Maybe it’s weird to be calling it a first impressions considering I’ve played through the Alchemy Stars closed beta, but that short period of time and placeholder stuff doesn’t give quite the full picture. We’ve come a ways since the original teasers for “Star Chaser”, to a simultaneous global launch of the game, so let’s just get into it.

VISUALS

At a quick glance, the presentation has seen polish here and there, one of the places where the differences are more immediately apparent (to me anyway). Simply compare the first closed beta’s homescreen to launch below:

Changes include:

• Nightium detailing
• Prism icon change
• Lumamber clour
• Added icon for daily check-in calendar
• Detailings over menus, scrolling banner, menu icons at the bottom
• Profile icons now can have background colours
• Homescreen background can also be changed

The gacha screen for 5- and 6-stars now also have a brand new animation and is suitably bombastic with cut-ins and logo transitions. This also applies to active skill use in combat with modified cut-ins. I’m too slow to properly capture them but take my word for it (lol). The Illustra menu now also has a built-in music player, with the selection available for you to change for your homescreen or Colossus BGM.

The sepia framed picture is the other item given to closed beta testers, the first being the Soroz icon.

After evading the pursuit of the Eclipsites, to commemorate the first time everyone met each other, Soroz specifically asked Firefly to draw this hanging picture based on the image it recorded. Almost everyone thought this was a photo because the scene was recreated so realistically.

The Good Times item description

GAMEPLAY

The core gameplay has not seen any particularly drastic changes. You’re still five to a team, four elements, units have their classes, chain combos, Ascension, Breakthroughs and the like. I’m going to be a little down here in that the pinch of “not having the right characters” hits harder in this kind of game.

In a team, you’d like to have a nice distribution of converters, DPS, teleporters and healers, yes. At launch, it is possible to have a tougher start than others if you don’t have the right composition when you don’t have a larger variety of units yet to fill their roles. In trying out two accounts, my high-rarity formation is struggling more than my lower-end team, the former not having enough converters or dedicated healer, and I don’t have high mobility as a back-up option. Gacha is a cruel mistress, but we’ll get back to that. Anyway, auto-repeat has been added, so huzzah!

They’ve made changes to the rewards, where you get 100 Lumamber for a 3-star first clear in a mission, up from 80 in the first closed beta. This is alongside milestone rewards, giving out a few more Star Flares, as well as Star Flares for 3-star clears in boss stages. Dayna has also been moved to a 10 point requirement instead of 25 in the beginner missions, giving Thunder mains an early AOE DPS option.

The controls can be a tad finicky as a command gets registered instead of cancelling like I wanted. The furniture placement in the Colossus honestly still sucks a lot, so please don’t look too closely.

Affinity levels not only unlock flavour dialogue, but also give stat increases. They’re not particularly large, but without an easier way to raise it without gifts, at least early on, I feel miffed I’m locked out of learning about my favourites so soon.

Also, could we have an easier way to see who the illustrator is for any given character? That seems like a strange oversight. Besides that, please have a standard time display for the shop and for other parts of the game; decide if you’re going to use Days / Hours or just Hours.

GACHA

Gacha banners now come in two flavours: the focus rate-up that uses a special Star Flare (converted from Lumamber) and regular Star Flares. The focus rate-up banners still contain other 6-stars at a 50% chance, nor is there a spark system, so it’s on the relatively dicey side at a base 2% chance for a 6-star. Fortunately, the rules do at least state that the accumulated probabilities carry over. I find it hilarious that Carleen is not available in the initial pool, like the devs realized how absolutely bonkers she is…

10-pulls still cost 3,000 Lumamber. Daily logins over a month give a total of 300. Daily missions give 50. That’s a total estimate of 1,500 Lumamber a month, which feels a tad low for regular play.

The shop has more currencies, like the Star Gems obtained from duplicates. I assume the Star Store currencies come from maxing out duplicate 5-star Aurorians or higher, which I will not be hitting anytime soon. The Secret Store, which carries 2 regular Star Flares looks to reset at the same time as the Secret Territory seasons, so don’t go looking there for a regular stream of currency especially if you’re wanting to pull in the limited rate-ups. Secret Territory seasons reset weekly.

OVERALL

The monetization as a whole is cheaper than, say, Arknights, in my region, so if you’re interested in supporting the devs, that’s an option for you. I don’t intend to spend anything yet, so I don’t know how much Lumocrystals convert into Lumamber, nor do I see any other method of obtaining Lumocrystals at present.

I’ll definitely be enjoying it in my own time, so here’s to days to come.

Read more:

• Closed beta experience
• Closed beta systems
• Recommended characters list

Download

Alchemy Stars

Publisher: Tencent

Developer: TOURDOG Studio

Release Date: 2021-06-17

Android, iOS

As ancient forces collide, harness the power of the Light to save the world from darkness! A revolutionary RPG that pushes the genre to new heights of strategy and suspense presented by Tencent Games and Tourdog Studio