Dragon Star Varnir

The game is a turn-based RPG with an interesting premise: all battles take place in the air, so positioning is more important than your average RPG. Splitting your party into groups that are below or above the enemy team can save you from certain attacks, but they limit your attack options when attempting combos against specific targets. Some enemies are only vulnerable to certain attacks, so there is a good bit of thought into where you attack from and with what abilities since many abilities can affect groups across the different attack planes. There is also a "gotta collect them all" thing going on with the skills system. To learn more skills, and increase your options in combat, you have to "eat" enemies to learn their abilities in a grid system, sort of like FF's Sphere Grid. Leveling will increase your stats, but these "cores" come with a bevy of stats boosts, Passive Buffs, and unique abilities you need to increase every character's versatility. So you wanna have every character eat as many cores as possible to pick up as many buffs and new abilities as possible. Fights feel more entertaining when every new creature presents a new opportunity to eat a new core. The rest of the game is pretty typical anime JRPG schlock and the production values are pretty poor, so this is no Tales or Ys game. The combat pretty much does all the heavy lifting. Thankfully, there are options to speed up how quickly you get through cutscenes. I put a 4, but it's more of a 3.5.

The game is a turn-based JRPG. The fight grid is structured in 3 layers (TOP: increase magic atack pergentage and magic defense; MID: increase physical attack and physical defense; LOW: increase magic atack pergentage and magic defense). You have different formation types to choose in order to group your characters on a single lane, on the same lane, one per lane in order to maximize their potential and abilities. You start with 3 characters, and you will collect another 3 during the game. In battles, you will have 3 main characters, and the other 3 will be support. You can switch the characters in the battle on the go without extra turn. The main characters will be damage dealers, and the support characters usually have passives that improve the total health of the group, damage, or improve counter or protect abilities. There is a chance every turn that the support character will defend the main character for all damage received from 1 attack (it can go as far as 35% with passive skills). There is also the chance that after every atack the support character will counter with another atack (it can go up to 25% with passives). The enemies have weak points (vulnerable to different magic or physical attack), and if you fill up the fear gauge, a weak point rush will follow where all the main characters will atack the enemy in one turn (you can get 4 atacks). Every new enemy can be consumed in order to learn new passive or offensive abilities for the character that devours the enemy. You can create elixirs to farm gear based on the enemy components collected, you have romance, potions, level-up, stats increase and all the specifics of an RPG. The game presentation is a visual novel, with few 3D scenes from time to time. Some important parts of the visual novel are voiced, but the majority is just text to read. The characters are lovely, and the team cohesion and story development for the characters is great. The story overall is okay. I recommend this game. 10/10 for me.

I'm liking the battles and the characters designs, but the story is not too interesting, also for some reason there are stutters.