PlayStation Plus New Free RPG is an 80 Hour Beast

One of the latest titles to land on PlayStation Plus is going to keep you occupied for a very, very long time, should you choose to finish the game in its entirety.

There are so many games. Arguably, there are too many games. Also, some games are super long.

This introspective crash out does have a point, I promise, because one of the more recent games to end up on PlayStation Plus is quite the lengthy experience… and it’s also the third mainline entry in a series of which I haven’t played… at all.

As revealed by Sony last month, a whole heap of new titles made their way on to the PlayStation Plus Extra catalogue on 19 August, including Mortal Kombat 1, Marvel’s Spider-Man, Earth Defense Force 6, Unicorn Overlord, and the incredible Sword of the Sea.

It was a bit of a meh month for me, because I’d already played the majority of the games on the list. One of them, however, stood out to me, because it made me feel like a terrible games journalist for not having played it (or any of its preceding entries, for that matter).

If you’re familiar with the series, you could probably already guess that I’m referring to Atelier Ryza 3: Alchemist of the End & the Secret Key, the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 title developed by Gust and published by Koei Tecmo that released back in March 2023.

Thankfully, if you’re like me and you haven’t played any of the other games, it seems like you can jump right into Atelier Ryza 3: Alchemist of the End & the Secret Key and not miss out on much.

If you do find yourself enamoured with it though, I hope you’re prepared to put in some series legwork to finish it.

As detailed on the How Long To Beat page for the game, you’re looking at a minimum of 33 hours (if you only want to play the main story, that is).

If you’re a completionist though, you’re apparently going to take roughly 82 to hours to get through everything. Woof.

On the plus side, it sounds like its worth it. Atelier Ryza 3 received glowing praise upon release, with the PC version of the game netting itself an 85 out of 100 on Metacritic.

Ugh, fine. I’ll play it. As if my backlog isn’t big enough as it is.

I hope I don’t end up loving it, because then I’ll probably wind up playing the previous two games too. As if I needed more games to play.