Was contemplating upon giving this one an 8 but the last leg really sucked me dry. Spent about 25 minutes total on the final boss, with savestates, and that's not mentioning the boss rush beforehand. Hell, even regular enemies start biting chunks of your health bar sometimes in those last two or three stages.

That being said, it's the only real issue I had here. Alcahest is generally quite solid in about every aspect, not necessarily an essential but I would definitely suggest it as a shorter action RPG, being hardly even structured as one and clocking in at only about 4 hours from my experience. The soundtrack from Jun Ishikawa is particularly notable, bringing a sense of familiarity and comfort with its close sound and proximity to his work on the subsequent Kirby games on the SNES. Very good stuff.

I'd recommend this for sure, especially into you're into games like the Zelda series or Soul Blazer, but be wary of the home stretch. It could definitely stand to be at least a little more forgiving, and probably will unfortunately turn out as my core memory of the game.

Game Review - originally written by Gideon Zhi (founder of Aeon Genesis Translation Group)

Alcahest! This game is… different. It’s sort of an action/rpg, it’s sort of an arcade game. You play as this guy Alen who runs around slashing things with his sword and collecting other swords and stuff. You can collect power-ups that expire after a fairly short amount of time, and you can do a charge attack, all in standard arcade fashion. What makes Alcahest different from most arcade games is that it’s not nearly as maddeningly difficult as, say, Mars Matrix. You also get continues. Yeah, that’s right, you have -limited bloody continues- to beat the game with. But that’s okay, you can earn more, and the fewer you have the easier it is to gain more. You don’t really get experience or anything, your “EXP” is really just credits towards your next continue, and you lose all your “EXP” if you game-over.

The storyline is… fairly cliche. It’s not necessarily -bad- per se, but it’s very much standard fare. Demon-thing made of hate, hero-guy collects elemental weapons and companions and kicks ass, lots of manipulation of greedy bastards by the hate-demon-thing. No earth-shattering plot twists or anything, which the game sorta needs, but eh, whatever. It’s an action game. The characters are sufficiently cool, but by the time you get to the final level you’ll be using the guy with the homing shots exclusively for everything but boss battles, and the healer chick for boss battles. Everyone else is just sorta chump change in comparison, even for the cool dragon chick :(

Neat trick, by the way - when you beat the game (it’s not that long; five hours most I’d say) let it sit on the “END” screen for a while. Alen will show up and start showing off some of his more puny moves, and the game will cycle through every single music track for your listening or SPC-ripping enjoyment. Joy!

So yeah. I had fun with it, but I’m not sure if I’d want to play it again. It was cool while it lasted, but my attack-charging thumb is goddamn sore after that final boss*%(!

Playing a bunch of action games recently and this early HAL game (Kirby, etc - early home to Iwata and Sakurai) has been on my list!

First, the positives - it's a fairly short game, the sound design and music is amazing (by Jun Ishikawa), and the pixel art is nice. There's some fun level design moments. It's very weird that this game feels Very like kirby - partially the sound design, but there's also something to the controls and how you jump around the stage using those jump pads.

But other than that, it's kind of middling as an action game. The game has many many abilities, but the movement/enemy design/level design isn't solid enough to make those work in a meaningful way. Most enemies feel the same - very difficulty to safely kill with regular attacks, so you stand far away or charge a special move. Bosses are the same - their movements are too sudden and your hitbox too unclear, they hit too hard. You can either try to hit the boss 100 times to win, or just spam magic/super skills.

That's not to say there are no good ideas, but there's not much of a solid action game core to be found here. The level design soon reveals itself to mostly be mazes with finicky mechanics (dense spike tiles, conveyer belt tiles). It's a bit of a shame because the story setup is some fun genre stuff - floating mountains, futuristic airships, demon worlds...

I think the kind of action HAL was going for ended up perhaps better suited to something like Kirby Super Star - all the abilities are something fun to experiment with and see (rather than armor on a generic protagonist), the point isn't so much solid combat as it is just going around easy levels with different kirbies.

Me and a friend were interested in playing this so we both played this and chatted on discord the whole time so that'll give me a pleasant memory with the game. Thankfully the game itself is good too!

This is a top down action game with some cool sword abilities and partners as you travel through 8 stages. You got a few moves at your disposal and you even get more swords and partners as you travel through the game.

The levels have some cool designs and the enemies are a decent enough challenge to not feel mindless or too hard. I will say though sometimes navigation can be a little annoying as it can be hard to tell what you're doing wrong at times. Sadly the last two stages kind of just give up on making interesting levels which leads to my biggest issue.

The boss fights suck in this game. I wouldn't say they are unfair hard but I just never really looked forward to them. Yes I know they have a weakness thing for the swords you have but I swear some bosses just don't know when to just die and some of them do so much damage just from contact that it annoys me. They don't ruin the game but they could be better.

The presentation though is very good with music done by the same composer as Kirby Super Star. There's some good stuff here if you enjoy that OST. The game also looks pretty good for 1993 though you also won't be wowed by anything in my opinion.

Alcahest is an interesting game for the library. One that lacked a western release though there is a fan translation nowadays. It's nothing too special but I enjoyed playing it. I do wish it did some things better like the lives system and the plot being kind of boring but there's still a good top down action game here that you should give a try if it peeks your interest.

This game was advertised to be as a Zelda clone and in some ways it kinda is, but in many other ways it's clearly a game of it's own. It's a ARPG with real-time combat and is certainly a lot of fun to go through! Though, once again I've forgotten most it and what it was about, but I remember it being a lot of fun to play and though not strictly a Zelda clone imo (no inventory for multiple items, ect), it was still a lot of fun and you even get a dragon as your companion!

Gameplay + Stream

(played for the bunker's fpga-tour)

really had a great time with this one. it does so much right; enemy design varies wildly, plenty of options to change up your combat style, and some really great music that adds to the whimsical look and feel of it all.

HOWEVER, the enemy damage output is absolutely insane, especially in later stages, and while the majority of boss fights had an apparent exploitable weakness, the boss rush leading into a ridiculously difficult final boss left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. super solid action RPG with a disappointing final two stages, just don't really think i should be getting two-hit killed by a boss and three-hit killed by normal enemies. still recommend it though, and especially glad that it got an english translation.