So, back in the Fall 2022 season, I took a look at Managment of a Novice Alchemist as my seasonal anime of choice, and I opened up likening the pitch to the venerable Atelier series of games. In a sense, this was the elephant in the room: Atelier already had an anime outing back in 2014. The other elephant in the room, which I partially addressed, would be the massive popularity of Ryza. She got her own anime outing in Summer 2023, and we’ll talk about it in due time. For now, though, it’s Escha and Logy.
To shortcut twelve episodes of Novice Alchemist (or confirm what you’d suspect in one), that show was fluff. Fair enough, that’s what Rorona (an entry I’m familiar with) was like. Escha & Logy looks very much the same at first glance. It’s got its bouncy opening, overwhelmingly cute female lead Escha, bright colors, soothing music… but there are elements of the premise that are a little bit darker, like how most of the world is said to be covered in the Land of Dusk (where nothing can grow and humans can’t live) and there’s a general but very background sentiment that everything is kind of circling the drain. I’ll let you know if and when anything is really done with that.
In the meantime, we meet said cutie, who lives with an automaton (clockwork robot person) lady named Clone. Escha is starting her first day of work today at the R&D department of a government office. She’s not alone, though, as coming down from Central is fellow state alchemist Logix – Logy – who is distressingly well armed and, if the exchanged blushes are much to go by, probably distractingly handsome.
He also has a lot of learning to do on what small town life is like, as he’s a little surprised that the government office R&D is doing maintenance person jobs. He doesn’t object, and according to montage this involves fighting monsters in order to get to various reagents to cook up new or repaired bits and bobs. You know, I get that in a game you’ve got to have the RPG battle element, but from a story standpoint, what is the deal with these monsters?
Right at the end of the first episode we’re introduced to one further plot hook: a set of floating ruins in the sky above the little town, which nobody has yet been able to reach. Balloons (the preferred flight method in this world) can’t make it through the air turbulence, but it’s Escha’s dream to get some new means of travel and explore the sky ruins there. I don’t think this could be a more obvious plant if it tried.
We learn more about ruins in the next arc, which involves an outlying village with water trouble. Apparently, the ruins are the product of lost advanced civilizations, and many of them still provide useful functions, meaning they’re seen as valuable places to both preserve and investigate. Of course, the civilization that made the ruins couldn’t stay in the game, as is pointed out, but that’s just part of the weird apocalyptic melancholy that seems to underlie this bright, cheerful show.
We also get more hints that Logy has some sort of tortured past, and meet new characters. So many new characters. Seriously, there’s a design with a quirk and a name just about every time you turn your head. We meet a variety of town NPCs like the people who run the transport balloon and this strange childlike shopkeeper, a very hungry combat member of the branch office, a couple of adventurers, a witch and her apothecary friend, an archaeologist… the list goes on, so if I mention someone out of the blue, assume we said hi.
We then enter the chewy filler center as we mess around with Escha’s accessory, a cute new girl who wants to make medicine, the apple orchard, and our local airheaded sword girl’s evil and drunk identical counterparts (collect them all!). We even get the obligatory onsen fanservice episode, thanks to the witch girl needing a sidequest.
This puttering gets us all the way to episode nine, where we finally bring back the obvious plot hook of the ruins in the sky, what a new mission being drummed up to reach and explore them. After trouble just getting the approval to do so first and then more trouble (and reckoning with Logy’s past: turns out he was responsible for this universe’s Hindenburg) building an airship that can reach it, we get into the sky and find a mysterious girl there.
She summons a boss monster and drives everybody off, but then they learn more about her from ancient tablets, and also Clone who was there when the ruins were raised up to the sky. Said girl is apparently an ancient alchemist who became the control system of her research station, who was trying to find a way to stop the whole ecological devastation that’s the background of the setting. She’s grown horribly misanthropic in her isolation, but Escha of course wants to help. Thus, everyone gets together for a second expedition that will hopefully get to her, through her, and win her over.
Escha gives it her best friendship speech, but there’s a boss fight anyway. At the end of it, after the summoned monster is bested, Escha actually saves the girl from a follow-up attack, finally getting through to talk with her. With Clone’s help, they manage to break through her madness and make her realize that her decaying sky palace is a dead end when it comes to revitalizing the world. This causes the girl to fade away, and wouldn’t you know it, she’s a load-bearing boss.
In the aftermath, it seems there will be no punishment for the ruins damage today (I guess they had their permits properly filed), said girl is now a spirit who can transfer between different ruins systems to continue her work with a better outlook, and Clone has come through an arc that would have been really compelling if we followed her more.
At the very end, Logy is (probably due to building a cool airship for the town out of a box of scraps) invited back to Central city to do extremely prestigious technology research. It’s a good thing for him, to follow a dream, but he leaves a lot unsaid with the heartbroken Escha left behind. However, Clone seems to believe there’s now hope in this world for whatever comes next, finishing out show with a snapshot preview of presumably the follow-up game. The End.
Atelier Escha & Logy: Alchemists of the Dusk Sky is about what you’d expect out of Atelier, just by its reputation: it’s mostly harmless fun, but the setting takes itself rather seriously, including not magically fixing the huge background problem in the span of twelve episodes. Saving the world is beyond Escha’s scope; the best she can do is learn an important lesson that if the world is going to be saved, everyone had better work together in order to do it.
I actually respect that quite a bit, and in a sense the anime has done its first and foremost job: it’s made me more interested in the game. Since I know what the core loop is like, this slice of the overall themes is at least somewhat engaging.
But, as an outing on its own, the anime does have a little split focus trouble. It can’t quite decide if it wants to be more Slice of Life or more about an overarching plot. In fact, it’s about 50/50.
With four episodes dedicated to the sky ruins and a couple early on doing necessary setup, it has the backbone of more of a fantasy adventure. In that, it could be rather unique, since there’s not a lot of focus on combat and most problems are solved by hard work and invention rather than by smacking something really hard. In that, though, its game origin holds it back a little. It’s compelling in a game to learn new recipes, but having characters in a show just get a chance to buy the next book rather than following the logical process of innovation? I’m less sold.
The other half, though, is a mix of goofy and heartfelt that plays well enough on its own, but that doesn’t synergize with the plot side. Totally excusable in a game, but a case of lacking identity in a show. It’s not usually that we’re even dealing with light plots that kind of add in, we’re dealing with either pure fluffy nonsense, or individual character arcs that come in without being presaged and then never matter again. The best handled of these is probably the request Escha takes to improve the apple orchard’s yield, revealed at the end of the episode to have been a right of passage for every generation of her family, each tending a section of orchard in their own way, which even helps connect Escha to her tragically deceased mother. If I were trying to retool the series to feel more plot-focused and cinematic, I think I might leave it in. The worst offender on the other hand is sword girl’s copies. This hints at a lot of stuff, an entire extra show worth of stuff but… nah, one overall silly episode and we’re never addressing again the war history, the experiments evidently in human cloning, or whatever her other “sisters” are after. You can skip it entirely and miss nothing.
That said, of all the troubles a show could have, a mild case of questionable identity is by far one of the more excusable. Whether it’s plot-focused or Slice-of-life, the show is still light and optimistic with a few sad undertones for depth and body, so it’s not as though its tone is off.
All the same, I don’t think I can rate Atelier Escha & Logy: Alchemists of the Dusk Sky very well overall. Its heritage keeps coming back to bite it in these weird ways, proving that this wasn’t a property really intended for the screen. It’s not bad, but the characters other than the titular duo and Clone are pretty thin (likely because they were developed over sidequests and skits), the presentation of alchemy is lackluster (because it’s trying to be like the game, where that presentation works), and it does have that slight issue with deciding whether it’s got a core story or not.
For all of this, I’m going to rate the show at C+. It’s fine, probably better than Management of a Novice Alchemist, but nothing special. Watch it if you’d like to take a little pastel break without feeling insulted.