A few days ago, KOEI Tecmo released Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land. And, to be honest, I was pleasantly surprised by it. You see, Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout was one of the worst optimized PC games of 2019. And, after six years, GUST Studios has finally been able to offer a somewhat good PC game.
To test the game, I used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, and NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 5090. I also used Windows 10 64-bit and the GeForce 572.70 driver.
Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land offers a few graphics settings. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Textures, Shadows, Terrain, LOD Distance, and more. The game also supports uncapped framerates. And, although there is support for Intel XeSS, Atelier Yumia does not support NVIDIA DLSS or AMD FSR.
My biggest issues with Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout were its framepacing issues and its awful mouse camera movement. And I’m happy to report that both of them have been fixed in Atelier Yumia. Once you start the game, it will compile its shaders. As such, you won’t get any shader compilation stutters. I also did not experience any major traversal stutters.
The camera movement, when adjusted via the in-game settings, is also great. I haven’t played any of the previous Atelier Ryza games as I was really disappointed with Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout. Still, I’m happy to report that exploration works great with KB&M in this title. The game also displays proper KB&M in-game prompts.
In terms of performance, the game ran with over 140FPS at Native 4K/Ultra Settings at all times. As you will see in the screenshots, we were mostly CPU-bound, even at 4K. From what I can see, Atelier Yumia can effectively use 10-14 CPU cores/threads. This means that you will need at least a modern-day eight-core CPU with SMT/Hyper-Threading in order to enjoy it.
To give you an idea, a six-core CPU (without SMT) drops to 6FPS in the open-world area. An eight-core CPU has major stuttering issues. By locking the framerate to 60FPS, we were able to get a somewhat playable experience with 10-12 CPU cores/threads. Finally, the only way we could get a smooth gaming experience with an unlocked framerate was with all of the 16 CPU cores of the 7950X3D. And, let me tell you that in no way does this game justify these huge CPU requirements.
Graphics-wise, I wasn’t particularly impressed by Atelier Yumia. I’m not exaggerating here, this looks like a PS3 game. From the textures to the overall environmental detail, everything looks so PS3-like. So, don’t expect this to “wow” you with its graphics.
Overall, GUST Studios has finally fixed the most annoying issues that plagued the old Atelier Ryza games. Atelier Yumia is fully enjoyable on PC with KB&M, and does not suffer from stutters. Still, you’ll need a powerful PC to enjoy it with ultra-high framerates. Not only that but Atelier Yumia does not justify its PC requirements. So, while it’s in a better state than the old Atelier Ryza games, this is nowhere close to being described as an optimized PC game. There is still room for a lot of improvement here. But hey, at least it’s not a complete mess!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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