HomeFeatures
What the unlikely rise of Atelier Ryza 2 says about PC gaming in 2021JRPGs or bust
JRPGs or bust
If you had asked me to pick which RPG series would unexpectedly break out on PC back in 2019, I doubt I would have pickedAtelier Ryza. Gust’s long-running series about cherubic anime girls doing alchemy had long been a kind of background radiation in the RPG space — always there, but barely noticeable. There was little to suggest that Atelier Ryza would suddenly become something resembling an actual hit, easily breaking series sales records while consistently selling out on online storefronts.
But that’s pretty much what’s happened. When it arrived in Japan in 2018, it quicklysold more than 150,000 units, generating buzz among fans both at home and abroad. It soon followed suit in North America, where it leapt up the sales charts on Steam among endless “Thicc Thighs Save Lives” memes. True, it was a fairly modest success in the grand scheme of things — sellinga few hundred thousand unitswon’t make your game the nextAmong Us— but it was enough to turn some heads, including my own.
Watch on YouTube
NowAtelier Ryza 2is here, and it’s already popping up on Steam’s list of bestsellers. It has a long way to go before it matches the popularity ofPersona 4 Golden, let aloneGenshin Impact, but at long last Atelier appears to be a series on the rise.
So how did Atelier Ryza get to this point? Well, Gust deserve no small amount of credit for the large improvements made to the Atelier formula. But it has also been the beneficiary of various trends that have taken shape over the past decade or so. Specifically, Japanese RPGs have developed a real audience on PC, and Atelier Ryza is particularly well-positioned to thrive in such an environment.
And -sighs- yes, the memes had an impact as well. WhenDengeki PlayStation revealedthat character designer Toridamono was fixated on getting Ryza’s thighs right, the internet quickly responded.
Reflecting on the series’ newfound success in the westin an interview with Nintendo Life, producer Junzo Hosoi mostly attributed Ryza’s breakout to the faster-paced battle system, which is a hybrid of turn-based strategy and real-time inputs.
But beyond even these meaningful improvements, Atelier has benefited from certain trends beyond the scope of the series itself. Among them, parent company Koei Tecmo has taken a noticeable step forward in quality, finding success with a range of titles, including the Atelier series andNioh, Team Ninja’s answer toDark Souls. Atelier Ryza has also surely benefited from the continued mainstreaming of anime, which has helped even fairly esoteric action games likeNier: Automatato find mass audiences.
All of this feels remarkable in light of the fact that Steam wasn’t even readily available in Japan as recently as 2011, when the platform and the bulk of its games were still presented in English. Even just a few years ago, magazines like Weekly Famitsu were reluctant to cover digital games, preferring instead to focus on traditional console releases. It’s taken a dramatic shift in mindset among Japanese publishers to get to this point. Even now, Japanese publishers seem kind of shocked when one of their gamesmanages to break out on PC.
So while Atelier Ryza is hardly the first Japanese RPG to succeed on Steam, it does represent an ongoing sea change for the genre. In the early 2000s, popular developers like BioWare began migrating to consoles, leading to speculation that the PC was doomed as a gaming platform. Now JRPGs are moving the other direction. You could almost say that the genre has come full circle, closing the loop that began when Yuji Horii borrowed fromUltimaand Wizardry to create Dragon Quest. That can only mean good things for Atelier Ryza and games like it, showing that confident, well-made JRPGs can have a bright future on PC, no matter how niche their history.
