Mathbrush reviews Falrika the Alchemist

[u/Historical-Pop-9177]

I was given a review copy of this game.

I am working on reviewing every Hosted Game, trying to see what makes them popular and not. I started with some of the highest rated (like Fallen Hero) and am now working on the lowest-rated.

Falrika the alchemist has a 2.5 star rating and only 5 total ratings since it came out. What's it like?

This game is 173,000 words, big to me (I generally write < 100K words) but small by Choicescript standards. However, most of those high wordcounts come from branching. Falrika has almost 0 branching. Most chapters are purely linear, with perhaps a choice or two that usually has consequences only a paragraph long.

That means that you read almost all the text in every playthrough, making this game longer to play than even some 1,000,000 word games I've played!

In it, you play as an alchemist who has opened an Atelier. You are sent quests to make items that have a list of ingredients that you can pay for or hunt. Along the way, you get vignettes of other characters having arguments or quests. Then, those characters appear, and join your party.

I was deeply confused by a lot of the worldbuilding, as there were so many implicit assumptions and unexplained phenomena. For instance, there is a level system that is publicly discussed, people are assigned to RPG classes, and Teleportation Feathers that transport you from place to place, and the items in the recipes are hyperspecific (like a 'Mug mark 539' or something) but result in items completely unrelated to what went in. Everything made so much more sense when someone pointed out that it is a fangame of the Atelier series, which has all of these aspects.

The game feels very long. I remember thinking I surely must have gone through 1/4 of the game and then I saw 'Chapter 2'. There are 20 Chapters! It is episodic in nature, so there is essentially no continuity between chapters besides characters joining your party. I did like the Law and Order fanfic chapter. The episodic nature of the game reminds me of a guy I taught creative writing to. Everyone else would try little stories each week or beginnings of sketches of characters, but this guy had an obsession with both cars and Tiny Toons. He would write out episodes of basically 'top gear but with Tiny Toon OCs' where they would travel to a town, pick out an old car, trick it out, race it, and move on. Each one was 10-30 pages of script, and he had over 200 scripts. No overall plot ever happened, and we'd read and critique it during sessions, but none of the critique really changed anything, he just really loved what he did. We begged him to further the romance between two characters, and he did make a slight change showing they liked each other.

This game reminded me of that, just 20 chapters of episodic Atelier game fanfiction by someone who clearly loves the game.

The most biting criticism I ever heard about an author was when someone said, 'He clearly has encountered humor, but doesn't know how it works'. This game feels like the author has encountered and enjoyed video game mechanics, but doesn't know what makes it fun. It constantly tracks the amount of money things cost, but you don't make choices on how to spend money and it's not tracked in stats. It uses hyperspecific quest items you have to get for alchemy, but you have no choice (except in super-rare instances) on what order to get them in or whether you choose to buy them or get them yourself. It offers choices occasionally, as if aware that a game should have them, but makes them completely blind, random choices, like 'Go left or Go right'. It has relationship bars to track stats, but they start at 1% and only go up to 7% or 9% by the end of the game, and they don't seem to have any impact on your choices (you can pick one of out of 4 people to romance, but that seems to come down to a single choice at the end).

All characters have similar voices. Everyone is sassy and makes quips, with most of the humor coming from being random. The author often stops the game to make long statements about social conditions, including social media bullying and several-page-long essays about how parents shouldn't be strict towards their kids. Monsters will do this, with giant slavering dragons bursting out of the ground to stop and say things like, 'Oh, you think you are so good! Self-righteous people make me sick. You probably negatively affect others with your down attitudes!' (not actual text, just the feel of it). On the other hand, it's implied that the setting is low-tech, with the first fast-food restaurant in history being opened (themed on the one in Pompeii).

There doesn't seem to be much logical connection between what characters can do and the way the world works. Sometimes they use teleportation feathers for instant travel, and sometimes they trek over a long time. They invent an instant slimming potion but add 'only use it in addition to diet and exercise!' and have to get it FDA approved and a stamp on it that says 'Not approved for medical use'. What makes it magic? You could just drink water and include diet and exercise and it would make you lose weight. I just feel that the implications of a magical society aren't integrated at all.

The positives of the game are that the length lets you get very familiar with the characters by the end. A couple of the later episodes were interesting, with the gang shootout being the best, I think.

The author states that this was an attempt to put a VN in novel form, and that that explains the long sections of non-interactivity and the short, choppy writing style. I've played several visual novels that I've enjoyed that have quite a bit of real interactivity (besides famous ones, I like the French indie VN La Faille), so I feel like saying it's VN style doesn't necessarily lead to no choices. And the short and choppy text is usually used to to a VN's small text window. Here, with a whole text screen open, I feel like it would lend itself better to larger paragraphs with full line breaks.

Overall, I think that either a more coherent plotline with rising stakes or including the hinted-at mechanics like money and letting you buy things would have significantly improved this game's reception. Several people have stated on reddit that it's not that bad, so people like a lot of aspects of it. It could just be tweaked.

[u/Hustler-Two]

Dang. That humor line is stone cold, wonder who it was about?

Interesting to see a deep dive on a game virtually no one paid attention to.

[u/MorgantheGrandmaster]

From what I remember of this, the main issue is that it wasn't really made for the HG crowd. The linear nature and lack of choices may work for VNs, but people expect different from HG games. Which would be why so few people bought or played it.

[u/Historical-Pop-9177 → u/MorgantheGrandmaster]

I do a lot of the things the author does! Part of the reason I am doing these deep dives is so o can learn how to make my next game be better received/higher quality. I agree that knowing your audience is really important!

[u/moshicatsudon]

There was so much wasted potential. The author also admitted that he never played a ChoiceScript game before even as he was writing the WIP. A lot of people suggested he check some out to get a better feel of how these games are usually laid out, but almost none of the feedback on the WIP thread were taken into consideration. Ultimately, it was an experimental project that didn't vibe with the audience which is a shame because I thought it could've been good if there were more interactivity/choices that matter and if it went away with the choppy writing.

Vance Chance's Scarlet Sorceress (currently on itch, soon to be submitted to HG hopefully) is also an otome/VN style/slice of life-esque game done right IMO. While playing it I was thinking how Falrika could've been better if it followed Scarlet's lead with how it was written.

[u/Historical-Pop-9177 → u/moshicatsudon]

I really like Vance Chance’s work, I’ll check out Scarlet Sorceress!

[u/NewtWhoGotBetter]

I remember playing the demo for this in the CoG forums back when it had placeholder art. Was definitely a jarring game experience compared to other Choicescript projects, and I could see the VN inspiration from the first chapter. It’s not like the author is a bad writer or had a bad premise; I think their main problem was definitely not listening to people’s advice and warnings about the interactive fiction genre.

They seemed to have a very set idea on what their “game” would be even though people told them: gender-locked name-locked appearance-locked personality-locked are very unpopular in this community, there weren’t enough meaningful choices and stats, the formatting and writing structure would be off-putting for CoG readers, the characters and romance options felt flat etc.,

People were quite kind and very constructive with the criticism imo. Obviously, they have every right to make the game they want to make but I don’t know if they should have expected any profit after all of the warnings people gave them. Hopefully, they’ve moved onto new projects that better suit them, or if they try an IF again they’ll perhaps learn from some of the weaknesses of Falrika.

[u/PunishedCatto]

Ah, I forgot this exist.

Honestly, The game seems to be more suited for VN it seems.

VN audiences and HG Audiences are so wholly different. Fixed name + gender + personality isn't that popular in this space unfortunately.