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.
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.