In an interview with 4Gamer, Atelier series producer Junzo Hosoi revealed a surprising piece of information about Ryza’s return in the upcoming Atelier Ryza 2.

Hosoi explained that while Atelier games would sell well whenever the series debuted on a new platform for the first time, a huge part of Atelier Ryza‘s unprecedented success came from Ryza’s character design, which drew attention to the game from an early stage and brought in many new players to the series.

That being said, Hosoi added that other factors such as Gust also making huge efforts to rework the battle system, the alchemy system and multiple elements in Atelier Ryza were also crucial to the game’s success and paved the way for a sequel.

Furthermore, following the first game’s theme of “summer memories” was another reason why Ryza was chosen to be the protagonist of the sequel:

Junzo Hosoi: “One of the charms of the Atelier Series is how you get to see the characters grow older and change. So we did consider changing protagonists as usual. But we wanted to keep the same protagonist to better depict the games’ theme of summer memories. Keeping Ryza as the protagonist for a sequel was something we thought about since the beginning of the first game’s planning. However, everyone has been asking me “Did you keep Ryza because the first game’s sales were really good?”, and there’s also some truth to that. Because even if we wanted to do something, we couldn’t do it if not for the players’ support.”

Lastly, Hosoi also mentioned that if there’s a third game within the Ryza subseries, Ryza herself won’t necessarily be the protagonist for a third time, and it won’t necessarily be a new sequel time-wise. They’re not sure yet what they’ll do, and that’ll depend of the players’ opinion.