Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout's devs go into great detail on the various character changes during development

Late last week, we checked in on a Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout feature that shared a ton of concept art, as well as insight from producer Junzo Hosoi and character designer Toridamono. Some more specific details from that interview have come through, which have been summarized below.

- the Atelier series usually has character designs with a girly focus, but with Ryza, Hosoi wanted to go with a new direction
- Hosoi felt that Toridamono could come up with a new design and decided to contact him
- Hosoi asked Toridamono to do a trial drawing, which is the image you see above
- this was given the green light, and Toridamono started officially working on the project

“The pressure was huge when I accepted the offer. I can’t do girly designs at all, and I’m no good at drawing frills and such. I worried about whether someone such as myself could be the illustrator for the gorgeous Atelier. At first, I had many worries before I started, and I wasn’t confident, but Hosoi-san kept persuading me and we somehow made it to where we are now.

I remember there was also something about making Ryza ‘boy-ish.’ Around the time of the rough draft she had short hair, but as we went over the plans there was talk about wanting her to be more like an older sister, so we got this illustration." - Toridamono, Character Designer

“So we decided on asking Toridamono-san, and we had him draw Ryza once again, and this is the draft of that (Pictured Above). We went to the Gust development department in Nagano, and had him draw that after discussions with several staff members and myself. At the time we talked about wanting to make her barefooted to bring out an impression of her being someone energetic who runs around.” - Junzo Hosoi

- Toridamono faced struggles of not understanding how to bring out a “boy-ish personality,”
- he was even told “That’s wrong” by Atelier series creator Shinichi Yoshiike
- Hosoi explains that both he and Toridamono were new to working together, so there was a bit of feeling each other out
- Ryza from this design appeared to have had more focus on breasts than thighs, as Hosoi is apparently more a breast man

- Tao was the very first to be completed
- at first he had two bags, but after making him into a 3D model, it switched to just one shoulder bag

- Hosoi felt that Lent looked too pretty, so they decided to put in more details for a new design
- Toridamono prepared about five variants and said to choose whichever one Gust wanted
- none of the designs were chosen, as Toridamono said that he “Kind of didn’t like them”
- the bottom design above is the one that was finally chosen

- Empel has lighter-colored hair
- the reason he wears a lot of layers is because of the remnants of what was previously an old man’s setting

- Lila is a character that is full of mysteries, who is actually half-beast, half-human
- she has a different background from Ryza and the others. For that reason, I had a lot of freedom with her design
- Toridamono decided to go with elements he specialized in to make a character that pops

- the team ran into trouble with Klaudia, who was completed after Ryza
- Toridamono says he isn’t great with the ojou-sama types, meaning he's not great at doing designs for frills, dresses, and stuff
- since Klaudia plays the flute, there was an idea for a tailcoat like the ones conductors wear, but this was scrapped
- some of the earlier designs also had Klaudia show more of her bare legs
- since the childhood friends of Ryza, Lent, and Tao all have darker parts to their legs, he wanted to see lighter-colored legs
- in the end, they decided to stick with the stockings look for Klaudia