Arc of Alchemist (PS4)

The game is a multitude of disasters muddled together into something resembling a game.Some key points.- The story is extremely short and can be beaten in around 6-10 hours depending on how you play.- The plot is horrible, and is a badly written the world is ruined because of wars.- Bombards you with hint menus at the start of the game and doesn't allow you to discover things for yourself. It becomes obnoxious after the first ten or so in opening 20 minutes.- The battle system is awful and is a simple button mashing affair. You also don't see EXP gained from monsters and instead level up after beating like a couple of monsters.- Graphically the game looks like it belongs on the Nintendo Wii but runs really poorly. I noticed numerous incidents where the game stutters and drops sub 20fps in places.So your characters are on an expedition to discover a "Great power" which can save the world. This involves you wondering around samey look deserts from one "event" tag on the map to the next. When you're done discovering resources you can return to your home base by a portal thing.Your home base is like a hub where you can use the resources you collect to invest into research and development of numerous things to benefit you. Its not very indepth and acts more like padding to the game, but its your only way of unlocking better things to buy in the stores. You also need to invest in your base and use money to upgrade your character stats.You'll notice that whenever you return to base you'll often see random filler scenes which have little to no relevance to the plot and are more slice of life in nature. Its more of a disjointed mess.If you're buying this game expecting a proper JRPG world with indepth character development, story scenes, and world building, I'm afraid you won't get that here. If you want a messy low budget game which offers you rapid character leveling(I gained 30 levels in the first hour) then go for it. I think most studios would have scrapped this game for being in such a poor state, but if faced with little choice but to release you do what you have to do.

May be cheap for a PS4 game but do not be deceived. It is short with horrendous gameplay.You start off running across a desert for no apparent reason with no particular direction you can find with 2 other (what might as well be) random characters. Gameplay is awful, controls are sluggish.I am a long term time RPG Fan and have trawled through hours of garbage over many years. I got about 45 minutes in hoping it would improve and thought "You know what? No!" and stopped.There are much better "Arc" and "Alchemist" games out there! (Although this is nothing to do with any of them!)