I’m pretty sure I did an early impressions post at some point, but now that it’s been literal years and I’m still playing, I thought it was finally due to get a comprehensive gush post about this game up here to get it all out of my system.

I’ve nearly caught up the story content in Alchemy Stars and I like how much Stuff is in the setting without it feeling too out of place, somehow. It’s basically “fantasy but also post sci fi apocalypse” so they chalk a lot of strange things up to lost technology being found/unearthed/reverse engineered to different degrees, like the Illumina Federation has straight up assault rifles and battle tanks and the Rediesel Wrench has Mad Max contraptions and hot rods, then random buried ruins will be full of drones, AI supercomputers and sometimes cyborg weapons you woke up by accident. As such, the story has gone from “You are the last member of this species helping the Forces O’ Light fight the Forces O’ Darkness” to “we have to hack the planet” and it’s not been a particularly jarring curve.

(About the only exceptions are the ‘we have to work real world events and holidays into the setting’ instances, they mostly go the Life Day route and have a character go “oh back in my hometown, we do this– focused a lot on the new Longzhou region/faction because man these games love to make up new versions of China)

I’ve had a few friends try the game but always seem to bounce off of it. I guess I stick with it because it reminds me of weirdo Sting games like Knights in the Nightmare in that it’s SRPG adjacent but the actual battle system (connecting like colored tiles) is batshit goofy and in practice looks like a conga line of characters running around in awkward zig zags smacking everyone in the back of the head. I’m not sure how well they’re doing in the big picture given how I basically only know like, one active-ish player and I’m not interested enough to track down a list of highest earning games, but they don’t seem to be stagnating or winding down like other games I’ve seen close up shop, so hopefully I get to enjoy it for a while to come. Ideally, I’d like it to get a Mega Man X Dive collected version some day, but that seems to be extremely rare and that’d be sad. Alchemy Stars is a really unique game and so suited to playing on the phone to boot. It’s not really deep enough I could see it on a console and the way it plays is so touchscreen dependent it would probably suck on a controller of any kind. Then again, I never played the PSP port of Knights in the Nightmare, so maybe I’d be surprised. (You don’t need to be especially precise in drawing paths but sometimes the isometric view or level effects can make it a little trickier to match colors up- which, by the way, I only found out a couple weeks ago or so it has a colorblind/hi vis tile set you can enable that puts element markers on the screen which helps a lot with the addition of ‘dark’ tiles. Dark Yellow parses as orange or red to me sometimes in particular)

The latest thing they’ve added I find especially cool are the Dreams, which cycle every other month or so and spotlight a character by putting them inside a dream, either working out a personal problem or just giving the player a chance to get to know them better. As massive as gacha game casts get, it’s a pretty nice feature and feels more ‘crafted’ than the usual “you raised an affection stat, so here’s a little conversation” payoff they go for in a lot of these things. In fact there’s really not a lot of romantic pandering to the player, which is kind of refreshing. Most of the dynamics have what I’ve described as, “you are the member of the friend group who owns a car.” Characters message you on the computer roughly daily either to butter you up for favors, let you know they broke something on your ship, or sometimes just kind of waste your time. One of the chapter climaxes has your character declare the Main Girl who’s been with you from the start to just be Your Best Friend, and I dunno. Maybe I’m just so numbed to harem shit I just thought that was kind of nice. (Like, seriously, your character is supposed to be the last of a race of telepaths who are extremely useful for strategizing in war, you have sole access to ancient technology including a sentient flying fortress, you would think someone in the Federation would be insisting that you BREED LIKE MAD for their own benefit.) I’m not going to say that the artwork is devoid of fanservice, of course- It doesn’t feel as in your face as something like NIKKE, but some characters definitely have gazongas aflap or rippling bare muscles depending on what you’re into.