Atelier Ryza is a very bad Atelier game and the sole reason why it's often "recommended" is because it's the latest title of the franchise and the sheer amount of fanarts it got as advertising.
-characters besides Ryza herself barely hold any weight in the story, which is itself linear instead of being branched out into different routes and endings depending of your affection level with other characters and personal achievements (such as being filthy rich or because you baked a lot of pies for example) like it was the case in Atelier Arland and Dusk games. This also heavily affect the replayability.
-voice-acting in Ryza is completely absent outside of story events, in contrast where Atelier Rorona, Totori, Meruru, Ayesha, etc had voice-acting even on characters routes.
-combat doesnt involve any type of strategic thinking besides just smashing the attack button and the tactics level of your main character while the rest of the party controlled by the AI also does most of the job. It's also a weird hybrid of the queue system while everything else acts in real-time, meaning a party character with a far higher speed stat can be still slower than everyone else because of his/her attack animations. Manually selecting skills can also cost you "turns" if you're hesitant on what to choose.
-alchemy was okay-ish though it's easy to break the (already easy) game early if you know what you're doing since there is no time limit/managment to handle.
Nevermind Ryza also continues (since Lydie & Suelle) the trend of charging you for extra stories and other things separately when you can get the Atelier Arland (Rorona, Totori, Meruru) and Dusk trilogy (Ayesha, Escha&Logy, Shallie) for a lot less without any DLC bullshit too.
