Dragon Star Varnir Reviews

This game is 50% VN, 50% gameplay. 1% VN and 99% gameplay if you skip all dialogues and cutscenes on NG+. The story is good and has some twist to it. There are 11 chapters in the game. Each chapter comes with 1 dungeon. The game is pretty short if you rush through on NG+(can be done in about 1.5 hours or less). Majority of the time spent is on dialogues, battles, devouring dragon cores and opening/finding chests. The dragon core system is like FFX sphere grid system. You devour a dragon for a character and the dragon core will be available for that character, then use Factor Points(FP) to unlock skills and stat boosts. Boss dragon cores dropped after defeating bosses are shared and accessible by all characters. There are 4 types of skills to be learnt: Physical Skills, Magic Skills, Devour Skills and Passive Skills. Each category has a capacity limit/points of 20 for skills learned to be equipped(like FF9 system). Each learned skill has a minimum equip cost of 3 and up to 6, so you customize and picked the skills you want for each character. All major boss dragon cores grants useful skills(for survival and fighting) even if you didn't devour many dragons. There are 3 levels in battle: Top, Middle, Lower. There is not much of a strategy here except to split your party up in each of the region so that an AOE attack won't hurt as much or to use some formation for bonuses. I did 3 playthroughs and just kept all my party in the default middle row as I don't see a need to strategise. Just save your game before attempting a battle, and you can also save anywhere in the dungeon. If one of your characters is at the lower level and chooses to attack an enemy in the top level, it will move that character to the top level after attacking. Majority of the enemies in game has a weakness to an element. So knowing the enemies weakness is key to winning especially when playing hard mode on NG. There are 3 different endings depending on the decision you make throughout the game + little sisters' mechanic. The little sister mechanic can get frustrating to the players if they want to get the true ending on the first playthrough. I feel that the mechanic is still reasonable as you are able to open every chest and devour every dragon core while still achieving true ending on hard mode. As the little sister's mood mainly depends on distance travelled, you can plan your route. Even if you mess it up and get the normal ending, you can always do it on NG+, and it will be much faster and easier than the first playthrough. So you don't really "lose" in this game except for the time spent. There is something which I noticed on NG+ and NG+2 is that the little sisters' mood seem to reduce much more with the dragon meat fed to them. So it seems like the developers wanted to help players who are interested to get the true ending on subsequent playthroughs. I got this game at a steep discount of 85% off and I think it's well worth the price for the story and gameplay. You can also reach the maximum level 399 in about 4 hours on the maximum difficulty.