Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & The White Guardian Review (PC)

I have been deep in the Atelier series ever since I first got my hands on Atelier Sophie: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Book. I have followed Atelier to the Ryza games as well as played Atelier Yumia, which was released earlier this year. The most recent one, Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & The White Guardian, is an interesting title.

Game Name: Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & The White Guardian
Platform(s): PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, PC (Reviewed)
Developer(s): GUST Studios
Publisher(s): Koei Tecmo
Release Date: September 25th, 2025
Price: $59.99

Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & The White Guardian is about Rias searching into her grandfather’s past from a town called Hallfein that was covered in red mist 13 years prior, and made the entire village disappear. The location was then infested with monsters. Rias wants to restore the town to its former glory while also trying to figure out its history. She meets Slade, who is on a mission to discover what happened to his father 13 years ago in that same town during the red mist. They team up to find out what they can and to restore Hallfein to its former glory.

The World Of Atelier Resleriana

An interesting thing to note is that Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & The White Guardian isn’t the first game to take place in this world. The first game was the mobile game Atelier Resleriana: Forgotten Alchemy & The Polar Night Liberator. In the mobile game, you play as Resna and Valeria as Resna tries to bring back Alchemy in a kingdom that has banned it. Her alchemy is used through the other mana of the other Wanderers who are in the world. Wanderers are people who have drifted between different worlds and likely are from other games in the Atelier series. They just so happen to be Alchemists or connected to Alchemy in some way. The mobile game itself had a lot of world-building and a lot of characters that showed up from the other Atelier games.

Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & The White Guardian has a different approach to the system of alchemy than the mobile game. In this one, the mana is given to the cauldron based on the energy in the dimensional paths that you find throughout the game. Rias has a special ability to use this special cauldron and relies on Slade to open up more dimensional paths to add more mana to the cauldron.

It felt weird at first for this game to still bear the mixed name of Resna, Valeria, and Alvina as the title, since they aren’t really prominent in the game. Early on in the game, Rias meets Resna, and they do a full deep dive into alchemy as Resna becomes the mentor to Rias. Resna is doing tasks in her own Atelier, but a lot of the help you get in the game, such as Totori and Sophie, are directly linked to Resna as Resna talks about Rias being her student to literally everyone who is friends with her. If you played the mobile game, you would know that it’s basically all the wanderers.

The story of Rias, Slade and Hallfein is mostly self contained so you don’t need to know much about the mobile game which the story of the mobile game is still ongoing by the way. That said, some snippets do relate to the mobile game, and it is mostly to get people interested in the narrative around the Polar Night Alchemists as they show up for a few missions to mess with Rias and Slade. Sadly, the global version of Atelier Resleriana: Forgotten Alchemy & The Polar Night Liberator is discontinued, and you would have to play the Japanese release of the game to experience it now.

Unlocking Dimensional Paths

The main crux of Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & The White Guardian is gathering mana to the cauldron in the ruins that Rias and Slade find. To do that, they have to unlock dimensional paths by finding the Geist cores. As more mana is gathered, it means more paths are unlocked. Slade has a book with him that details alchemy and the red mist event, but to get the text to appear in the book, they have to put the book on pedestals found throughout the dimensional paths.

Rias’ sister, Camilla, is one of the people in charge of restoring the town of Hallfein. It is at her request that she brings more manpower to help Rias and Slade in their endeavors. It is thanks to their network that the other wanderers find their way to Hallfein. The main party you will control is six individuals. Rias and Slade, as well as four wanderers from other games. These wanderers include Wilbel, Raze, Totori, and Sophie. Together, they will be your entire battle party.

Combat in Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & The White Guardian is turn-based. You will see the order on the timeline on the right side of the battle screen. Enemies have a health gauge and a stun gauge. If you can break their stun gauge, it makes them go later in the turn order. Stunned enemies also take more damage from attacks and skills. Each character has skills that reflect elements or the type of damage they can dish out. Slade does physical damage and thunder damage; Rias does mainly wind damage. Each person in your party has a different type and element of damage they can deal. Enemies have weaknesses and resistances. The best way to deplete the stun gauge is to focus on their weakness, then once stunned, you can dish out some combos.

In the front line, you can only have three people at a time. The back line can interrupt the turn order by using your TP or tactical points. If you have a lot of TP, you can use multi-attacks. This combines one of the characters in the front line and up to two characters in the back line to do three different skills at once. Once the multi-attack is done, the final character of the combo replaces the person in the front line.

Exploring Hallfein

When you are outside combat, you can only control Rias or Slade. Rias has her whip, which lets her grapple to higher locations on the map. Slade can strike his spear into different colors barriers surrounding rocks that will open areas of the map. When you are outside the Atelier, or the town of Hallfein you can only have up to 500 ingredients in your basket. Once you go back to the Atelier or the town, the ingredients go to the storehouse. This frees up your basket, and you are welcome to go gather more. The best way to get good-quality ingredients is to explore dimensional paths.

One thing I didn’t realize til about 3/4ths of the way in the game is that the storehouse has a cap of 9999 ingredients it can hold. That may seem like a lot, but when you are having fun just going around gathering ingredients because it is fun to get as much as you can, it can quickly become a problem. About 3/4ths of the way through, I decided to do a ton of the dimensional paths, not just to get ingredients but also because at the end of the paths, you will find bosses that have rare materials. Also, at the end of the dimensional paths will be another pedestal that unlocks more high-tier recipes.

You can increase the town level of Hallfein by giving Camilla materials and synthesized items from the Atelier. You will need to increase the town level to progress the story. This can be where you get blocked from story progression and will need to start messing with synthesis to learn more recipes and find how to synthesize the particular recipes. You can make new recipes by finding them in shops, on the dimensional paths, or by morphing your current recipes.

Synthesis is a main mechanic in most Atelier games; thus, it is an important feature in Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & The White Guardian. Each ingredient you gather has a trait, a type of ingredient it is, and two different colors. When you combine ingredients, you want to make sure they match the colors of the previous and next items in the recipe. This enhances those traits and increases the ability to morph to a new item. To morph an item into a new item, it requires a specific item that matches the colors of the other ingredients in the recipe. This is one of the main ways I worked on unlocking as many recipes as I did. When you find an ingredient that can morph an item into a new one, it will be in the recipe synthesis sheet afterwards.

The Beauty Of Atelier

A lot of the assets and characters in Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & The White Guardian look ripped right out of the mobile game. Honestly, I think the mobile game looks gorgeous, even as a game made for the phone, and it gave us newer models of older Atelier characters. Thanks to these assets being as small as they are, the game ran at a locked 120 FPS 1080p on my current PC. My PC runs a hefty NVIDIA RTX 4080 Super Graphics Card and an AMD Ryzen 7 7800 X3D processor. It, however, does run at a 70-80 FPS 720p resolution on Steam Deck. It’s a perfect handheld game for spending an hour or two to unlock a new recipe or a new dimensional path.

A lot of the wanderers from other Atelier games do show up in this title, but the sad news is that most of them are there for a small story beat, and then you can unlock dispatches for that character. Dispatching them takes a bit of in-game time, but they will get you two to six materials you can use at the Atelier. The special animations in combat and the effects look gorgeous. There is also CG art that appears in certain scenes. These CG art scenes are fantastic, though there are only a few.

Some of the problems of the older games in the series are still here, though. This was a game meant to appeal to the older fans of the Atelier series, and it does have its own share of problems because of that. It feels like there are two teams at Gust working on the Atelier games. One that is geared towards attracting new fans who started with Ryza and moved on to Yumia. And an older team working on Sophie games, and now the Atelier Resleriana games.

Is This An Introduction To Atelier Or Not?

Some issues of the older games are the vague way of progression. To progress, you need to level up the town, but it doesn’t give you a good direction for accomplishing that. Yes, you need to give materials to Camilla to raise the cap of the town level. The items require you to do a lot of exploring in the Dimensional paths and the areas outside the town to find ingredients that will help morph the current recipes you have.

Or you can just plain find the recipe in the wild in a treasure chest, but overall, it’s hard to find out how to make certain materials unless you are a veteran of the series. Just like the Sophie games, it is required to find specific recipes to progress, but the recipe alone in this game only gives you the idea to help raise the max level.

Another issue I have is the ingredient cap. I understand having the basket you leave being capped because it incentivizes not getting stuck just gathering forever. However, when you reach the cap, it wants you to discard until you get below the 9999 threshold. I have a shop in the game, why can’t I just send it over to the shop? You can only sell nine items at a time in the shop, which is also a weird thing.

It’s meant to sell only nine big items to maximize your shop rank as well as the amount of experience you get to raise the town level. This leaves a lot off the table, though, to actually have certain things being sold while you are gathering. You find fairies to basically cover taking care of the shop while you are away, but I wish it would let me just put my D rank ingredients and lower into a wastebin that gets sold at the shop. I hate just discarding it into the nether.

So, What’s the Verdict

Overall, I really enjoyed Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & The White Guardian. I loved crafting new items, morphing, combat, and seeing Sophie be playable in another Atelier game. I gave many of my best items and accessories to Sophie, and she was a major powerhouse in my party. I do have some nitpicks, but my time with the game was positive. I do think a lot of the older fans will like this entry. They may dislike not having their favorite alchemists not be playable, especially with how big Ryza is in the fanbase right now. I want to see the next Atelier Resleriana game that is on console have more playable characters.

Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & The White Guardian will be released September 26th, 2025, on PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and PC.

Review Disclosure Statement: Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & The White Guardian was provided to us by Koei Tecmo for review purposes. For more information on how we review video games and other media/technology, please review our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy.

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