Alchemy Stars

» see alchemystars.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Alchemy Stars arrived on 17 June 2021 with more than a million pre-registrations already banked. Numbers like that get bought as often as they get earned. Tourdog Studio built it and Level Infinite, the overseas label Tencent uses when it would rather not lead with the word Tencent, put it out worldwide on iOS and Android in English and Japanese on the same day.

The combat had more thought in it than the category required. You fielded five characters, each tied to one of four elements, and instead of picking a target you drew a path across a grid of colored tiles. Longer chains of matching tiles meant more range and more damage, so a turn was a routing problem rather than a menu choice. Between fights there was a flying base called a Colossus to upgrade, and a small 3D garden where you fished and chopped wood like the game was embarrassed to be only one genre.

Ten million downloads by September 2021 is a real audience and nowhere near enough for this category. A tactical gacha wants a daily login sustained across years, which is a commitment I have never once made to a phone. The schedule is the part I can read, and it is where this one turns strange: Tencent went the other direction and launched a Chinese version on 13 June 2023, two years after the global release, into a game already past its best window.

~ the dossier ~

~ two services, one date ~

The Chinese service got its notice in November 2024 and the global service got the same notice in December. Both were set to end on 24 January 2025, at 04:00 UTC. New registrations stopped, in-app purchases stopped, and the nineteen-month-old Chinese version died at the same instant as the three-and-a-half-year-old global one.

Gacha closures almost never line up like that. Regional services usually run on separate publishers and separate contracts and die months or years apart, which is why this site keeps having to ask which version of a game a shutdown date belongs to. Here there is no ambiguity, and the reason is that one company owned the decision on both sides.

~ what the compensation says ~

Players who had spent money were offered gift packs. Not for Alchemy Stars, which was closing, but for other Tencent titles, Honor of Kings and Call of Duty Mobile among them. A refund sends money out of the company. A bundle of currency for a game you do not play yet is a transfer between internal accounts, and it doubles as a recruitment pitch aimed at the people most likely to take it.

~ the offline build ~

A special offline build was released for existing installations, with limited features compared to the live game. This is the standard gesture now, and it is worth being honest about what it preserves. It is called Alchemy Stars Special Edition, and players were told to download their data to local storage before the cutoff if they wanted to keep it. The story and the art survive, along with a theme song written and performed by Reol over a score largely by Asami Tachibana. What goes missing is everything that made it live: events on a calendar, and a few thousand people pulling on the same banner in the same week.

Level Infinite's stated reason was the difficulty of continuing to offer a satisfying experience, which is a gentler way of saying the budget for one had gone. Service ended on 24 January 2025. The offline build still sits on whichever phones had it installed that morning, moving one operating system update closer to not launching.

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