EXTRA 11 — Alchemical Corruption 1: A Retrospective Review

Hello fellow perverts!

If you are not a pervert, then leave now.  This blog is only for perverts of a legal age to enjoy their perverted-ness.

If you don’t know who I am, I am Hentai Sentai Sentry, expert reviewer of weird porn games from the land of the sun.

If you’re still here after that terribly corny opening, then it’s time to begin.

Let me begin by announcing that the poll is over!  You have all voted, and your votes have been heard, and the results are…

Even More Alchemical Corruption!

…Really guys?  Really?  I just finished reviewing AC12, and you want me to do the entire series from start to end?

I should complain.

…But that sounds like a blast, so let's do it!

For those that don’t pay attention, this is the first of my Retrospective Review series!  A new format of reviews, introduced now with Alchemical Corruption.  In this series, I shall be replaying each game in a series, in release order, writing a review for each game and updating my reviews for any games I've already reviewed.

This is the first post for my Retrospective Review of Alchemical Corruption, and as the first game, there is no expanded title.  This is merely ‘Alchemical Corruption’, the game that started the legendary series we all love!

Or at least lust after.

My initial score for Alchemical Corruption One was a scalding E+.  One of the lowest scores I’ve ever given a game, this was primarily due to how hellish it was to get the game running than it was due to the actual quality of the software itself.  It took me around a week just to get the thing started, and it crashed whenever I tried to save the game!

This then leads to my original breakdown:

Art: DSex: DGame: FLore: EAverage: E-

The art and sex scenes in the game were -- decent enough.  The lore existed, but I frankly didn’t understand half of it at the time, and the gameplay… urgh…

The gameplay was miserable.

Oh it did its job well enough, don’t get me wrong.  But it took all of five seconds to figure out a dozen exploits that destroyed the difficulty of the game, until you got to the optional bosses -- at which point you suddenly realized your exploits were not nearly enough and you were screwed.

Add that to not being able to save, and getting a game over whenever you lost a fight, and…

…Yeah.

I did not have a fun time.

Thankfully, the zealots -- I mean fans, sorry, fans -- of the series have come through!  They’ve made a series of virtual machines that one can download to run the game on, so that they don’t need to spend a week figuring out dependencies and so it doesn’t crash while saving!

I am still sore about that.

I will never not be sore about that.

It was a miserable experience and I would not wish it on anybody with a net worth less than one billion dollars.

Now, let’s see how I rate it today!

The Art:  C-

Now, on the one hand, the art, objectively, kinda sucks.

It’s retro style hentai.  Overly detailed in some odd ways, and under detailed in others.  Every ruffle of clothing is detailed in immaculate detail, and yet the nipples look oddly puffy!

That said, for older-than-me retro style hentai, it’s… decent enough.

Art is hardly objective, I know, but I’m trying here.  I know some people like that style, and for that style, it works surprisingly well.

…Don’t go into this game expecting anything like the amazing art of AC12, however.

You will be disappointed.

The Sex:  D- / C+

So, here’s the thing.

Early Alchemical Corruption?

It has a lot of rape in it.

Back when I first reviewed AC1, I was of the opinion that ‘edgier is better’.  We’ve all had that phase, mine just happened to bleed over into my kinks.  And while non-con sex can be a fun fantasy, the way it’s depicted in AC1 is… brutal.  It really dives into the psychological aspects of what it can do to a person, repeatedly, sometimes for the main characters!

For example, one of the first female party members you recruit will get raped by bandits a little before the game's halfway point.  Depending on prior choices, she can end up… either absolutely broken and no longer playable, or managing to recover enough to continue adventuring.

There’s also a different case where a character thinks she would enjoy being raped, but when it happens, she… really, really doesn't.

Because it’s rape.

Now if you like that kind of thing?  Then I’d say the score is roughly at C+.  I’ve played a lot more games since my first time playing this one, and it really dives into the impact that sexual abuse can have on a person in a manner that makes it really hot… if you get off to it.

If you don’t, then it’s D-.  Because not finding rape hot is one of the most reasonable turn offs around, regarding kinks and sexuality.

I won’t be giving two scores like this for the rest of the games in this series; just this one, because the reasoning is clearest here.

The Game:  F

Look.

I don’t care what any of you say.

The gameplay in AC1 sucks.

The alchemy system is a mess that ultimately comes down to RNG, no matter how good your ingredients!  Heck, you even can, should, and all but need to exploit that, because a solid early-game strategy is tossing pebbles into the cauldron and seeing what comes out a few hundred times!  You’ll end up with solid mid-game gear before two hours are up, and then you can just trash the beginning of the game.

And the optional bosses, oh boy, the optional bonus bosses… those are nightmares.  I’d say they would be fun if, again, it wasn’t so biased towards random chance!

One of the bonus bosses, 'Patient i', has a skill that goes off with a one sixth probability every turn.  This skill triggers four times, picks a random target, and reduces their HP to zero.  If it picks a target that is already knocked out, then nothing happens.

For those that don’t know, the party size is four!

This means that every turn there is a -- presuming my probability math is right -- one and a half percent chance to just lose without anything you can do!

Every!  Turn!

And it takes around fifty turns to defeat her, assuming you don’t die to any of her other bullshit RNG-heavy moves.

This means -- again, assuming my probability math is right -- an over fifty percent chance for you to die due to that one move in the fifty turns it takes to defeat her.

So are you ready for a coin clip contest that can take up to a full hour to get the results of?

I’m not!

F is far too lenient a score for this game, but it’s the lowest one I’ve got!

The Lore: B

This is a major jump from the E I originally gave it, and there is one reason for that:

Argenta.

The Goddess of Alchemy -- the Goddess of ‘Shy Girls’ in this game and this game only -- is one of only five goddesses that exist in AC1, as opposed to the twenty seven goddesses by the time of AC11 and AC12.  And she is this game's biggest hero.

The lore of the actual plot is rather sub-standard, which keeps this score below an A, so I’ll just summarize it quickly here:  There are a tribe of futanari in a jungle that have figured out a method to use alchemy to turn people into massive monsters that can destroy a city and, in the most extreme case, nuclear-strength living bombs.

They have done so by ‘corrupting the art of alchemy’.  Thus, ‘Alchemical Corruption’.  The actual process on how to do so was disgustingly simple once they found it out, and turned a small tribe into a force that threatened the entire continent.

And that plot is, what I would call, ‘okay’.

It’s not the worst, but it’s not anywhere near what I’d call good.

No, the brilliance in the lore of this game comes from how it sets up the plot for every subsequent game.

Alchemical Corruption One is where we see what a world would look like if run by the chief god of the world, AKA Fratlord.  A world where the god in charge doesn’t know, and doesn’t care to know, how to run a functional world.  There are multiple areas in the game where you run into invisible walls, bottomless pits, and locations where the environment just doesn’t make sense.  And that's all integrated into the plot as expressions of the world being fundamentally broken.

And the one person that aids you through all of that?

The one person that points out how terrible the world is built, how careful you need to be to avoid falling through the cracks?

The goddess Argenta.

Outside of AC11, this is the game with the most interference from the divine, and it’s all due to her.  You get a clear and obvious view as to the state of things.

I didn’t realize it the first time I played, but you can see many of Argenta’s complaints play out in later games, or predict the appearance of certain goddesses or threats.  The two clearest examples are how she predicted both Modesty and Atlantis.  Not that they, specifically, would appear -- but that humans would form an effective resistance to Fratlord at some point, and that the state of sex in the world cannot last forever.

It’s only with the understanding of the full series do you see both how she’s right, and how obvious it is in retrospect.

That, plus how enduring all the bonus bosses wins you an explanation of how Alchemy is fixed and starts to just work from AC2 onward through the series, means this game earns a rating of B grade lore.

The New Average:  D+

Regardless of which score is given for the sex scenes, the average works out to a D+.  The art is… okay enough.  The sex scenes are either ‘not terrible’ or ‘acceptable’.  The lore is certainly better than average, but the thing that weighs down this game's score is the same thing that weighs down the setting itself.

Fratlord.

His terrible rulership as chief god results in a truly horrendous system to play through.

His lack of care of his duties result in a stupid plot of a single tribe nearly turning an entire continent to ash and rubble.

It’s terribly ironic that his existence in the plot is the only reason why we get some of the great games that this series is known for.  He's the foundation for everything else, but whenever he personally shows up in the series, things just become an unfun, and worse, unsexy farce

This game lays the basis for all the ones to come, but I highly recommend that you don’t play it.

Find the script online and read that, instead.  Or watch somebody else play it online.  Don’t play this game.  Don’t try to get it to work.  Don’t go through that nightmare.

Learn what you want from it, and then move on to the better games made later.

So, once again, my final score is:

Art: C-Sex: D- / C+Game: F Lore: BAverage: D+

This is Hentai Sentai Sentry, signing off!