on, Escha & Logy just kind of forgets about the setting for long stretches. There’s barely an overarching story here, and while the individual characters do have their own arcs to keep things moving, most of them are shallow cliches that aren’t likely to hold your interest. There are fun moments here and there, but by and large it’s the gameplay that’s carrying the load.
Another small point against the game is that, while the dialogue translation is excellent, menu translation has numerous small errors. There are weird abbreviations, blatant typos, and items referred to by different names in different places. Most problematically, some alchemy effect descriptions are either baffling or completely incorrect. It’s usually something you can figure out if you stop to think about it, but considering that this is the third release of the game, it shouldn’t still have translation problems.
Conclusion
For someone as story-driven as me, it’d normally be a pretty big mark against a game to have a story as bad as Atelier Escha & Logy. There really is almost nothing worth mentioning about it, and yet I absolutely love the game. This is about as good as the Atelier series has ever been at integrating its combat and crafting. When it’s so engaging to find new ingredients and turn them into ever better items, there’s really nothing else needed to keep this game going. Sometimes doing part of your game incredibly well is good enough.
Rating: 90%
Time to beat: ~42 hours to do everything in Escha’s route except a couple of DLC bosses. 100% would roughly double that since you have to play Logy’s route as well, but it’s not super different.
Price: $40, but routinely cheaper and available in a bundle of all three Dusk games
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For more reviews, see my Steam curator page: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43219041
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