The Summer 2023 Anime Preview Guide

Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout

The village of Rasenboden lies on Kurken Island, surrounded by a lake. Time travels slowly on this island on the Roteswasser Kingdom's outskirts. In this quiet little village with very little excitement lived Ryza, a girl with too much energy for this quiet village, whose main feature was that she was so ordinary that she had no outstanding features. One day, she sneaks onto a little boat with her childhood friends Lent and Tao, and they have their first adventure to the opposite shore. There, she encounters a man who uses a mysterious power called alchemy. This power completely enchants Ryza and she asks him to teach it to her.

Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout is based on Koei Tecmo Games' Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout role-playing video game. It streams on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

"Stiff" is the word I kept coming back to during this premiere. Be it the visuals, the narrative, or just the character dialogue, everything about this episode feels inert, moving in unnatural jerks and starts before returning to a rigid state of rest. It's trying to be cozy, warm, and adventurous, but it just can't seem to make that happen.

The animation is a big part of that. While much effort has been spent making these characters look as accurate to their original game models as possible, that faithfulness makes these busy designs a nightmare to animate with any consistency. It's the kind of show that looks fine in screenshots but never feels natural in motion, and even during still scenes, there's a stiffness to the characters that keeps them feeling uncanny. In a show that is built around a host of friendly characters and low-stakes adventuring, that is a huge handicap that this premiere never overcomes. The cast might look nice, and their world might be charming, but the interaction between those two elements is off-kilter for every second of screen time.

That's a problem the writing is just not strong enough to overcome. Ryza and her group are, frankly, pretty generic RPG party members, and there's no flavor to their interactions to offer them any real personality. We've got the nerdy one who's hesitant about all this adventuring talk. We've got the jock who is slightly more into it. Last, we have Ryza, who is all about adventuring, and getting out of her humdrum little island town. She gives about four separate speeches to that effect before the halfway point of this premiere. They're simple archetypes that, while not actively bad, aren't enough to carry the ploddingly slow narrative of this double-length episode. It certainly doesn't make the non-interactive recreation of the game's opening tutorial chapters interesting.

I can only imagine this adaptation working for existing fans with an established love for this cast and world because it does nothing to entice newbies. Even if you're a rubbernecker who only knows this IP through horny fanart of Ryza's blood-restricting zettai ryouiki, there's barely more than a few scraps to feed you, and they're largely confined to the OP. Whatever magic dwells within the original game has failed to translate here.

I'm unsure which this show loves more: Ryza's thighs or butt. Of course, it's also quite fond of her chest and crotch, and there are so many shots that are zoomed in on sexualized areas of her body that, at times, I felt like this was filmed in Creep-o-Vision. But then, this is also a girl who wears open-toed boots on a farm, so aesthetics are more important than other things here. It's also perfectly in line with the game it's based on, during which you spend a lot of time looking at Ryza's backside as she runs about on her quests.

Speaking of games and quests, this does feel very much like it's a game adaptation. This first double-length episode is the prologue to the main story. While it may be necessary later to know precisely how Ryza came to learn alchemy, in this case, it feels a little too close to a game tutorial to be particularly compelling viewing. Ryza talks at length about how she wants more than the life of a farmer on an insular island with "traditions" against going to the mainland, setting up her new career, then convinces her pals Tao and Lent to go off-island with her. Lent learns how to fight monsters, we meet the man who will train Ryza (and Tao), and Ryza gets to pass her alchemical aptitude test. It's the sort of thing that's only sort of fun to play as it prepares you for the meat of the game, and that feeling is replicated in watching it without the benefit of a controller in hand to help direct the action.

It also isn't a great introduction to Ryza herself, or at least not a particularly sympathetic one. While her desire to choose her path in life and to see the world is positive, she comes across as a bit bratty here as she deliberately goes against virtually everyone in pursuit of her goals. Ryza is only invested in her adventures, to the point where she makes things harder for other people. On the other hand, Klaudia would have been in trouble (or at least more trouble) had Ryza, Tao, and Lent not been galivanting in the forest. The islanders seem to feel that Ryza's actions were more of an issue, but it mostly feels like everyone's short-sighted here.

I don't feel this is necessarily the best episode to judge the rest of the series because it is so clearly the prologue. It's probably worth a second one to see where the story goes from here and if Ryza becomes any more likable because this isn't without potential, it's just taking a little too long to get moving.

I've spent the better part of fifteen minutes trying to come up with the perfect pun to start this review with, but I figure my colleagues have already beat me to the punch, so I'll just say it as plain as I can: Thighs. This girl's got 'em, and this anime wants you to know it. If you're a Thigh Guy (or Gal, or Pal), then you'll be glad to know that at least one show has you covered for the whole season.

Anyways, the Atelier games are JRPGs that seem forever stuck in my sizeable backlog, so I can't say I'm very familiar with the particular entry in the franchise that is being adapted by Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness and the Secret Hideout. That said, I have been on a huge fantasy kick ever since Final Fantasy XVI started kicking my teeth in, last week, so this summer is honestly the perfect time for some new fantasy JRPG-styled anime to come knocking at the door of the Preview Guide. I'm craving monsters and spells and good old-fashioned adventures more than I have in a long time, which had me hoping that Atelier Ryza might be one of the shows this season that made me excited to stick around for more.

Sadly, this one didn't do it for me. Atelier Ryza is hardly a terrible show, at least based on what this extended first episode has to offer, but it also failed to leave much of an impression on me of any kind. Despite the pretty music and solid production values, there's just not enough substance to Ryza and Co.'s first outing as heroes for me to latch on to. The setting of Atelier Ryza is about as humdrum as can be, and while there might well be a lot more to this world to discover and fall in love with, we spend most of this episode wandering around fields and forests as the script introduces us to the many characters that we'll be getting to know over the course of the season. It's not exactly lifeless, and the cast does possess a certain easygoing chemistry, but forty-eight minutes is already long for a single episode of anime, and this premiere was starting to feel long in the tooth around fifteen minutes in.

I imagine that a lot of these issues would be much easier to reckon with in the interactive version of this story, where you have that extra later of engagement that comes from getting to control the characters and mess about with crafting systems and battle mechanics. Plus, starting slow is an issue that plagues even some of the greatest RPGS; they just happen to come with the added benefit of being able to plow through all of that slowness in just one sitting, instead of drip-feeding their players content in twenty-to-forty-minute chunks exactly once every seven days. Maybe this show will appeal to folks who've already been converted by the games, or at least those with a lot more patience than what I've got. If I spoke fluent Japanese, I could see myself being perfectly happy putting this on in the background while I work on chores and the like, but I don't, so I'm going to pass on this one (at least until we get an English dub).

Coming into this episode, my sum-total of knowledge about Atelier Ryza comes from the cover of the third game where Ryza is a giant and Tao and Lent stare across a chasm at her colossal meaty thighs. And while this episode regrettably showed her to be a normal-size girl, the camera in this episode is just as focused on her bare thighs as Tao and Lent appear to be on that cover. (And yes, I do know that the cover is an unintentional optical illusion but I can't help but see it any other way.)

So, why did I just waste a paragraph commenting on Ryza's thighs and a picture that isn't even from this anime? Well, because it was things like that which kept me sane while watching this episode. This episode is, for lack of a better word, “boring” and the fact that it's a double-length episode is baffling. Honestly, the first half of the episode could have been cut with the story starting on their ill-planned adventure and it still would have been mind-numbing—though slightly less so.

There is nothing here you haven't seen a million times before. Ryza is a girl who dreams of the world outside her small village—and so drags her friends into an “adventure.” Ryza, Tao, and Lent are level 1 characters who have never encountered a monster—much less defeated one. Lent, the strongest among them, can't even put down a single slime. Of course, they have a chance encounter with a lost girl and are saved by two seasoned adventurers and… I'm sorry, I was falling asleep there.

It doesn't help that Ryza is pretty darn unlikable. She is dangerously naive and doesn't truly understand she almost got her friends killed. She's too focused on her own selfish wants to realize what would have happened if not for Empel and Lila coming by when they did. While it's a good place to start a character arc (where she would grow and change into a responsible adult through a series of tough life lessons), it doesn't make her any less insufferable at the moment.

This is an anime that desperately needed to start in medias res. There needs to be some kind of glimpse at who she will become so we can be invested enough to sit through the cliché beginning of her story. In a game, starting at the beginning as we see here would be fine. After all, you're already invested in seeing where the game will go since you paid your hard-earned money to play it.

So what nice can I say about this anime? I respect the little details—like how the small half of Ryza's two-section staff sways realistically as she moves about. I also enjoyed that, in an anime with so much focus on Ryza's thighs, Lent's low-waisted pants were there for some equal-opportunity fanservice. But is any of that enough to get me to come back next week? No. No, it is not.

I've seen images from the Atelier Ryza game floating around for a while, and I imagine it's been the same for most anime/game nerds, regardless of their interest in the actual series. So, going into the first episode of the anime, I had two thoughts: first was that people seem to love Ryza and that her shorts look to be three sizes too small and CRAZY uncomfortable. Her thighs are squeezed into stockings that fit her like a sausage casing, and yet they don't touch. Seriously, I'm worried about her; shorts that tight are a breeding ground for harmful microbes, putting her at risk for yeast infections or even bacterial vaginosis. Hopefully, she'll learn to alchemize some probiotics!

I know I'm being silly, but between the aggressively prominent shots of Ryza's squished, shiny thighs and the stultifying literally-adapted RPG plot, I didn't have much else to think about. Atelier Ryza is, in the tradition of most anime based on video games, extremely boring and I don't know whether or not liking the game would make it any better. Ryza makes a whole bunch of monologues about how she longs for adventure, but due to the island's extremely contrived “tradition” she's not allowed to leave. Her companions are cookie-cutter JRPG types: the weedy nerd caster-to-be, and the bulky fighter who is, for some reason, wearing a belly shirt.

The hour-long premiere and unengaging story and character writing meant I had a lot of time to hyperfocus on the costume design. The animation is noticeably stiff and unexpressive, and I think that a lot of that has to do with the costumes, which have a frankly excessive level of ornamentation. This kind of intricacy is fine when you're working with either hand-drawn stills (which, for what it's worth, express more personality than any of the characters did in the entire episode) or 3D rigging, but it just doesn't work in hand-drawn animation, where a human has to figure out how everything moves instead of a computer's physics engine. If the characters jump around too much, all those little bits and bobs have to shake around, and it's a whole mess. Personally, I believe they could benefit from being stripped down and simplified, because if I'm going to worry about Ryza's vaginal health then I might as well also worry about Lent's weird cross-shaped thingy that looks one wrong move away from nicking a blood vessel, or Lila lounging on the couch in her spiked kneepads.

My obsessing over the costumes started when I checked the time out of boredom and realized I was only halfway through the hour-long premiere. I needed something to engage my attention, anything! But you, dear reader, do not need to go through that. You can just skip the episode entirely.