Lydie & Suelle is an excellent choice as a game for creation, with very funny quests will becoming truly challenging after a while. The game may not have the most interesting fighting system for an JRPG and the best-executed graphics on the console, but it makes up for its failures with a good story and the mechanics of alchemy and exploration.

It has great dialogue along with interesting battles but a boring post-game. It offers us a funny and epic story, but it also has excessive loading times for each action and poor quality in Nintendo Switch's portable mode.

The Mysterious Paintings has a good battle system and premise, but overall I wanted more from the final entry in the Mysterious trilogy. It seems like a missed opportunity to not include an open world and instead opt for a streamlined adventure with quick travel being the only option for exploration.

Atelier Lydie & Suelle is a rather standard entry to the Atelier series. Content with relying on a pretty standard setup, the game doesn’t innovate or move forwards, although fans of the series will no doubt be interested in the new story alone. It’s a pretty interesting take on the ridiculously wide genre of RPGs, with a much heavier focus being given to its deep crafting system, but that might not be enough to convince new players on its own.

If the game was ever-slightly-more polished it would be a solid recommendation. Instead, this game’s a shrug. It doesn’t earn the credit it gets and instead just perpetuates a good idea that’s been at the core of this franchise for two decades. This series needs a lot of improvements before the next entry; hopefully series’ developer Gust will put in the work. If they do, I’ll be there to play it myself.

Atelier Lydie & Suelle: The Alchemists and the Mysterious Paintings is a fun yet sometimes tedious JRPG that has you doing a lot of busy work. In some cases there is some fun to be had but a boring battle system spoils what I found to be a fun and lighthearted experience and worth checking out.

If you really love crafting, Atelier Lydie & Suelle: The Alchemist and the Mysterious Paintings might be your jam. But if you like literally any other aspect of a typical JRPG, you’re going to be disappointed. It might be worth $20 for the curiosity, but at $60, I really can’t recommend it to anyone who doesn’t already like the series.