Arc of Alchemist - Possibly the Second Worst Game I Have Ever Reviewed

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4 years ago

It's kind of refreshing to sit here knowing that I may already have my worst game of the year out of the way. It's a situation where I am kind of happy I don't do this fulltime and have a few guidelines in place for not finishing a game before review because this became a hours ago. Just so you know how far I made it, looking at the other guides and reviews, I've only got the last area I haven't cleared.

That said, there will be no positive things to say about this game. At first, I thought all the negatives I was reading about the game couldn't possibly be that bad, and on one hand, I think that guess was correct, on the other, it may be worse than some have said.

The gameplay is about as basic as you can get but technically functional. I have played far worse from a mechanical perspective, and it's not buggy either. There are two main issues here, the first being it's just not interesting. Basic combo attacks and a couple of abilities is all you get, and none of them have any interesting effects are uses. This is made worse by lack of good enemy design, leaving the combat boring throughout, even if it's put together well enough.

Secondly is that there just isn't any kind of feedback for when you or the enemies are getting hurt. I've found you can stunlock many enemies, but they just kind of stop attacking and have no visual or audio reaction. When you get here there isn't any kind of indicator either. It's easy to adapt too, but it makes combat feel entirely unsatisfying as well as mildly frustrating.

On to the story, which is almost non-existent. Find the great power to hopefully save the world from dying. We don't see the state of the whole world, just this area, or even anyone outside of the group here. This makes it hard to connect with the story because the dying world feels like a place far away from where you are. This isn't helped by a very bland cast of characters. Thankfully not much time is spent on the story, so like everything else, it just becomes another small annoyance.

I played in docked mode on Switch the whole time, and I had experienced a fair bit of lag in the gameplay as the game progressed, especially once I hit Abyssal Valley. Considering this isn't that detailed of a game, it's a bit weird to see so many slow down issues with it. Not enough to break the game or anything, but it hardly feels excusable.

I could go on, but in the end, the real problem here isn't that anything about the game is terrible, I have seen all these same issues far worse in other games. The problem is everything in the game is bad. I tried, I really did, but I can't find anything about this game to compliment. Not since Drive Girls have I found a game I recommend against this strongly.

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4 years ago

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