Nora: The Wannabe Alchemist

Genre: Simulation

Players: 1

.

Review:

(Note: This game is included in Nora: The Wannabe Alchemist + Mosaic Chronicles Deluxe, along with Mosaic Chronicles Deluxe.)

Nora: The Wannabe Alchemist, released in 2022 on PC and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2023, is a game that’s hard to classify under a genre, but I suppose Simulation is probably the best bet, as I feel this is closest to a market Simulation-style game, though there are some extremely simple Arcade-style minigames here too. This game puts players in the role of a young witch kicked out of a magic academy after an accident she insists wasn’t her fault, and who must now raise the money she needs to attend school remotely, doing so by growing ingredients in a garden, turning them into potions, and selling them.

The presentation here is okay but nothing special, using cartoony hand-drawn 2D visuals backed by a soundtrack that I suspect is public domain. In short, it’s fine but nothing interesting or impressive.

As for the gameplay… honestly, this just all feels like busywork. Play the stupid plant minigame a bunch of times until you get the ingredients you need, move to the kitchen to transform said ingredients into a potion, sell said potion to one of your waiting customers or bring it to the local shop to trade for cash, which you can trade for more plants or other tools you need. Then wash, rinse, repeat.

This wouldn’t all be quite so tedious if there wasn’t a bit of a loading time every time you change locations, or if you weren’t forced to go through one of a handful of little text cutscenes every time you’re done with the plant minigame and then forced to swap locations again. It’s like the game is trying to make things more frustrating and tedious for players.

While some players might be enticed by the themes in Nora: The Wannabe Alchemist, everything about this game just made me frustrated and bored. So many different parts of this game inject the whole thing with tedium, and that’s on top of an experience that’s already just busywork. If you want to play a shopkeeper Simulation on Nintendo Switch, you have plenty of other better options than this.

tl;dr – Nora: The Wannabe Alchemist is a Simulation-style game where players take the role of a young witch trying to earn money by growing ingredients, turning them into potions, and then selling them. Every step of this process is made unnecessarily tedious with loading times and unnecessary interruptions, on top of gameplay that boils down to little more than busywork. If you’re looking for a shopkeeper Simulation on Nintendo Switch, you have plenty of better options.

Grade: D+

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