A game’s elements aren’t always of the exact same calibre. Perhaps the gameplay will be good but the graphics aren’t up to the same standard, or the game won’t have enough content but will be paced very well. Toziuha: Order of the Alchemists has surprisingly good level design and gameplay, especially for a game mostly made by a single developer. However, it’s also probably the most unbalanced game I’ve seen in my entire life. I enjoyed the game overall despite its sometimes intense frustrations, but there’s zero question it needs to be rebalanced from the ground up, which almost certainly won’t happen.
Toziuha: Order of the Alchemists is very clearly aiming to be an Igavania. It looks like, plays like, and borrows liberally from Castlevania games, to the point that it sometimes feels more like a fan game than its own thing. That being said, it handles its storytelling fairly differently and the story itself here is actually pretty decent for this sort of game, although it still boils down to “bad guy is amassing power to do bad guy things and only the protagonist can stop him.” It concerns the main character, Xandria, attempting to take down an organisation of alchemists in order to prevent disaster from striking.
Let’s start with the good, as there’s a fair amount of it. The game world is pretty huge, with a story that takes about 20 hours to get through (making it more than twice as long as any of the games it takes inspiration from.) Not only that, but the areas are memorable, with disparate themes and unique pathways all over. The fact that a single person designed all of this is pretty damn impressive. The graphics aren’t amazing, but they do a good job of capturing the feel of Castlevania. Most importantly, there’s a lot to find and the game really forces you to scour the map to progress.
Despite the fact that it takes most of its inspiration from the more RPG-esque Castlevania games, Xandria only has her default weapon, which is a whip that functions just as you’d expect. It’s the only main weapon she gets for the whole game, so if you need different types of weapons with different ranges and attack arcs, you will not find them here. She does find multiple types of elemental enhancements that can be equipped, which change up the properties of your attack, but most of these aren’t particularly useful and, for most of the game, they use up too much mana to really last for more than half a dozen swings or so.
This is actually emblematic of many of the problems in Toziuha: Order of the Alchemists. Namely, all of the values from your mana, to health and damage feel like someone guessed and slapped them together. Magic is practically worthless and takes far too long to regenerate to be useful. Unless you’re wearing a hat that causes it to refill so quickly that you can just use it as often as you want. Many spells (called circuits here) aren’t useful, but some are so overpowered that you can practically break the game with them. One of my favourites allows you to throw three shurikens, with each of the three doing as much damage as a standard whip hit.
It’s almost hilariously overpowered and barely costs any magic at all, meaning that it’s far better than using the whip in pretty much all circumstances. If you’re wearing the aforementioned hat, you can use it as much as you want with absolutely no negative consequences. Even early on, enemies do and take way too much damage, to the point that they can often kill you in two or three hits. Conversely, they can take way too many hits to kill. The dev wanted the difficulty to be akin to a Souls-like in this way, but it just feels like none of it was properly considered.
Enemies give experience upon death, but levelling up here isn’t useful unless you spend hours grinding out dozens of levels. For whatever reason, a level up gives you a single stat point. On the normal difficulty, certain attacks can do 150 damage or more, meaning that levelling up 30 times would only lower that damage to 120. Aside from the tough enemies that take too much damage, you’ll find weak enemies from the beginning of the game mixed in that die in one hit. It’s not unusual to find the incredibly weak starting zombies in a late-game area mixed in with incredibly dangerous foes.
Another big problem in Toziuha: Order of the Alchemists is that your gear dictates much of your effectiveness, but you don’t really find much of it. There’s a single shop in the game that sells it, but the shop never restocks. An early-game enemy regularly drops incredibly valuable ore that you can farm for a little while to afford every single item in the shop. On normal, this can feel necessary, as the enemies pose way too much of a threat to you without any of it. Equipping enough to get around this makes the first half of the game mostly a breeze until the difficulty spikes massively.
Some of the bosses are insanely overkitted. The worst one in the game is the fire alchemist, who has far too much and deals way too much damage. This often means that you’ll need to stock up on healing items just to stand a chance. But the bosses do so much damage that you’ll typically need to heal after each hit you take. However, this is mostly in the first half of the game, as those can be too easy if you’re geared up. Very late in the game, all enemies get a significant buff, but they don’t drop more experience to go along with it, which makes skipping them even more worthwhile than usual.
One of the most obnoxious things in Toziuha: Order of the Alchemists is the prevalence of status effects. It seems the majority of enemies inflict a status, such as a poison status that lasts for way too long or the injury status that greatly reduces the amount of damage you do (more than one boss routinely inflicts this one.) But don’t worry, there’s an easily-obtained piece of gear that completely turns this off. There’s literally no reason to not use this, but it’s weird that the dev was so insistent on having enemies inflict these when the vast majority of players can just easily turn them off.
A particularly great item lets you use your mana bar as a health bar. Combined with the other item that increases your mana regen, you can just use this and not have to heal, or just greatly extend your health bar in a pinch. No matter where you look, Toziuha: Order of the Alchemists has something that’s almost laughably unbalanced. It makes Castlevania: Symphony of the Night seem balanced in comparison, which is almost impressive. So many of the game’s elements are just thrown together like this with seemingly zero regard to how they affect the rest of the game, it’s kind of astounding.
Having said that, it’s appropriate that a game that has such a completely broken difficulty curve would just throw broken tools at players to even the odds. It’s actually almost fun in its own way, although not in the long section where you’re unable to attack and must just carefully avoid enemies that will kill you in two hits. Why anyone thought that section was a good idea is completely beyond me. Toziuha: Order of the Alchemists is truly an exercise in what not to do when developing a game in so many ways.
If that wasn’t enough, the game is needlessly grindy in strange ways. Several of the really good items need to be crafted. You can craft in one building in town, but it requires you to buy dozens of items at the show, which means you have to repeatedly go back and forth between the two buildings after buying what you need, crafting one item you need, going back to buy more, then returning to craft more. It’s yet another incredibly poor choice that makes the gameplay more frustrating than needs to be.
If all of this makes it sound like an awful game, be assured that it strangely isn’t. After I ended up breaking the game via the above methods, I honestly really enjoyed the non-combat-related elements. Toziuha: Order of the Alchemists really is a good Metroidvania in a lot of ways and scouring the map for a way forward and using all of Xandria’s abilities as I got them was a lot of fun. The movement was enjoyable too, especially due to the air dash. Plus, there are boots you can get that make her run faster, which makes her even more mobile. It’s not all roses, though, as the whip swing and wall jump abilities control very poorly. Can’t have it all, huh?
Toziuha: Order of the Alchemists is an incredibly unpolished, rough game that would absolutely have been good if anyone involved had any idea how to balance a game like this. It can be infuriating, obnoxious, and ridiculously unfair in equal measure, so only the most patient Castlevania fans will be able to get through its 20 hours of questionable design decisions. But those that stick with it will find a rewarding game buried underneath the massive problems.
Toziuha: Order of the Alchemists: Overloaded with poor balancing and questionable choices, but still somehow greater than the sum of its parts. – Andrew Farrell
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