The first of this trilogy (apparently a sequel to the Dusk Trilogy if Logy’s appearance is any indication) is Atelier Sophie ~The Alchemist of the Mysterious Book~. It starts off very laid-back and slice of life-y, which isn’t really a problem. The problem is that the combat system and gathering areas feel unfinished and are kind of a chore to engage with. Combine that with having to grind requests to advance the plot and I ended up dropping it shortly after the previously mentioned Logy appearance.
The second, Atelier Firis ~The Alchemist and the Mysterious Journey~, reintroduces the time limit found in earlier Atelier games (you have a year to complete the ‘main’ quest; there’s no limit to continued exploration afterward)… except now time passes constantly. Simply walking around the map causes time to pass. That’s a hard no from me.
Atelier Lydie & Suelle ~The Alchemists and the Mysterious Paintings~ is the third game, and much like Shallie it brings back a large number of characters from both previous games. The plot here is more self-contained though and not having played through those doesn’t seem to result in missing much here (Alt will be a mystery until his last friendship event triggers and the couple mentions of Oskar won’t make sense if you haven’t touched Sophie). There’s no time limit (aside from the repeatable/ignorable requests and one particular, very simple, main quest) and it doesn’t require any grinding to progress the storyline (though unlocking the True End does, effort I feel is wasted due to the conflicting messaging). The only problems are that the gathering areas are much too large (not lifelessly so however… with one notable exception which was presumably intentional) and pretty much everything relating to the Ice Palace painting is pretty bad.
So the first two are skippable depending on your tolerance for, respectively, lack of direction and feeling rushed, while the third is quite good and has nearly all the elements of Ryza already in place.