Whether you are an old hand at playing Atelier games or whether you picked up your first ever game in the series with Ryza 2: the synthesis, or crafting, in the game is pretty important. Now, if you’ve played the first Ryza game too, you may have noticed there are some slight differences, but the basics are pretty much the same.
In our Guide to Synthesis for Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout I showed you step by step what would happen when Ryza steps up to her cauldron. I’ll repeat that process here, but now for the process in Atelier Ryza 2: Lost Legends & the Secret Fairy. There are a couple of differences making this once again, a fun experience!
The Skill Tree
In Ryza 1 you could find recipes in books, but you could also unlock them when making other recipes by unlocking them in the material loop. In Ryza 2, you start off unlocking recipes in a Skill Tree. By earning SP while making recipes and getting extra SP rewards in the Ruins you have to explore, you can unlock recipes.
Unlocking one recipes leads to more being available to unlock. The branches of the tree give you various sorts of recipes, for instance all bombs are in the same ” branch”.
Later on in the game, unlocking recipes in the material loop is back.
The Info on the Screen
Let’s take the Bomb as an example to show you what you see on your screen once you go to the cauldron. I’ve already unlocked the Bomb’s recipe in my skill tree, and selecting it in my recipe list I can click on the minus button on the top of the left JoyCon brings up all items that are related to my Bomb recipe: there’s Crimson Ore, (Gunpowder), (Sand), (Neutralizers) and Bomb Dragoon.
You’ll notice some items are listed between brackets. This means that a group of possible ingredients is named, for instance, for (Gunpowder) you can use Crimson Ore, Beehive or Demolition Bomb in this example. The items that aren’t between brackets have to used specifically.
Clicking on such a specific item like Crimson Ore shows what it is, what tool you use to gather it, where you can find it, in what Category it belongs and its Element. More on that later. And clicking X even shows you to what material groups it’s related, in the case of Crimson Ore that would be (Ore) and (Gunpowder). So in this bomb you need Crimson Ore specifically, but in other recipes you could use it as part of a possible group of ingredients.
Let’s Make a Bomb
Before we go further: there is so much info on the synthesis screen that you might want to click X to Check Tree first. It gives you an oversight of all effects and traits you can achieve and pressing ZR or ZL will let you zoom in to look more closely.
When you press – on the Bomb itself (in the same table as above, where I highlighted the Crimson Ore) and then click on Bomb in the Related table you get the Bombs info. Pressing Y after that shows the effects of Bomb.
When used in battle, the Bomb can have the effect of Fire Damage, Lowered Guard for your enemy and can inflict Burns. Plus, it causes Exhaustion Explosion which is a magic effect.
Note that there’s also a reference to the CC Cost which is 2. To use a Bomb, you must have enough CC (Core Charge) to do so in battle.
Following the Material Loop
The Material Loop is the string that appears on screen when you want to synthesise an item. In this example for the bomb you can see in the image below that it has two effects going for it at its basics: Exhaustion Explosion as effect 1, and Fire Damage as effect 2. If you look closely, Effect 2 has 6 slots in it of which three are open. In the text beside it, it shows that you need three Fire elements to fill the bar up and get the effect to the next level. I did this by placing two Crimson Ores.
Of course, we would like to unlock Effect 3 as well, you need to place items from the group (Sand). I have several, but to get Effect 3, called Lowered Guard it needs items with the Fire Element.
The Soft Sand where the cursor is now won’t do me any good, as it has Lighting and Wind (yellow and green) and I need Fire (red). So, I’m gonna go for Burning Sand which has a red element. You can see below that by placing the cursor on the Burning Sand it shows that it will fill the two Fire elements and on the left, you see Effect 3 being added in green. This way the game shows you what will happen when you place this.
The Material Loop automatically goes to the Traits. The Bomb can have 2 trait slots if I can add a total of 5 fire elements. But even when I unlock 1 trait slot, some of the chained nodes in the Loop unlock. In my Bombs case I get an additional Effect 2, instead of just the Small variant of Fire Damage I could now add Medium.
I also see the Quality Node unlocking, it needs Wind Element added to unlock Effect 4! That’s all the effects accounted for, nice! By adding Wind Ore with two Wind Elements my bomb will also Inflict Burns.
After that, my bomb is complete as I can’t add anything more. I have made a Bomb with all effects that we had seen as possibilities, with the trait Critical and a Quality of 56.
Quality and Traits
Asides from all of that you want to achieve the highest quality for your bomb. To do that, it helps when the items you use have a high quality too. Pressing X lets you sort your items according to quality, but of course you can also filter on effect, quantity of the items or whatever sorting filter you need by choosing X and then Filter.
Filter lets you refine what you need. Want to try for a specific trait? You can see on the right what traits the items you can use have. This can come in very handy when you synthesize items that are only used in Alchemy, like Neutralizers. By selecting specific traits you can enhance the items you make with them.
And playing with traits in this way also helps with the villagers requests. Sometimes they don’t just need Cloth, but one with a specific trait.
Atelier Ryza has a long list of Effects and Traits. No need to remember them all, as the game always gives info. Here’s the list for both:
There’s no doubt, I could fill many pages about Synthesizing in Atelier Ryza 2. But I do hope these basics will help you to get even more enjoyment out of Atelier Ryza 2: Lost Legends & the Secret Fairy!