Toziuha Night: Order of the Alchemists
Don’t even get me started on my health insurance.
A few years ago, this game entered Early Access, and after having my curiosity piqued, I also bought and played the developer’s first game – Toziuha Night: Dracula’s Revenge. OotA is a direct sequel to Dracula’s Revenge, but they are very different games. The first Toziuha game is a pretty by-the-numbers Castlevania clone – a linear platforming action game where you swing a whip and lob axes at zombies. It’s definitely not the worst game of its kind I’ve played, but it’s also very rough, very amateurish, and brings very little of interest to the format.
Order of the Alchemists, on the other hand, is a much more ambitious project, an attempt to emulate the later DSVania games, and of those, the last, Order of Ecclesia, in particular. The parallels are frequent and obvious – you occasionally absorb new attacks via floating glyphs, there is a hub town with NPCs that send you on side quests, even a lot of the enemy designs and attacks are distinctly similar.
The world of the Toziuha Night games revolves around two forms of power: either making a pact with a powerful underworld demon, called a Toziuha, or having innate control over one element… and I do mean element in the atomic sense. You play as Xandria, an iron Alchemist who joins the Order with the sole intent of getting her revenge on the man who killed her foster family. After disobeying orders and getting bested by a chlorine Alchemist in the short prologue, she wakes up post-recovery, san health insurance, and must explore the region while recovering her strength.
As an iron Alchemist, she… mostly just has some blood magic, though it recharges so slow it’s not actually a big part of the moment-to-moment gameplay. Instead, she relies on various additional Elemental Circuits which she can bind to her iron whip, and castable spells/subweapons, both of which consume her [very slowly] regenerating mana. Many of these have a damage type of the more standard fantasy RPG variety to correspond with their Periodic Table element – Nitrogen causes cold damage, Sulfur fire, and so on. Enemies, as you’d expect, can be either weak against a damage type or resist or outright absorb it. You also have a backstep, and can eventually gain a slide and dropkick that lets you pogo off of enemies. Feel familiar yet?
The game’s pixel art is decent, certainly a step above its predecessor, and the effects are generally pretty good too. The portrait art is where a lot of the personality comes through – characters are rendered in a hand drawn, big-eyed style, which is very charming in a DeviantArt gallery sort of way, and a bit unnerving when it comes to the main villain, who kind of has those Ted Cruz Kind Eyes. There’s also a bit of the developer’s Nicaraguan pride in the consumable foods that give you status buffs, which are all given their local names and detailed descriptions despite the game taking place… I don’t actually remember where it takes place, but I assume Europe-ish. I also liked the way the setting and story merges magical fantasy with, like, a roughly turn-of-the-century level of physics and chemistry, including the magical superweapon being a plutonium bomb core, and the villain’s plan to use a hydrogen Alchemist to turn it into a thermonuclear warhead.
Unlike Order of Ecclesia, OotA takes place on a massive, mostly coherent map rather than a series of distinct offshoots, and this is simultaneously the game’s biggest asset and its greatest failing. The areas are nice and distinct, and the game has proper Metroidvania style mobility upgrades, in addition to the key and spell gating typical for later Castlevania games. There are branches, niches, and whole areas of the map that you’ll be coming across throughout your adventure, most of which will be inaccessible on first encounter, teasing you to return for a clean sweep. Good, that’s great. We like that, don’t we?
The problem is that Order of the Alchemists is, to be frank, just not very well-structured. I think the root of the issue is its status as an Early Access title – it was built up over a year or so of periodic updates, each one adding a bit more playable space to the already existing area, and like with Abiotic Factor, that means that the finished product has inherent pacing issues, segments that seem to drag on or lead abruptly or awkwardly into the next, confusing progression, and things that feel out of place if you’re not encountering them as a recent addition to your running playthrough. Many of the areas you’ll have to go through, probably multiple times in a run, are pretty long, and the fast travel locations are not exactly convenient to most goals and backtracking.
The map is what I would consider to be the bare minimum for a modern Metroidvania in terms of features and clarity, and in this case it’s still just not enough. There are far too many locked gates, environmental hints, out-of-reach ledges, and so on, and while you do get a bunch of different markers to manually annotate your map with, they’re fucking terrible.
Look at these. Which of these should I use to indicate a door that opens with a switch on the other side? What about a path blocked by a pillar with a giant skull in it? How about grappling hooks? A route that requires some mobility technique I haven’t intuited yet? An obviously special statue or foreground detail that has no use yet but likely will in the future? Do I just put question marks all over?
Then, once you do gain a new ability, or more likely, fail to find one and start making desperate stabs all over in the hopes of finding one, how do you know which way to go, which areas definitively dead end, and which you can still eke out some progress in? Well, I didn’t, and so many of my play sessions were consumed by me backtracking, combing through areas I’d already pretty much finished, beating my head against dead ends and sealed paths, waving at every NPC I could reach, hoping they might take mercy and cough up some hint that would end my agony. By the last few hours, I gave up, and found a fully annotated map online to guide me, and even then I got lost or found I’d done things in the wrong order.
The game also struggles mightily with balance issues. Early game is incredibly brutal, and was even harder before some patches – you would die in just a couple hits, the only reliable recovery option is reaching a save point or backtracking to one, and status ailments are oppressive. It feels almost as hard on Normal difficulty as OoE is on Hard, at least until you get a couple levels under your belt. Then, once you get some decent subweapons and can afford to stock up on potions when you go through town, the difficulty falls off in general, punctuated by occasional insane spikes, usually coinciding with the appearance of actual insane spikes as part of platforming gauntlets. Statuses remain dangerous enough to be a constant drain on your resources even once you can fill up on curatives – getting cursed and not immediately fixing it means you’re fighting without any subweapons or whip buffs until you get to the next save point, and that’s not usually a situation you want to be in.
Speaking of subweapons, they’re a mixed bag – some are pretty fun to use, some are flashy but take too long to channel to really use them in practice, and a few are just overpowered and make every other option obsolete. The main culprit is the upgraded shuriken, which lets you throw three stars down at an angle, pure non-elemental damage that can one-shot most regular enemies, burst down even minibosses respectably, is barely resisted by anything, and most importantly, is extremely mana efficient. This skill has been hit with multiple nerfs since release and it’s still probably the best subweapon, just by virtue of being the one that works reliably, doesn’t require any kind of aiming or foresight, and doesn’t lock you in place for several seconds.
One interesting feature is the ability to purify ores dropped from enemies and use them to craft special items and consumables – in fact, you need to do this in a few spots to make crucial quest items. It is, unfortunately, kind of tedious to do much of this, because you have to buy up stock of TWO different item types to synthesize pure elemental metals, and you have to grind the ore drops on top of whatever other drops you need, and some of those drops are absolutely obscene. Some of the gimmick endgame stuff requires upwards of 100 random drops. I ain’t running back and forth killing zombies for two hours just to save on a couple mana potions.
Bosses are a high point, both in terms of balance and design – most of them are hard, but appropriately so, and even when they do cause ailments it feels less like an irritating fluke than when it happens via a normal enemy clipping you. It’s actually a bit sad that so many late-game bosses can be almost brute-forced with potion chugging, because they mostly feel pretty good to fight legit. There are even secret no-hit rewards for bragging rights just like in OoE.
The game has four different endings, and each one requires you to go a bit further out of your way to unlock it. To avoid abject tragedy, you need to backtrack from the threshold of the final boss to tackle a hidden optional one, and the true ending then requires a lengthy sequence of backtracking, side quests, NPC conversations, and secret item collection that only begins once you’ve done that. The map woes intensify if you’re not resigned to spoilers at this point – hope you’ve manually written down where to find every conspicuous bird and statue in the game, because there sure as shit ain’t no bird or statue icon you can use in-game for that! Oh, except one of the birds only shows up at night [as in, system clock time… I think?] anyway, so if you’re hoping to do this all on your own you’re probably CAPITAL F FUCKED. The dev patched the statue quest so you actually only have to visit one of the statues now instead of all seven or whatever it was, but I guess he kept in the one bird that only appears at night.
I’m not done flipping my shit either because there’s also a mandatory rhythm game song you have to play to reach the true ending! AND IT’S REALLY LONG! But I’m not actually that mad, because it either bugged out and thought I beat it when I canceled an attempt out of frustration or it had a slaughter rule built in.
The game’s got a hard mode, in case you somehow thought this was all too easy, and it even has a gimmick magic-only mode now too, which is a cute inclusion from the post-SotN ‘vanias. Too bad the mana regen is still pretty sad even on the WITCH mode.
All my complaining aside, I really did enjoy Toziuha Night 2… at least, when I felt like I was getting somewhere with it. I think the game could use a bit more refinement in controls, a massive amount of rebalancing and, please God, at least some token effort at improved clarity and signposting for the midgame. But for a solo dev to take on the massive leap from “indie Castlevania 1” to “indie the last good Castlevania” as only their second or third game ever is commendable, and despite some rough edges, I think the amount of charm and personality to the game helps it stick the landing. I mean, also the fact that Konami hasn’t made a good Castlevania in almost as long as the developer’s been alive, that probably helps make it look better too.
Toziuha Night: Order of the Alchemists can be purchased on Steam, itch.io, and Nintendo Switch.