Last November, Koei Tecmo’s studio Gust released Atelier Ryza Secret Trilogy Deluxe Pack for PC (Steam), PS4/PS5, Nintendo Switch, and Nintendo Switch 2. The definitive edition of the anime-styled RPG series’ Secret Trilogy bundles some brand-new content alongside improved versions of the three original entries.
Around the time of the title’s release, AUTOMATON sat down with series producer Junzo Hosoi to look back on the production of the three games and discuss the refreshing change of pace Ryza brought to the Atelier franchise with her distinctively “plump” character design.
Hosoi said that, after the release of Atelier Lulua: The Scion of Arland and Nelke & the Legendary Alchemists: Ateliers of the New World, he felt like the series had become stagnant in a way, and that it needed a breath of fresh air with the following release. At that point, the team at Gust went on to conduct a thorough market analysis in order to decide what kind of game to create next. Since the first thing they wanted to do was settle on a character design for the new protagonist Ryza, the team started with researching the body types and depictions of women that were popular at the time.
Compared to the main heroines in previous entries of the series, who were mostly on the slimmer side, Ryza ended up having a much fuller figure, which was apparently the result of the studio’s meticulous market research. “After carrying out various analyses, we concluded that the plumpness of her figure was something our players would want. We also felt that body type preferences and character design trends vary depending on the culture and various individual circumstances. Taking such a wide spectrum into consideration, we wanted to make Ryza’s design somewhere in the middle of that range,” Hosoi told us.
The topic of Ryza’s character design being influenced by cultural and economic aspects of the time it was made in has been brought up numerous times in previous interviews, and according to Hosoi, Ryza’s design philosophy falls right in the middle of that character design trend spectrum. “I felt super relieved when I saw that the players positively received Ryza’s design,” he commented.
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