Atelier series moving away from Fanservice?
A recent publication of the day Nintendo Life went viral on social networks recently, it is an interview with the producer of the game Atelier Ryza 3, to which he would have said that he was making a “conscious effort to move away from the Fanservice” that the series has become known .
The Atelier series of JRPGs is quite old, the series started with Atelier Marie: Alchemist of Salburg released in 1997 for the Playstation 1, and seeing all the games until you get to Ryza, none have strong fanservice, the girls are cute at best (apart from maybe Plachta from Atelier Sophie), Ryza was the first one who practically showed more “fanservice”, with her thighs being very prominent.
Even because of that, Atelier Ryza is the best-selling game in the entire series, so yes, the fanservice did help boost sales and the series is much better known now.
What do you mean Atelier series moving away from Fanservice
And then the people on social networks were very worried, what do you mean the producer wants to escape the fanservice that first helped the series to become better known?
Anyway, let’s see the exact question that the Nintendo Life website asked Hosoi-san, series producer, and what exactly was he saying?
Having reviewed all of the Switch entries in the series over the past few years, we’ve noticed a shift from what you might call a more ‘fan-servicey’ style towards RPGs that feel like they are trying to appeal to a much wider audience. Has it been a conscious decision to redirect the style of the franchise in this way?
Hosoi-san: Yes, it is. We want as many players as possible to pick up and play our games. For this reason, we are constantly listening to the opinions of various players and looking for and coming up with content that they will enjoy again. We would be happy if many people think of Gust games when they think of JRPGs.
Honestly, the answer that Hosoi gave doesn’t really indicate that they are really wanting to run away from Fanservice, not even the question asked indicated that, I honestly don’t know where these titles came from. But anyway, on March 10th Hosoi also gave an interview to IGN Japan, where he talked about the game and about, in a way, “fan service”.
There Hosoi says that he thinks Tridamono’s (Ryza’s illustrator) illustrations are beautiful, and that they wanted to make the characters likable, and completes saying the following: “For our part, we don’t want to show the characters in a sexualized way, we We’re very careful about that.”
Well, I believe that there is a clear difference between the terms “fanservice” and “sexualized”, it is not possible to know exactly the context of what he thought or what he meant, because it is a fact that many arts and products considered fanservice from Ryza are leaving.
From what I understand, they don’t want to sexualize all the girls in the series, but at the same time they are ok with fanservice, which is not terrible, honestly, the fanservice in Ryza is not bad.
It is worth remembering that in December 2022, Hosoi, Tridamono and Suzuki gave an interview to the 4Gamer website where it was said that they further increased Ryza’s thighs for the 3rd game.
Anyway, the Atelier series was never really about fanservice, the fanservice started in a way I would say in Atelier Sophie with Plachta’s look, the heaviest fanservice started for Ryza, as the Atelier series always changes protagonists, just seeing the next one game with the next heroine, if they go back to the cute heroines path or if they go to another heroine with more body like Ryza’s.
In addition, all the images you saw in this post are official game art, all fanservice!