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The story
An app advertised as letting fans “chat with Ryza” from the Atelier series has caused a stir after users discovered that the free tier cuts you off after just two messages — and even paying for the subscription only gets you 15 chats per 10 days. The 3-day free trial also silently converts into a full annual plan unless canceled within 2 days. On the thread, commenters piled on complaints about the pricing, comparing it to VTuber donation costs and standard AI token rates.
What people said
Nah, stuff like this actually sticks around for a while — they just mark up the server costs and pocket the difference. No voice recording expenses either.
Cloud coding AI is locked in a brutal price war with local PCs, but for character-chat services the cloud side dominates and there's barely any competition.
Steam's still ruled by the RTX 4060, so unless they pull off something like linking two PS5s together, local AI probably won't catch on for gaming anytime soon
Wonder how much the top-ups cost on top of that
Not gonna lie, this is pricier than a VTuber's members-only content
VTubers charge anywhere from a few hundred yen to tens of thousands per comment, so VTubers are still more expensive overall
Even a married couple in a rut talks more than that
You can just feel the intent to reel in suckers no matter what
Wait, this is official?
If chat AI could shrink down to around 10GB and voice synthesis got just as lightweight, couldn't you link two PS5s or two Switch 2s together and run it locally?
Without Thunderbolt, just USB, you can't parallelize like you would with graphics cards, but it should work fine running separate AI processes
That'd be fine if it were unlimited, but it caps out at 45 times a month
But if AI does the talking, you don't even need to hire a human
This is the winning move!
15 chats per 10 days is just insulting
No wonder they can't compete with Chinese developers
If they've got time to make garbage like this, they should be rushing out the next mainline Atelier game instead
For 3D RPGs, Chinese studios are just too strong now — it's basically over
But for chat AI, regulations are forcing HoYoverse and Tencent to shut down more and more of their services, so Japanese games will probably see more entries in this space too. Actually, even the console version of Dragon Quest X is already doing this
Tokens are expensive
Yeah, anyone who actually understands AI could've told you that
Honestly you'd be better off watching "The Tale of Princess Kaguya" instead
Isn't this pricier than V-Kaguya and V-Yachiyo (VTubers)?
Unlike Ryza, it's not even cute
If I'm paying money, I'd rather it be for a cute girl like Ryza
If they made it free or unlimited, the servers would get overwhelmed, so they have to keep it expensive
You'd think everyone would get bored quickly and traffic would stabilize, but then a global version might launch, so it's hard to say if prices will actually drop
China has regulations on this stuff, so just like game consoles during COVID, this might actually go up in price too
Background and Key Points
The Atelier series, published by Koei Tecmo’s Gust studio, is a long-running alchemy-RPG franchise, and Reisalin “Ryza” Stout became its breakout mascot after 2019’s Atelier Ryza, spawning both a mainline sequel run and the mobile spin-off Atelier Resleriana that posters reference as already having a “gacha” reputation. This chat app appears to be a licensed tie-in letting fans converse with an AI version of Ryza — but the free tier stops at two messages, and even the paid plan (around ¥6,000/year per one poster) caps out at 15 exchanges per 10 days, with a 3-day trial that auto-converts to a full annual subscription unless canceled within 2 days, a classic dark-pattern subscription trap common across Japanese mobile apps.
The thread doesn’t converge on outrage alone — it splits over whether the price is actually unreasonable. Several posters compare it favorably to VTuber “oshi-katsu” spending, where superchat-style comments can cost far more per interaction, arguing AI chat is comparatively cheap; others insist any cap this tight, especially on a “official” character product, is an insult regardless of comparison.
What outsiders may not grasp is why the caps exist at all: generating conversational replies via cloud LLMs incurs real per-message compute cost (tokens), unlike a VTuber’s fixed voice/video overhead — a point posters raise but don’t fully unpack. Also glossed over: the “just run it locally on two PS5s/Switch 2s” suggestions are technically naive, since consumer consoles lack the interconnects (like NVLink) needed to pool GPU memory for large models, something the thread never corrects.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry, “Geha”) thread “[Sad News] The App That Lets You Chat With Ryza Turned Out to Be a Pay-to-Talk Game.”
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