Adult Game JRPG Review Visual Novel

The Alchemist of Ars Magna – Review

The Philosopher’s Stone. An item that can grant Alchemists power beyond their wildest imagination. “Dust.” The creeping clouds of calamity that destroys all life it touches. Originally released in Japan in 2020 by developers ninetail, The Alchemist of Ars Magna (Soushin no Ars Magna) is receiving an English release through publisher PGN Games. And in this game, Socie, a country of Alchemists, fights against the apocalyptic threat of “Dust” and “Oblivion.” Can this world be saved?

The Alchemist of Ars Magna - Gauntlet

Narrative Arcs 

In The Alchemist of Ars Magna, Shin Balt, a young alchemist, and his companions must find a way to combat an existential threat to their existence: the Dust, a supernatural phenomenon that threatens the world of Socie that they all live in. The Dust corrodes and destroys all it touches, and encroaches ever closer to humanity day by day. 

Shin, however, has a special tool to fight against the dust: the Philosopher’s Stone. Granted to him by his companion, Enri, Shin has the ability to take in the Dust that destroys all else, and convert it to power. 

The narrative of the common route really reminded me of the Shonen battle manga formula (but with some H). Each battle, each boss is a new opportunity for Shin and his party. A new friend, a new enemy, a new obstacle to surmount (or fall victim to). And even though I cut my teeth reading the library out of Shonen manga, the format is still fun every time. 

That’s not to say it’s all fun and games. The story has some serious moments, especially post route-split. In the first route I played, there were some times I was holding a finger on my A key in shock. But it is jarring at times how the game oscillates from funny rom-com time with the party, to talking about the dire state of the world, then back to fun time. It really made me question what kind of story they wanted to tell–something serious, something funny? Not that things can’t be both, but the pacing at times, certainly did feel off.

That being said, when the writers went all-out, they really went all-out with the story. I would love to say more, but without getting into spoilers, for me, it was probably two notches too cheesy. Let’s just say the writers added some cheddar, havarti, brie, and pepper jack in a real short amount of time. Regarding the other route, the route split does fundamentally change the type of story the game tells. Where route A is like classic shonen, route B is something else entirely. I personally wasn’t a fan–especially after playing through the other route first.

The Alchemist of Ars Magna - Combat

Combat with a little extra sauce

The battle system is rather interesting, and has a nice level of depth, especially for a visual novel. Veteran VN readers will know that gameplay in VNs can vary greatly in complexity. What Ars Magna offers is a classic turn-based combat system, with a touch of “board-game crawling,” and I mean that very literally. Exploration occurs almost entirely on maps similar to a board game. The maps are filled with spaces offering different effects: loot, battles, healing, and more. 

Enemy variety is quite nice, with each unique enemy having a spread of elemental defense values and race classifications. These classifications come into play when considering your own team’s composition–-one of my favorite parts of Ars Magna’s combat is the variety of ways you can set your team up. 

When team building, I found the most important thing to be character skills–for example, Celes’ skills generally set her up to be a tank, whereas Aria’s sets her up as the mage of the party. However, these skills are tied to whatever weapon the player has currently equipped: if you expect to need fire elemental damage, switch off the weapon that provides Aria with wind elemental spells. Certain weapons switch the paradigm of characters as well–need a buffer rather than an additional DPS? Switch to a weapon that better fits how you want to build your team.

Skills aren’t the only way to customize your party members. The game also provides customization for your team through God crests, which players can earn as combat or tile drops, or through story progression. Each God crest offers one or two effects and a bevy of stat increases. Effects range from simple damage increases, resistance to status effects, shields at the start of battle, and more. Each party member is allowed to equip up to four God crests at a time, allowing for combinations of effects. Where this particular system comes up short though, is in its high degree of RNG–many crests are only available through combat, and with each map having a limited amount of encounters, whether or not you get certain crests is up to a dice roll. Despite that, I still had a great time mixing, matching, and trying to max out the effects of the crests. 

Difficulty-wise, The Alchemist of Ars Magna does have a few options for an initial playthrough: easy, normal, and hard. I played through on normal mode, and never felt like I needed to grind. Boss battles felt decently challenging, and I did have to adjust my team comp a few times after wiping out during some particularly difficult fights. Hard mode additionally has two sub-levels players can choose from that increase enemies’ stats by a certain amount. On game clear, the player gets access to New Game+ options, which include two higher difficulty modes, optional status and equipment inheritance, among other options. 

While on the NG+ note, Ars Magna does have possibly the best skip function I’ve seen in a VN, letting you skip entire scenes without seeing the classic zooming text a classic skip function would show you. Additionally, “Advance Mode” is unlocked on game clear, which automatically skips battles and boss fights. I was able to get to the halfway point of the game in about 45 minutes with the skip options and Advance Mode selected–a fantastic set of features for CG collection.

The Alchemist of Ars Magna - Map

UI Concerns, Typos, Bugs, and Translation Issues

For a game initially released in 2020, there are a few concerns I have with the controls of the game. On expedition boards, navigation can feel a little slow, as you can only navigate tile-by-tile with the mouse. Some maps certainly have more backtracking than others, but it can feel a bit slow if you want to 100% each map. 

Additionally, during battles, there are no keyboard controls at all. With the card system in place for skills, my brain wanted to be able to press 1 through 8 in order to select skills, but this is not implemented in-game. Even worse, when progressing through combat, players are required to click through–when I was starting out, I tried pressing both space and enter, but neither worked. There is a setting to turn off “Click Standby,” which is definitely not an English phrase I’ve heard much before, but makes it so that the turns progress even if the player isn’t clicking.

I found myself missing my keyboard a lot early in the game, but after a while, I got used to it. Regardless, lacking keyboard controls entirely for the combat segments is a bit of a shame. However, this is really only noticeable in the battle scenes, as visual novel segments work as expected.

Additionally, this being an RPG, there are a number of systems and stats, but The Alchemist of Ars Magna never goes into detail on a number of them. For example, the game has 4 main stats, and I was never really quite sure what exactly “technique” affected, and there’s no in-game help menu explaining. The alchemy system is used to craft weapons, consumables, and even upgrade materials–but it’s never explained that if you click on “Liquidation” in the alchemy menu, you’re able to purchase materials with gold. On one hand, it is nice that the game throws you in without much explanation–but I went through 60% of the game without knowing I could purchase materials for my next weapon upgrade, instead of waiting for drops. Additionally, even after completing The Alchemist of Ars Magna, I still do not know what the “Proficiency” stat does, other than it seemingly maxes out at 2000? Perhaps a skill issue on my part.

For this next section, a big caveat: this is a 50-hour game, and the script is huge. Typos are expected, but still worth mentioning. There were quite a few typos and translation issues that stuck out to me. Especially early on, when players are just getting a feel for the lore of the world and characters, questionable phrasing can be distracting. For example, in chapter one, Enri has quite an important lore drop for her character arc: she has a mission to complete, but she’s forgotten what exactly that mission was. This was the line in-game:

“I have a mission given to me by Astarte. But I’ve lost the essential content”

Here is the original that I transliterated from the associated voice line:

“ 私には、アスタルテから受けた使命があるの。けれど、肝心の内容なくてしまった / Watashi ni ha, Astarte kara uketa shimei ga aru no. Keredo, kanjin no naiyou nakute shimatta”

Here is a translation of the line from DeepL

“I have a mission that Astarte gave me. But I’ve lost the important details.”

Now, I’m not saying that DeepL should be translating all visual novels–the human work here is important. But this line is a microcosm of some of the puzzling word choices made in TL over the course of this visual novel, with the phrase raising my eyebrow being 肝心の内容 (kanjin no naiyou), translated as “essential contents”. If you were to look up both words in a dictionary, the first English words to come up would be those two: essential, and contents. Word by word, the translation isn’t wrong. But the turn of phrase, on the other hand, is simply unnatural and feels like a lapse in editing. Truly, the issue is less with this specific translation–I’m not a translator, by any means. It’s more about the numerous unnatural turns of phrase that took me out of the game and landed me on jisho.org, wondering how the heck they got where they did.

The Alchemist of Ars Magna - H-Line Examples
Some examples of the H-scene Writing in The Alchemist of Ars Magna

H(ilarous?) Scenes

For my taste, the H-scenes were a bit rough. I do have to cut Medibang some slack–the original Japanese did not seem to leave them much to cook with. For example, one character refers to their own vagina as a “pussy shack” multiple times… If that doesn’t get you going, well, I don’t blame you. To be quite frank, I was keeled over laughing far more often than I was tempted to enter sage time. Seriously, I popped a few real, physical, honest-to-god tears while reading some of these lines.

While I certainly derived some joy from the hilarity of the writing, narratively I felt that the H-scenes were cheap at times. My personal preference for gameplay-intensive eroge like Ars Magna is to get to know the characters a bit, maybe have a little foreplay, kissing, or other soft-H, and get a sort of culmination H-scene at some sort of narrative peak. After that, no problem, go all out. 

But, in Ars Magna, we get H-scenes relatively early, before any sort of big on-screen conflicts or relationship building. Some go so far as to be locked to story progression– at times, you literally can’t progress the story until Shin engages in activities with a lovely woman. And get busy Shin does. This is an H-game. You do the math. And while there are lore reasons for the early sex, it still feels rushed, and a wasted opportunity to build any sort of a crescendo to an erotic climax.

Thankfully, as the game goes on, The Alchemist of Ars Magna starts getting there. And despite my aforementioned concerns, the art isn’t bad, most of the CGs range from decent to pretty good! Common for English releases, the CGs are uncensored too. Maybe I’ve just become aware of a personal fetish, but it’s a shame that the early scenes felt so wasted. Also: the route split mentioned earlier has different CGs depending on which route you took. When you get there you will have a good idea of the difference. 

Note that if you’re playing the Steam version, you’ll need to download an adult patch to view these scenes. There is no mosaic censorship included.

Verdict

The game is fun. The story is fun. I like the characters a lot, and the gameplay systems have a nice depth to them, while not being overwhelming. However, the game is let down by a variety of smaller flaws: UI issues, translation quirks, and typos that occurred far more often than they should have. I could take or leave the H-scenes, but the game does have some fetish content that could definitely appeal to the right person. If you’re in the market for an H-game with a straightforward story and solid gameplay, I definitely recommend The Alchemist of Ars Magna–but I think you’ll enjoy it more if you purchase it on sale.

WAIT FOR SALE ON THE ALCHEMIST OF ARS MAGNA

Platforms: PC
Purchase: Denpasoft / JAST Store
Steam 18+ Patch: Download Here

Want to see more Visual Novels? How about our review of Venusblood Frontier International by ninetail? Or if you’re looking for another Adult Game, Dohna Dohna ~ Let’s Do Bad Things Together is worth checking out.

Many thanks go to Medibang for a review code for this title.

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