Apothecary Diaries: Palace Chronicles: Maomao deserves better than this mediocre frog.
I know mobile games have a reputation for being attention-destroying Skinner Boxes. Slot machines wearing paper mustaches that are always teasing the user towards one more pull. Except instead of financial enrichment you are usually chasing a .jpg of your favorite characters in new costumes, often scantily clad. Heroes of fantasy and fiction, wearing swimwear and giving you bedroom eyes.
And hell, I’ve had fun doing it. I’ve been playing Fate: Grand Order for nearly a decade now, and in that time I’ve maybe spent 40 bucks, Not a bad price, year by year. I think a lot of these games have something to offer even without paying any additional money. I acknowledge that some folks are cursed with a greater impulse to chase the Ultra-Rare drops, but that’s never been me, thankfully. I’ve put hundreds of hours into FGO, Genshin Impact, Dokkan Battle, all the way back to Puzzles and Dragons and would recommend those experiences to anyone with the willpower to ignore all the monetization thrown at you.
If you have felt the ever-growing shadow of the other shoe about to drop, here it is: Apothecary Diaries: Palace Chronicles has nearly nothing redeemable about it, and that breaks my heart.
The Apothecary Diaries is one of my favorite anime in decades. I am something of a lapsed anime fan; I had my heyday in the 90’s and ’00s like so many other millennials. I’ll always love my Bebop and my Gundam, and there is no exaggeration in saying that no artist has brought me more joy than Akira Toriyama and his Dragons, both Ball and Quest. I don’t know exactly when the turn came, but I remember a some years ago when I was browsing some streaming catalog, and realizing that what they had on offer just wasn’t for me anymore. I wasn’t tuned in enough to the scene to know what they were making that I would like either, so I gave anime an Irish goodbye, choosing to revisit the classics if I ever felt the appetite for some Japanese animation,
Diaries took me by surprise. A mixture of a political thriller and a medical drama, with big, meaty spoonfuls of will-they-won’t-they. I watched the entire series in a matter of weeks. 100% fresh, would recommend, etc., etc.
Not so, for Palace Chronicles. Every insidious trick in the mobile game handbook is on offer here. Timed stamina that gates forward progress. Gacha-style pulls. Not one, not two, but three different paid passes, all on day one.
The worst part, is I could (and have) forgiven that kind of naked, Herodian greed if I find the gameplay or at least the story compelling. There is nothing here. Nothing to play. No story to speak of. It is clicking boxes to grind one currency, so that you can afford to click a different box for a second currency, which you will need to buy a third box, for yet another currency. On and on, ad infinitum. At one point I was given a quest to level up a medical chest, which I did, only to have to do the exact same thing again, literally a minute later.
I have played other games like this. There are a number of them available on app stores and on Steam. Semi-idle gratification machines, themed after Chinese Cultivators or European Courts or Greco-Roman Empires. Fantasies where the slow progress of time is built into the expectation, where using your real-world hard earned money feels like the fulfillment of a fantasy of sponsoring a young debutante and less like throwing your cash into the bank account of some unscrupulous app-developers.
The only fun I had was in the in-game chat (sampled in the screen shots above). It was incredibly active, and full of excited players helping one another progress. As I spent my hours clicking alchemy tables to make silver appear, I was amused and charmed by the other players, swinging their digital pick-axes away, all in the name of enriching the life of their own personal Maomao.
Who am I to say they’re not having fun? Maybe the community is the point. The people I have known in the world of flesh and blood who have been the biggest supporters of games like these have all been retirees, people with an abundance of time and often money, but not always regular company. Maybe the simple mechanics and the passive, laborious rate of progress is a boon to players like that. I don’t know. All I can say it is definitively not for me, and the next time I’m asked to drink a poison, I’d prefer it have a little kick to it.
