Introduction

Paint me like one of your French girls: Let’s Play Atelier Lydie & Suelle!

Welcome! We'll be playing Super Mario 64, wherein we explore worlds within magical paintings with Mario to save Princess… wait, no, that didn't come out right. We'll be playing Atelier Lydie & Suelle ~The Alchemists and the Mysterous Paintings~, wherein we explore wondrous worlds within mysterious paintings with the twin alchemists Lydie and Suelle Malen!

Tell me more about Atelier Lydie & Suelle.

Atelier Lydie & Suelle (PS4/Switch/PC) is the 19th entry in Gust's crafting RPG Atelier series and the last entry in the series' Mysterious trilogy, Atelier Sophie (8 years prior) and Atelier Firis (4 years prior) being the prequels. Despite this, Lydie & Suelle stands on its own as a story. During the course of the game, we'll see our eponymous protagonists fulfill the promise they made with their mother on her deathbed to one day run the best Atelier in their country in spite of their inexperience, their family's grinding poverty, and their deadbeat dad. The main story is neatly divided into twelve chapters, almost all of which focus around an alchemy examination and a subsequent investigation of a Mysterious Painting. Keeping with Atelier tradition, we'll also delve into the friendships they make along the way—important friendships that will help them realize their dream and then some.

Despite what the title might prime Dusk trilogy veterans to think, Lydie & Suelle does not have separate stories like Escha & Logy and Shallie did. You can even freely switch which twin is on the overworld, but the few resulting differences are all cosmetic in nature.

That's nice. So how will this LP run?

This will be a screenshot LP (with video links for events). I'll be showing the main story along with all character events, as is required to achieve this game's True Ending. There's also plenty of scenes where conversations between characters happen offscreen; in these cases, I'll do my best to fill in the blanks. I'll denote these inserted lines with italics next to the character's avatar. With this in mind, doing all character events means a lot of content to cover. To avoid bloating the LP, I'm not going to show all the gathering, battles, or syntheses done.

Any of my own commentary will be denoted with italics.

Spoilers

This being a LP of the last installment in the Mysterious trilogy, it will spoil some major plot beats from Sophie and Firis.

I'll denote these with siren emotes and bold text when they come up

, but if you care about plot beats from the prequels (especially since there's also a LP of Sophie going on), then tread carefully. As for the plot of Lydie & Suelle itself, please keep the black bar discussion to a minimum. The story is more cute, simple, comedic and lighthearted than complex and loaded, but there will still be scenes that can blindside you despite all of that.