Gacha, short for gachapon, is often viewed as an exploitative skinner box made specifically to spear whales and keep them in tow until they can no longer afford to play or break the line. That’s because it is. However lucrative it can be, general gaming news ignores it until a whale drops 5 figures and fails to get a waifu JPEG. Gacha Hell seeks to review gacha games based off gacha-specific criteria. If a game’s here, there’s something worth talking about.
DISCLAIMER: Hatman works for a mobile game developer. For obvious reasons, none of the games reviewed will be from that developer.

There are games that are precisely-crafted experiences where each aspect deliberately flows into one another to create a perfect melding of the narrative, gameplay and audio-visual. Other games are created with a care akin to a field study of monkeys with diarrhea in a poo-flinging contest.

Alchemy Stars is somehow both, and I have to talk about it because they made a tiny little adjustment to the standard gacha character collector that warrants an in-depth examination as to why it works well. First, I will need to explain why I can confidently make that statement about TourDog Studio’s entry in the gacha collector experience and then we can talk about the actual subject of the article.

The Core Gameplay Experience

The core gameplay loop of Alchemy Stars is relatively simple: On your own turn, you guide your party through a path of differently colored tiles per round which determines their attacks and ability triggers. On the enemy’s turn, they just try to kill you with various abilities. To clear a stage, you have to complete the stage’s objectives. Most times, it’ll be something like “clear two waves of enemies” but sometimes it’ll be things like “reach the exit after it opens”, “survive a set number of rounds” or “collect X items that are dropped by defeating enemies”. This helps break the monotony of the traditional gameplay.

This is also not what I mean when I say the developer threw gameplay concepts at the wall to see if they stuck. Whenever the player has to actually play the game, everything is good. In fact, the main complaint of the game is that there’s just not enough content right now. Or rather, there is but…

Everything Else

What if I told you that inside this fun little puzzle path-drawing RPG you had Fallout Shelter and Animal Crossing? You wouldn’t believe me, right? There’s no way the developers would just decide to randomly add room management and development with assignable units for additional bonuses. Actually, thinking about it, this is fairly hands off so this is plausible. It’s a bizarre choice, but hey, it’s non-intrusive and allows you to access additional content with the random data simulator that has remixed levels if you want more of that sweet gameplay experience. Sure, your only reward is leveling up a bar for some rewards and loredumps, but why not? It’s at least more game.

It’s the Animal Crossing part that completely knocked me on my heiney when I first booted it up. The game in and of itself does have super-deformed models of their Live2D art for the actual game part. They figured that the player would really love developing a whole village with dorms, a tree hybriding mechanic in full 3D that taxes a TCL 20 Pro 5g edition enough to cook eggs on it. There’s no real goal here – just make your village and decorate it however you want! Catch fish to put them into outdoor aquariums or your fountain! Mine ore and trees to build things to make your village pretty on the pretty meter, which caps out fairly easily! Invite your units to your cool village so they like you better and you can talk to them more! Events happen sometimes!

We can safely say that absolutely nobody asked for this. It’s the number one complaint about the game by a wide margin. Originally, I was wowed that a developer actually went out of their way to make such a bizarre decision and stuck to their guns, but as I played that mode I realized that I wasn’t really getting anything of worth in the actual game I wanted to play. That I was essentially draining my phone battery by leaps and bounds for… well, nothing at all. In fact, this entire mode (called Cloud Gardens, named after the area of the protagonist’s homeland that they decide to reclaim after the protagonist managed to escape as a baby because his ship-guardian called a colossus took him and fled during what was effectively a genocide) was why I wanted to write about this game in the first place.

After a month and a half playing this game, I decided it wasn’t worth it. The decision was absolutely courageous, but courage wasn’t worth talking about in my opinion.

Text Messages

Instead, it’s this insignificant little word bubble on the left side of the screen that I want to talk about. Typically, every time you log into the game, one of your units has a message for you. Depending on when in the day it is, it’s a good morning with some flavor, a plea for you to not work too late into the night, something typically as heartwarming as they possibly can considering the relative age of the protagonist. It’s a fun little addition that makes you attached to the characters even if you normally hate them, because everyone cares for the protagonist in their own way. Be it with Barton the military-obsessed general who wants the protagonist to train because they look extremely frail and don’t want them to get hurt, or the younger units who idolize him because he bridges the gap between childhood and adulthood by being a teen and treats everyone with respect despite the hardships experienced (such as being kidnapped by one of the gacha units at one point in the story).

As I played, I found myself looking forward to seeing some of these messages. Sometimes they appear following progress in the main story, sometimes they appear following gift-giving, ascension or breakthroughs (different methods of powering up characters), sometimes they’re log in specific, but they’re always written well and when it’s one from your faves, it does tug at the heart strings. I found myself more and more engaged with the game. Not enough to drop money on it considering I tend to chew through these for content for this column, but enough that it took a while before I even considered writing this article, because I knew once that was done I’d have to part ways.

And all that because of a tiny icon that, mechanically speaking, gives you +5 affection for a character from time to time.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the core game is good though I can’t say the studio knows how to leverage the strengths of their game well. Their main monetization driver is skins for characters and while they are good at getting you attached to them, they also offer skins in weird ways: There’s a Battle Pass that you can get a premium version of (like all battle passes) if you want a skin for a better character and additional rewards. Otherwise, the skin will be for a 3/4 star character. There’s a lottery where you have to buy actual tickets to get the skin, but the lottery is guaranteed to not give the skin before the 5th pull. The first pull is free, the rest are paid. Other skins you can just buy outright. You can buy premium currency as always but that’s not the main monetization driver.

If the core gameplay wasn’t fun, I don’t think I’d have stuck around to have this little thing tide me over and see just how unhinged the devs are when it comes to just throwing anything into the game and then just sticking to their guns. Do I think this game is worth playing? Honestly, I think it might be. If the core gameplay sounds appealing, chances are it’ll resonate with you. The characters themselves are hit or miss. Musically, there’s nothing really outstanding but it’s competent despite the orchestra being a bit too much at times.

Just… avoid Cloud Gardens unless you’re playing on emulator. For your poor phone’s battery at the very least.