"Ho-hum."

Alcahest confuses me very much. On one hand, I can safely say that I've never played anything quite like it before -- at least on the SNES or any other platforms of this generation. There's platforming elements, but there's also backtracking. The levels are divided into stages but they're all connected by one coherent overarching plot. You have allies who join you and guardians who promote your weaponry and teach you new skills, and they all have their own strengths and weaknesses. There's so much nifty stuff going on in Alcahest that it really threw me for a loop at first.

At the same time, however, Alcahest is really just a generic action RPG at heart. You swing your sword, you slay numerous baddies, you rescue the statued princess and at the end of the day peace has been restored to a troubled land. You have hit points and magic points, both of which can be augmented with sparsely-distributed Soul Orbs and Potions of Life, and the SP you accumulate help your partner's special attacks. As you plow through every level, you'll come across a mid-boss, and after more plowing a final boss. Lather, rinse, repeat. And thus, Alcahest was born.

This title was a low-key 1993 release developed by HAL Laboratories and published by none other than Square. Any gamer who has been around the block a few times can pick out the signature aspects of both companies. The music reeks badly of HAL's stylings; they must have one composer who they keep locked in a closet and let him out just to do soundtracks to their video games. Really, how achingly similar to Arcana and Kirby Superstar are these tunes? Similarly, the gameplay feels surprisingly similar to other competitor titles of the era, most notably the also-obscure Brain Lord. Moving to Square, we can also see that the game was presented with a hefty serving of plot and even characterization, something not often seen in an action-heavy brawler. All in all, Alcahest makes for a pretty interesting meld of styles.

It isn't absolutely amazing, mind you. The game is fun, but not a worthwhile or memorable experience. It is fairly long and challenging for all it's worth, though I can't help but feel that there is something missing from it. Perhaps it's just the limitations of the genre, but I would just liked to have seen more from the story and the narration of Alcahest. It feels too restricted to its under-the-radar status; there's no sense of grandeur or ambition, and the game feels so dreary and weighted down because of it. There were plenty of stretches, and it may or may not be because of this, that I simply didn't feel compelled to play through Alcahest any more.

There aren't any fundamental flaws with the gameplay, though it is rather repetitive. Your character wanders aimlessly through many exotic locales, such as 'mountain', 'castle', 'sewer', 'another mountain', 'another castle', and 'airship'. Yes, typical RPG staples; I'm not impressed either. As you stumble around, you are also tasked with beating down various baddies. There's a little more variety to the creatures that accost you, but they still boil down to typically routine soldiers and lizard men. You start out with a fairly simple blade, unable to cast any magic and relegated merely to a spin attack as its only means of extra-normal defense. As you journey on and free various Elemental Guardians, yet another RPG staple, you'll get new swords and concurrently new magic. By the way, with each level a new ally will generally aid you in your quest with their own muscle and a unique ability. Some of them clear out the screen, some of them sling fireballs around, some heal you up right quick...nothing special here, either. Mournful sighs go here.

If there's one thing that does bug me a little bit, it's that the boss encounters are disarmingly hard. As a matter of fact...the entire game is actually kind of hard. Your opponents have a gigantic amount of HP, so much that swings of your sword do perhaps 1 damage off of a 50-point scale. Since the enemy's life is measured in disintegrating boxes, it's hard to provide an exact figure, but know that futile slashing will not get you very far. You'll have to rely on your magic and your partner's abilities, but what happens when you run out of MP/SP? Well, you're boned. Unless you can make good use of your sword's other ability, which most likely you can't. To make matters even worse, enemies can kill you in about 3 or 4 attacks, so your character will be dropping awfully fast. He'll need all the extra lives he can get! Sadly, that too is an impossibility, because you only gain a life at the insanely high EXP threshold of 350000. You basically have to go through half of the game without dying at all for any hopes of reaching this. Yeah, great.

Surprisingly, Alcahest looks absolutely awesome for a 1993 title. Granted, there's not exactly a whole lot of other things taxing the cartridge space, but the developers really went the extra mile in rendering this. Character sprites are big and well animated, with plenty of unique movements for all their attacks. The animations look great for spells, Guardians and your ally's special abilities. The allies themselves are distinctive and well-done, and enemies always look fearsome and ferocious. The sound is not quite as impressive, though it is derisively amusing for a player familiar with HAL's soundtracks. It sounds exactly like it was taken from a Kirby game, no questions asked. The sound effects are stock-standard and hardly seem to stand out. Alcahest is not an atmosphere game, don't get me wrong, but just a little more effort in this department would have meant something.

Actually, I feel that way about basically the entire game. It started out that I'd given Alcahest an 8 before writing this review, then it dropped to a 7 towards the beginning of it, and now as I read over what I've strung together I've dropped it down to its current score of 6. Certainly the game is fun, but there's also an ample and undue amount of frustration thrown at the player as well. I'm not fond of breakneck boss fights where I absolutely have to use all my MP and SP just to survive and I can't even use my basic weapon attack for anything. Nor am I that big a fan of similar, blandly-designed environments with nary a puzzle to break up the monotony and only a few RPG exploration elements, which are merely weak "key X for door Y" fetch quests that pepper so many games of this vein. I do, however, enjoy remorselessly gutting a fish-man from time to time, and admittedly raining fiery death from above on a screen full of robots never quite gets old. Alcahest is just one of those two-sided coins, the kind of game that you just can't get enough of...for a span of about 10 minutes.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 12/20/05