I've been a long time lurker for your blog, I've picked up several manga and anime recommendations from you over the years and generally our tastes line up lmao. Seeing your favorite game was Kamidori finally pushed me over the edge to give it a try. I just finished jumping through all the hoops to install it and english patch, looking forward to trying it later.
HOPE YOU ENJOY ONE OF THE BEST RPG'S/EROGES IVE EVER PLAYED!!! ALSO HOPE YOU FOUND THE VERSION WITH THE 2.0 APPEND GOLD DISK AND THE HANNAH EXPANSION! CAUSE YOU AIRENT GONNA WANNA MISS MYLEN PLOA WHO IS JUST A WONDERFUL CHAOS GREMLIN!
Kamidori Alchemy Meister Review: Eroge within a VN within an RPG
Yes, you read that title right - it’s complicated. Kamidori Alchemy Meister (or simply Kamidori) is, as far as VNs go, considered to be one of the most ‘entry level’ novels around. The main reason for this is that it is not really a visual novel. Calling Kamidori a visual novel is like calling Fire Emblem or Pokemon a visual novel simply because characters talk to each other: Kamidori, while an excellent game, is clearly a JRPG with visual novel elements attached, and not the reverse.
Gameplay - 9.9/10
The strongest point of the game, and it is a very strong point indeed. Kamidori offers countless hours of gameplay (I had clocked well over 100 before I was finished with it), and not only is there a lot of it, it is all high-quality too. Kamidori’s gameplay can be roughly broken down into 2 components: Yuidora gameplay and dungeon gameplay. In Yuidora, you create items via the titular alchemy, you manage your shop, you buy and sell from the church, you talk to the townspeople, you fight in the Arena, you expand your room, you enhance your clothes... There is so much to do before you even leave the town that you could spend hours just in Yuidora!
Once you leave the town, however, the game gets perhaps even better. The turn-based gameplay style, the skill and item management systems, and the difficulty of the dungeons all felt perfect as I played through it, and I enjoyed the grindiness and the difficulty of some quests and dungeons immensely.
My only gripe with the gameplay is that the difficulty falls off REALLY hard in the early stages of the late game - without going too in-depth, while the 5 ‘endgame’ level 90 dungeons are very hard for a first clear, once you farm them for endgame items and especially once you pull the Fountain of Youth from Advent Bay, the difficulty falls off like mad and the game becomes REALLY BORING. This is a huge issue, because the endgame accessories and the Fountain of Youth are obtainable on the second playthrough, while the ultimate weapons have to be farmed over many, many, MANY playthroughs due to requiring materials which can be as rare as a 1-of in a playthrough (beads...). I found that once I had gone through my second playthrough and beaten Advent Bay, it was such a drag to go back and play over and over and over again to farm beads to craft weapons and clothes... So I gave up before I even finished all the weapons. It got THAT boring.
That said, it is one downside to a game with incredibly rich and enjoyable gameplay - and if I were to play it again, I would just ignore the Fountain of Youth and the game would continue to be enjoyably difficult.
Story/Characters/Routes - 5/10
The story is not as horrible as some people would have you believe - some people would give this 0/10 without a second thought - but it IS kind of a weak point. The interactions between characters feel forced often enough for it to leave an impression on me, and a lot of the plot points were pretty weak (while I enjoyed the ‘main’ plot of the common route regarding the reaper, none of the heroine’s stories really caught my interest in any way). In regards to characters, the main character Wil and the 3 main heroines had decently fleshed-out characters which I genuinely enjoyed reading about... but then the other dozen or so girls that Wil gets nasty with throughout the novel may as well just be walking, talking Fleshlights. Lots of shallow characters and weak plotlines surround them (excluding Elizasleyn who had a pretty good plotline, and Rags whose storyline I already said was pretty awesome), and the New Game+ characters do not have ANY real significance to them. When only 3 out of around 16 girls who have scenes are actually interesting, it’s safe to say the characterization was quite weak.
H-Scenes - 7/10
Kind of hard to rate these if I’m honest, because while on the whole the scenes aren’t incredible, there are a notable few that I enjoyed quite a lot (while these are certainly very subjective, I enjoyed Suina’s, Phinilly’s, Mylen’s, and Hannah’s, plus some of the armor scenes - Beast Master armor comes to mind). I have put this at 7/10 mostly because of the sheer volume of H-scenes - although I don’t think that highly of the scenes (or H-scenes in general!) even I found some that I thought were good, and I am sure most people would be able to find a couple that they enjoyed.
Audio/Visuals - 8.5/10
For a 2D turn-based strategy VN, the audio and visuals on this game are incredible! The VN scenes are, of course, beautifully drawn and (almost) fully voiced, and there is an abundance of sound effects and visual effects which make the game just that much better. In the RPG scenes, every attack by a girl once again produces a sound effect, and the characters also play sound effects on leveling up. It also has some pretty standard, flashy animations within these scenes, such as during fights. I also found it quite funny that the ‘Undress’ effect, which powers up a character when their health passes a certain threshold, would literally undress the character in question.
I couldn’t give this any higher than 8.5, however, due to 2 main concerns:
Towards the endgame (in NG+ and Append content especially) it is clear that the authors got very lazy in regards to adding more monsters, as we see simple colour swaps (and according to the translator, they didn’t even bother giving a lot of the monsters different names, resulting in 3 different types of ‘Troll’).
There are no male voices within the entire VN. It isn’t a surprise for the MC to remain unvoiced, since the reader is supposed to project themselves onto the MC; however, characters like Leguna and Crayl lacking voicing really made it even harder to care about those characters, who already lacked any sort of depth to begin with!
Overall: 7/10
In the end, I enjoyed Kamidori a lot, and for several evenings I was pretty much unable to put it down! However, what would otherwise be an excellent JRPG is dragged down by shallow characters, weak plots, awkward and out-of-place sex scenes, and a sharp drop in difficulty in the endgame. This being a VN review blog, I can’t really justify giving it more than a 7. Despite it earning more than that in terms of gameplay, it just doesn’t have all of the elements of a visual novel. But what did I expect? It is just a JRPG pretending to be a VN after all.
I would recommend this to anybody who likes RPG, strategy games and who might have an interest in more ‘real’ VNs in the future. This game serves as an excellent primer for people who are looking into VNs and, since my first Advent Bay clear in 2014, has stood the test of time and remains one of my favourite games.
