I’ll be honest with you. Alchemy Meister doesn’t even really belong on this site. Sure, it was suggested to me in a /weg/ thread and sure, there is technically nudity in the game’s code but it is not a porn game because I had to play for 12 hours to see any nudity whatsoever. It’s gameplay, seeing a couple chicks in their underwear, 7 more hours of gameplay, and then you bone. Of course it’s censored nip boning too.
Let’s start where all 21st century adventures start, the installation. After downloading the game and extracting all the files I was presented with an actual animated opening. With actual real animation (At the 20 hour mark I’ve yet to see animation again). After seeing that and getting my hopes up I quickly went into the options to get things set up where upon the game immediately crashed. Upon booting it again I was presented with a text box full of broken characters and 2 options. Upon clicking one I was taken to an “options screen” all made up of broken characters with 3 different options for 1920×1080 (all of which set the resolution to 800×600 for some reason). Then when launching it again I get to the main menu and it crashes.
After fiddling with settings, looking at an online guide, downloading a moon rune pack for Windows, and setting my clock and calendar to gook mode I was finally able to get the thing running.
Might I also add that trying to restore my settings breaks the game again. Why I have to set my calendar and timezone to nip to play a game that has no interaction with either is beyond me. This is probably the worst installation process for an ero game I’ve ever gone through. If you want specific instructions on how to get this working I’ll include a link to some at the end.
That being said, Alchemy Meister is a really REALLY fun and unique (at least to me) game. It’s a weird mishmash of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, Holy Potatoes a Weapon Shop (kind of), and some kind of dating sim that’s afraid to be a dating sim where your goal is to become the best alchemist there is. I would say that this game boils down to two different modes; crafting items to sell and wear and exploring dungeons to get materials to make more items to sell and wear. Now, thankfully there is very little intermediary crafting. I don’t need to collect the ore and smelt it into bars and get my charcoal and then my forge, there’s none of that crap. Go to place, kill things, things drop item, use item to make big sword.
Combat consists of you and your team moving around a grid based dungeon, attacking enemies and holding areas and positions that allow you to deploy more of your team. Your biggest priority is closing enemy spawn manholes so you can gain control of the map. When attacking an enemy you can choose between different elemental melee or ranged attacks to take turns whacking and or throwing rocks at each other. On top of this you have aoe magic spells, characters that are able to fly and move over lava or swim through water, and resource points to capture. Capturing a resource point nets you 5-7 resources picked randomly from the area’s item pool.
One interesting mechanic that Alchemy Meister has is that all of your skills take up points from each character’s CP (ha) value. I may have the ability to walk in water, do extra damage to flying enemies, and detect hidden resource points due to what I have equipped or the level my character’s at but I’m never going to be able to use all of these at once. Oddly enough this doesn’t mean much since you can modify your character’s skills and gear at literally any time. I can swap out my swim ability for my “do extra damage to flaming bats” skill and then switch back to normal right after smacking the bat.
As you go through the game your characters will become more powerful via equipping weapons you craft, leveling up, and going through a very Final Fantasy X upgrade system for your armor sets. Unfortunately you only get experience from fighting enemies which leads to the issue where your most powerful characters tend to be the only ones actually gaining experience. For example, my mage is really only useful against monsters that resist physical attacks. I don’t come across those very often so she doesn’t get used that much. Due to this she’s about 10 levels weaker than everyone else.
As I continued through the game and assembled my team of anime tropes to help fight I realized I was less interested in the story than I was when I started. Every single person you meet is a generic archetype. You have aloof person in position of power, aloof soldier type, elf obsessed with “the purity of the forest”, brash little girl, young troublemaker, tough as nails “one of the guys” girl, pious priestess, pious angel, mysterious and intelligent animal companion, and of course, the straight man. No one is remotely interesting and no one ever does anything unexpected. At one point you fuck up trying to make a rock golem and end up with a useless mud golem who likes to give hugs. Finally! A somewhat unique character. Let’s just do the ritual to purify it and make it stronger and then we can use it in fights! Oh wait, the ritual turned it into a little girl. Because of course it did.
How is the art and sex scenes? Generic. The art is basic looking anime/manga stuff. I’m no weeb, my manga exposure consists of JoJo, The Manga Guide to Databases, and reading Yotsuba that one time. Even so, I can still recognize when Eastern art does something unique with style or quality. This game definitely does not do that. As for the smut, I’m about 17 hours in and I haven’t seen them all but what I have seen is boring vanilla c-tier hentai stuff. One of the bigger differences between Eastern and Western porn games I’ve noticed, and this is based on the ones I’ve played so pitchforks down please, is that Eastern games porn games never have their sexuality in a casual fashion. No one is ever comfortable with being naked around each other. Even a couple who have been fucking for months still get super embarrassed if they were to walk in on one another getting dressed or bathing and the games tend to only have nudity when people are fucking. Calling it “fucking” is a bit misleading because it’s really just characters slapping censor bars and going “Don’t do that! That would make me cum!”. There’s so little actual porn in this game that to judge it as a porn game is a waste of everyone’s time. I ended up skipping most of the sex scenes because the art, the characters, the story, and the sex itself were all bland and uninteresting.
So if I don’t like the story or the art or the porn, why am I playing? Because I’m not playing for porn. I’m playing for fucking loot. I love loot. Loot is so good. When I play Diablo or Borderlands I want every possible gun or sword or pair of pants. When I play Skyrim I want to steal literally everything nailed down and keep it in my house forever. I want one of every thing in every game ever. This game has LOOT. Every enemy drops items, every dungeon you clear nets you like 30 different things that I’ll use to build pretty swords to keep in my inventory and never ever use. Wanting to see what kind of crazy hammers and furniture I can build next and where else I can go to collect goblin kidneys is the reason I’ve been playing this game for 5 days and why I’m still putting up with keeping my calendar in Jap mode.
So should you play Alchemy Meister? Ehhhh, I’m not sure I would recommend it. Am I enjoying it? Yeah, I am but I have weird taste and nothing better to play. If you’ve liked any of Eushully’s other games (they all seem to be exactly the same) or are used to going through weird processes to get foreign games working then I suppose you might enjoy it. Really, the biggest barrier to entry is the massive pain in the ass setup and the fact that you need to KEEP your PC’s settings fucked up as long as you want to play. So, in conclusion; If a porn game that isn’t a porn game that has interesting and really fun gameplay mechanics with a large amount of content sounds interesting to you and you’re willing to fiddle with a bunch of your PC’s settings to play than maybe you should give Kamidori Alchemy Meister a chance. To quote a man much better than me, “You come for the ass, you stay for the gameplay.”
Here is where you can get the game and massive props to
Greentext Does 
It’s a pretty fun game, but the sex scenes are its weak point, indeed. I play it to 100% the stages. Each stage comes with its own bunch of optional challenges, some harder than others.
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