Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian begins by having players choose one of two characters to start with: Slade, a young man whose father gives him a mysterious task on his deathbed, or Rias, a cat-eared young woman intent on learning the ways of alchemy to help her sister’s efforts to rebuild their disaster-ravaged hometown. Both characters will meet the other early into their journey, and thus begins a classic party-based RPG system.
A lot of classic JRPG elements are present as each new gameplay loop reveals itself. The recovering town has people with needs, who will post quests at the town center, but the player characters have needs as well, with quests cropping up even from the main characters and party members. Sometimes completing these will increase characters’ relationships with each other. Slade and Rias and their party will have to head out into fields or dungeons to defeat monsters and collect items, either for the townsfolk or for each other, for use in alchemy, or for selling at Mistletoe Miscellaneous, a shop once owned by Rias’s grandfather, and one she wants to see return to its former glory, which brings another metagame into the fold in the form of stocking and running the store.
The game features English text and subtitles, but the audio is in Japanese—save a few times when characters get excited and utter or shout something in English—and the characters are lively and portrayed well, both by their actors and by the surprisingly expressive faces and animations. The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian isn’t a graphical powerhouse by any means, with the world at large being somewhat low-poly and full of occasionally aggressive invisible geometry, but more attention has been given to the characters and the creatures, who really bring the world to life in a charming, stylised way that distracts from the other limitations of the Switch 1 hardware. On that front, some of the world textures feel washed out, and often there’s a faux lens glare at the top of the screen that just looks flat and distracting, but the game’s biggest flaw is easily the lag that crops up when accessing menus.
The left shoulder button will invoke a radial menu full of shortcuts to each page of the start menu, and players are going to need this—it can take several seconds just to flip to a new page once the menu is already open, and often it’s faster to close the menu entirely, re-open the radial wheel, and then open a new page of the menu from there than it is to just flip to that page once the menu is open.
Early on, the post-battle rewards screens get repetitive, particularly when players only have one or two characters and the enemies are weaker, and this screen also suffers from lag, though nowhere near as badly as the menus. These issues overall are the only major downsides, though, and while the menu lag is not likely going anywhere, unlocking more characters solves the problem of results screen fatigue. New faces pop up left and right, quirky and fun characters with unique designs and radiant personalities—having not played any other games in this series, it feels like meeting new friends, and while not all of them join the party or become playable, fans of past games are going to find themselves running into characters they know and love, and that overall fuzzy feeling is something this lighthearted game is full of.
Atelier Resleriana doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but instead takes a lot of tried-and-true game elements and hones them into finely crafted cogs, working together to form a larger clockwork of different gameplay elements that on their own can be surprisingly deep, and players can often dive in and start min-maxing, or often ignore or rush through aspects of the game they don’t find as interesting; battles can be set to auto-block, which won’t make decisions for the player, but removes the requirement that they focus on timing during enemy turns.
Characters can be leveled up and each has their own skill tree, complete with different abilities and actions depending on where they’re placed in the party, and the shop and town have their own experience points, progress, and necessities. Running the shop can be left entirely in the hands of the charming and colourful fairies, or items and decorations can be meticulously set by the player to max out earnings or experience points—even the town at large is an entity the player must level up, literally and through the actions of the characters throughout the story.
