SOULVARS Reviews

[h1]Grind Your Soul[/h1] [h2]Story[/h2] The game starts with some impressive cutscenes, but the characters have very minimal characterization and dialogue. At best, Yakumo is looking for another Soulbearer, but we don't know much about his relationship with that Soulbearer and one of the antagonists. Even the glossary barely explains anything substantial about any character. [h2]Gameplay[/h2] The game has an interesting deckbuilding system where your characters have a "hand" of 5 soulbits and you draw from a "deck" to refill that hand. However, once you have less than 5 soulbits left, you have the option of reloading all Soulbits at the cost of HP, with the cost being higher on hard mode. To make the most of your deck, you need to set up Arts, which combine Soulbits into stronger actions. And to use up more Soulbits in one turn, you must fulfill conditions to increase your AP temporarily, such as buffing, healing, guarding/dodging an attack, landing a crit, or most commonly, hitting a weakness. Sometimes, it pays to cancel an art in order to use the individual Soulbits in a way that nets you more AP next turn, allowing you to use bigger Arts. While this battle system is creative on paper, the grinding process is insanely tedious because there's no linear leveling. Instead, all characters have sync rates with Souldrivers, which functions as something similar to a class system that allows you to gain more stats and abilities. Additionally, unlike master quartz and Holo Cores in the Trails series, everyone has their own sync rate with every individual Souldriver, meaning you have to grind 21 souldrivers times 4 characters. Even in the endgame, you don't get much sync rate progress out of each battle unless you get lucky and spawn a silver or golden worm. You also need to worry about farming soul fragments in order to buy permanent upgrades from the Souldrivers, which is also a slow process unless you get lucky with silver/golden worms. The non-linear way of grinding also makes it hard for your postgame party member to catch up, despite his tanking gimmick. Worse yet, you have four total characters but three character slots, with Yakumo being locked in, and the inactive party member gets no sync rate progress. You can equip enhancement items to your equipments' enhance slots, but storebought gear doesn't have slots while randomly dropped gear have random slot counts. As a result, you're probably not going to be using storebought gear unless you're desperate to change your Soulbit loadout. The game's consumable item system allows consumables to be used without taking up a turn, but each character only has a limited amount of item uses per battle. This is fine in the main game, but in the post game, you will FEEL the items' lack of scaling. Other than revive items, other healing items only heal by flat amounts, making them powercrept as player HP and enemy damage increases. [h2]Verdict[/h2] 6/10 The pixel art and card mechanics are good and it's satisfying to pull off flashy combat arts, but the game also expects you to do an insane amount of grinding for barely any story payoff. Maybe this game needs a remake with a proper story and a better growth system for the characters. This feels more like a proof of concept than a full RPG. Maybe if you're the type of gamer who cares more about combat than story, the main game is at least serviceable.

Bonus: The game play and deck building are really fun, especially the different tricks to get specific cards. The leveling system is also interesting, and doesn't take too much grinding to build up new stats and card combos. The execution in general is very fun and you need to watch which cards you use, as reloading them costs HP. Malus: The story is very hard to understand, partially due to the quality of the translation and partially due to it just suddenly telling you new information with no foreshadowing. As an example, someone who was left behind in an early dungeon came back to reveal some major lore that would have fit in Cosmic Star Heroine, but there were no real clues that I could parse that gave me any indication that what was revealed had been going on.