No Autosave function. I crashed randomly and lost ~10hours of progress. The game wasn't as fun as Ryza. I recommend you start with Sophie 2 instead. I wish I had.

Atelier Sophie is the 17th game in the Atelier series of games, as a fan of Atelier ever since Rorona on the ps3 and recently purchasing all the games again on pc I can say still say that Sophie is my favorite protagonist! The game is a very good turn based RPG. My only gripe with it is that even on the hardest difficulty the game is still very easy, if you want to get into Atelier I really cant recommend Sophie and The Mysterious series of games enough if you wanna get started.

Disclaimer: Sophie 1 was my first Atelier game and therefore my entry point into the Atelier series. I chose to start with Sophie as I heard that the Ryza games are quite different from the other Atelier games and the Mysterious trilogy is the most modern classic Atelier game.

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The story is very slow in the beginning as you are mainly tasked with discovering and crafting various recipes in order to progress. Around 15–20 hours in when you create the story slowly increases the pacing. The narrative is instead mainly told through character events that Sophie has with the inhabitants of Kirchen Bell.
While I did like the overall story after finishing the game, I must admit that in the beginning of the game, I wasn’t really hooked and thought about throwing in the towel once or twice. But ultimately, I think it was worth finishing the game.
If you, the reader, however desire a more tight narrative, then Sophie 1 definitely isn’t for you.

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Sophie 1 is a game that is primarily focused on crafting. While you do have classic turn-based combat with Speed as the limiting factor of turns, your power/strength primarily comes from the items you craft, be it the armor or accessories to protect you or the weapons and attack items to deal damage. While there are skills in this game, they deal vastly less damage compared to crafted items so it took some getting used to the systems.
However, once you get the hang of the crafting and trait systems, the combat can be a lot of fun. I played through most of the game on Normal although I switched to Despair in the endgame because I was getting too powerful. As for the ultimate endgame, there are superbosses in the game which I did not like. Both the ________ as well as ________ are really annoying boss fights which require you to craft specific items with specific traits and grind for hours to get the aforementioned traits to counter their gimmicks which can wipe your party in an instant.
Furthermore, the game really lacks QoL features. For example, you do not have a robust search function in your crafting menu. In the early game, this isn’t a problem, but in the late game, with more than 50 recipes and 100 materials for crafting in the game, this results in a lot of searching. While you can filter for specific traits (thank god) you cannot sort alphabetically or search for a specific item. Huge oversight, which led to me navigating crafting menus over and over again.
Overall, I did like the gameplay, but I hope that the sequel Atelier Firis is going to address some of my concerns.

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As for technicality, the game runs really well. I played half of the game on a Steam Deck OLED and the other half on my desktop PC running an Arch-based Linux distribution. I had no issues with either Proton or the performance of the game so you can play this game without worries on whatever gaming OS you prefer. However, the launcher of the game is a bit clunky and the options to configure the game visuals and controls are really limited.

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I liked Atelier Sophie. I definitely think it’s not without flaws (as most games are) but I can see the charm and love being put into the game. The dialogue is funny and the character interactions are really comfy. Whether you’ll like Sophie is a different story though.
If I’m being honest, I wouldn’t start nor do I recommend you to start with Atelier Sophie. I can’t recommend a game to start Atelier with yet, as Sophie is currently the only Atelier game I finished. Many people either recommend Ryza or Sophie.

I will update this review once I have played enough Atelier games to recommend a good game to start with.