YMMV / Atelier Lydie & Suelle: The Alchemists and the Mysterious Paintings

• Contested Sequel: Though not for anything about the content of the game itself - the story is generally viewed as much better than the last few games, the battle system is considered one of the best in the franchise, and the multitude of gameplay improvements were welcomed by most. However, there was a lot of controversy of the game's extremely expensive DLC passes (a problem with all games released by Koei Tecmo at the present), the lack of an English dub, and high number of typos and translation errors in the script.
• Game-Breaker: The Firis Bomb technique. Firis in the support row can use several powerful elemental arrows when the appropriate battle item elements are used. There are two traits called "Twin Powers" and "Twin Powers: Pair", which add fire/ice and wind/lightning damage to your attack items, respectively. You can, for example, make a Flame of the End attack weapon with both these traits attached, in addition to maxing out the attribute levels in order to maximise damage. If a character uses it with Firis as their support, you will unleash not only a powerful attack item which hits with multiple elements at once, but also trigger all of Firis' support skills in rapid succession, resulting in a long bombardment of the enemy with powerful alchemically-enhanced arrows. The only downside is that Firis' support skills only work once per fight, but with the proper preparations, the Firis Bomb Combo can tear through even endgame bosses, so that one shot should be enough to get the job done.
• Hollywood Homely: There's an event where Lydie and Lucia say that Roger is becoming less attractive with age, even mentioning warts, but he's a gorgeous Pretty Boy with nary a flaw to be seen.
• Les Yay: The culmination of Sophie and Plachta's storyline will obviously have this. Sophie manages to give Plachta a new human body, and, when Plachta tries to leave Sophie since she's gone way beyond her teachings, Sophie manages to persuade her to stay with her, since they mutually agree that they're not happy unless they're together for the rest of their lives.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel:
  • After Sophie and Firis, the Mysterious series had come to be a somewhat polarizing one among Atelier fans, with players citing reasons such as comparatively uninteresting characters, stripped-down combat, tedious gameplay pacing, among others. Lydie & Suelle, in contrast, heavily simplified the more obtuse parts of the system and is completely packed with characterization events, resulting in much higher critical approval.
  • In terms of its position as a series finale, it's also considered to operate as a far more satisfying conclusion than the last one, Atelier Shallie; whereas Shallie was criticized for ending the Dusk trilogy on too much of an open-ended and inconclusive note, Lydie & Suelle goes in completely the opposite direction and goes out of its way to bring the Mysterious trilogy's themes and loose plot ends. It's also considered to handle the dual protagonists in a better way than Shallie or its predecessor Escha & Logy, in that rather than requiring the player to go through two barely different-routes in order to get all of the story content and Golden Ending, this game allows you to switch protagonists anytime and focuses on a single story involving the two of them.
• Tainted by the Preview: The announcement that the game's Western release would, for the first time since the English localizations began, not have an English dub, caused a bit of a furor, if nothing else because the previous two Mysterious games did have dubs and this meant that Lydie and Suelle would have several returning characters without their English VOs. On the other hand, as many existing players pointed out, the previous dubs were already bare-bones affairs, dubbing only battle phrases and certain key cutscenes while leaving much of the side content silent. While there were many cries on forums of "No Dub, No Buy", this game outsold Atelier Firis by a large margin so it appears the issue didn't bother most players.
• Unexpected Character:
  • The Puni from the Exam in Atelier Firis returns as an NPC, and is terrified to see Ilmeria again due to being used as a target for several end game bombs.
  • Nelke appearing in DX has surprised many due to her home game being both a Milestone Celebration title and a town-building game that plays completely different from the rest of the franchise.
• Win Back the Crowd: Due to the aforementioned criticisms of the Mysterious series and Firis causing the franchise to have a huge tank in sales after Sophie, upon Lydie & Suelle's announcement Gust immediately tried to invoke this trope by promising that it would be different from prior entries, to the point where they released a free demo of the game and showcased an entire event of player testimony on its improvements. Ultimately, while the final game ended up critically praised for indeed fixing many of the issues from the prior games, ultimately ended up with 180,000 sales by April 2018 off word of mouth after a poor first week of sales.