Dragon a bit behind…
When it comes to most visual novel games that have some sort of JRPG combat, the results can often be inconsistent. Either one aspect can be far better than the other, as was the case with Azur Lane: Crosswave or you have a game where both elements work, such as Neptunia ReVerse, at least to a certain degree. While Dragon Star: Varnir isn’t as disappointing as Azur Lane ended up being, it does suffer from a multitude of issues stemming from bland environments, repetitive dialogue, and a lacking presentation all across the board. That said, some moments of it story do shine through, it’s just a shame the rest of the game doesn’t hit those same highs.
Dragon Star Varnir is often two games trying to exist as one experience, albeit with neither really coming through in the end. The story, which is largely based around a Knight turned Witch in Zephy, is told through mountains of repeated text, with very little of it voiced, despite the quality of the acting actually being rather enjoyable when it happens. These moments are told through fantastic but very limiting artwork, with small little animations that attempt to bring them to life. It’s a shame that each character is only represented by a single character portrait, with little to nothing to change how they act in a scene. The picture of them will move and slide and bounce around the screen when their actions call for it, but this presentation feels lacking when compared to the in-game models that are used for a few actual cutscenes in the game, breathing more life into its storytelling in these few moments than the static images ever do.
One of the biggest issues surrounding the voice acting is how random it appears to be. You’ll have voices in moments where nothing of importance is occurring, and then nothing a few moments later when there is a heart-felt scene taking place between the cast. If this had been a victim of the pandemic then I would totally understand, but this game was originally released back in 2018 on previous platforms, so it’s hard to say why some choices were made back then. It almost feels like the actors were just given random pages of the story as some voiced conversations actually stop providing the voices at a certain point in the same conversation. Again, it’s a shame this game wasn’t entirely voiced as the acting that is here is solid enough for what this game is. It’s nothing to receive awards over, but it makes the game and its cast of characters nonetheless more engaging when it occurs.
An odd inclusion for the Switch release is the addition of a slew of bonus items and equipment that were previously paid DLC on the PlayStation 4 and PC versions that you can equip to your party members once they’ve joined your team. These items are so powerful that the game actually warns you that using them will drastically lower the difficulty of combat going forward. Even playing on normal with these items attached, I never once had to worry about changing or replacing them as while there were some out of nowhere difficulty spikes with a few bosses one-shotting me, I never found battles to be that challenging, making me question their use here. Had these items been available at a certain point in the story instead, it would have made more sense. Having these equipped; however, did prevent me from having to grind for hours at a time to stay ahead of the difficulty spikes that did eventually rear their ugly head, even despite my higher than normal stats. Still, it’s rather confusing as to why these items were available right from the start, allowing me to trounce nearly anything in my path for more than half the game.
Dragon Star Varnir is largely about a human Knight named Zephy, who while out and about on patrol to hunt witches, is attacked and almost killed by a dragon. Before the dragon can finish him off, a pair of witches in Minessa and Karikaro, arrive and vanquish his attacker, turning their efforts towards him afterward to hopefully save his life. At first, their efforts are without success, but upon having him drink dragon’s blood, from one of their mouths no less, he is saved, but strangely has become a witch in the process. In fact, not only is he the first recorded male witch that they know of, digging deeper into his past reveals some truths that start to make sense of his current situation. I also enjoyed the struggle that Zephy then has to contend with. He’s become the very thing he hates and is then shunned and hunted by those he once called his allies. Having him unsure about the witch’s motives around him to then eventually protecting them with all he’s got, feels natural as he gets to know them, and the younger witches back at the Den who begin to look up to him as an older brother.
Now, Dragon Star Varnir isn’t just about Zephy, as it’s also about the witches themselves, their plight to survive, and how to possibly end their cursed lives and become human. Much of the story also entails about how they feel about Zephy and his sudden inclusion into their lives. It is also through this event of him becoming a witch where they start to dive more into the cause and ramifications of what it means for them as well. There are also subplots about the Knights to which Zephy once fought alongside, to the Ravens, who are a band of mercenaries that hunt down dragons instead of witches. Without diving into any aspect of spoilers, the hook of the story is witches grow dragons within themselves, cursed to consume dragon meat or go mad if they don’t. If they choose to go mad, or simply not eat for a period of time, the dragon will kill them and be born into this world, an early act we get to see firsthand to drive this scenario home to the player and how dire the circumstances are to this band of witches.
Overall, the story is mostly enjoyable, but so much of it is repeated ad nauseam whenever a new character is introduced, or when other characters who are unaware of certain events are needed to know what’s going on or discovers it on their own, resulting in everyone getting together to go over said story moments yet again. This happens very frequently, as does hearing about other aspects of current conspiracies and events of the past. So many conversations feel bloated in repeating the same sentences over and over again, even in the same conversation. The fact that so many of these conversations feature no voice acting also makes them less immersive as I felt I was far more attached to the story and its cast when characters actually had things to say, making me more engaged as a result.
Despite the game’s presentation of its narrative, the story itself has some interesting moments, some out of nowhere plot twists, character turns, and while you’ll see many of those moments coming a mile away, it never ruined the ideas that this game has. Where the story really suffers; however, is in its use of its non-central cast. There are a few additional characters that could have been solid antagonists, including an interesting bad guy in Durandol, but so many of these characters are used to push the story forward for other characters instead of giving them their proper due. JRPG’s like Trails of Cold Steel had a vast number of bad guys that even despite them serving another purpose, they were always given time to become interesting in their own right, and even presented with their own epic boss fight as well. Here, a bad guy like Durandol is given a fight scene with Zephy that takes place during a visual novel scene where it’s largely a shot of just the background, with Zephy and Durandol not even present other than a few flashes of their swords hitting each other and some sound effects. Durandol deserved better, as does the overall presentation here when it comes to high-action scenes.
Throughout the story, you’ll be given a few dialogue choices that affect your “Madness Level” and honestly, many of these choices don’t quite make sense of what influences what. This madness meter will dictate the ending you’ll get as the final chapter will happen largely in one of three ways, but the way in which you make those dialogue choices to get to one of those endings is where it doesn’t quite come off as satisfying and is more or less pretty damn arbitrary. One of the last choices that pushed me towards my ending was between two options “ Why did you save me?” and “Why did you kill him?”. One of those options is a bad choice but damn if I was supposed to know which one was which.
Among all the visual novel moments, some of which that can go on for well over an hour is the combat. Dragon Star Varnir can feel by the numbers, especially on a lower difficulty, and of course with items that grant you abnormally higher stats, but it also floods the game with some often useless mechanics that feel tacked on to create an artificial level of depth. Displayed through a three-tiered system as you float at the top, middle, or bottom of the battlefield, so do your attempts at hitting other floating enemies. This does limit some encounters with the Knights themselves, but eventually, you do have a few battles with them here and there. Most of the time you are fighting dragons and other smaller creatures, often devoid of any really impressive animations, and these battles can become extremely repetitive and bland as a result. Not to mention that the sounds of the dragons themselves are easily the worst dragon growls I’ve ever heard, almost as if someone recorded the growl of their stomach and then altered it with some sound mixing. It’s that bad.
There is a bit of strategy to placing your team at different tiers, as enemies can often only hit one tier at a time resulting in just one member of your party being hit during that turn. However; many enemies can attack for three or four turns at a time, leaving you often vulnerable to take some wild damage, thus using a turn to heal everyone up and often repeat this same endeavor. You can perform one of two offensive options; magic, or physical attacks, but there are also options to defend during an attack, swap out to another party member, or use an item as well. Magic often allows you to hit multiple targets at once, despite their tier, while physical is more based on lowering or rising to their tier and then going forward with the attack. Many attacks and magic skills use SP, which will vary in its SP bar consumption based on the attack power of each strike. You can attack in rows and columns, but you can often just spam magic attacks and the targeting will often get the job done, at least on easy or normal difficulty. On higher difficulties, you’ll want to pay attention to weaknesses and positioning as some attacks can move enemies around, lining them up in a better formation to get maximum damage on future attacks. There is some depth here, but most encounters rarely ever take advantage of it.
You’ll also gain vast numbers of powers from devouring and consuming dragon cores. There is a devour attack that, if successful, will end the battle and grant you a dragon core. Though, you will also gain these by simply defeating the dragon as well. As you earn these cores, you can feed them to each of the party, making your party as diverse as you want as you’ll often be able to allocate the same powers to your whole team. Each core can be unlocked by using Factor Points and thankfully, you can choose to unlock the whole tree at once, should you have the points to do so, and you more often than not will have more than enough. While you’ll eventually gain six party members, you can only have three in action at once, making the remaining members of your team act as support. I would often make my main party member a master of two types of skills with my support member having a different set, just in case I wasn’t rocking anything that they were weak to. This more or less worked and helped me push through some of the really challenging fights later on when I increased the difficulty to adjust to my normal than higher stats.
Each party member also has a dragon form, however; this isn’t a transformation into a dragon or anything like that, but rather that of a largely revealing outfit where each character gains an appearance that more or less covers only the required amount of space to not make this a mature-rated game. The outfits are pretty much fan service, and while it’s fine for characters like Minessa, Zephy, and Karikaro, who are of age, it’s the younger characters where this gets a bit more awkward. Regardless, this transformation grants them a pretty substantial power increase as well as a new attack. This happens automatically once the Dragon Meter is filled and will eventually run out during use. Thankfully, this also heals the character, and since it happens once the meter is filled, you can often time this to let them ascend rather than waste a turn healing them.
While there is a fair bit of variety in the locations you’ll visit, they largely feel like the same bland maze-like environments. There are chests and resource spots to harvest, blocked locations that require a unique power each member of the team has to access, such as traversing a poison mist or creating a bridge over a thin gap, which is easy enough to push through as you can swap to any member of the party with a press of a button. You can also fly around each location, but the jerky controls don’t make it as nimble or intuitive as you would want, not to mention you can’t fly over those gaps I just mentioned, making the whole flying bit feel more like just sprinting around each location. Enemies feel placed randomly with so many locations just being constantly empty. Enemies will respawn after a short cooldown, making grinding easy enough, but if you use those bonus items, you likely won’t need to worry about that.
Apart from combat, and the overall story, you can visit the Witches’ Den, a location that acts as a shop, save point, or a hub location to let you revisit old areas. There are also side quests to collect, which are largely just collecting items you find out in the wild, or allowing you to give gifts to the main cast, granting you a bonus scene at the end of the game if you level up their friendship to max. You can interact with a few additional characters which don’t really exist within the story and are here only as a means to make these shops makes sense. For example, there are times where you’ll have to leave the young witches alone as you go off on your missions, despite there being characters in the Den that you could leave in charge and watch over them, but apart from visiting their respective shops, they don’t seem to matter when it comes to the main story.
One inclusion that is greatly appreciated is the ability to either select auto-battles during some of the more grunt-focused encounters, but also being able to skip all animations during combat. This comes in handy when you change into your dragon form, allowing you to bypass the same transformation sequence that you will see at least a hundred times per character. This also allows you to skip all combat turns as well, speeding up battles, especially when you want to grind. It’s a nice addition that respects your time and makes a lot of its battles far less tedious.
When it comes to how Dragon Star Varnir runs on the Switch, well, it certainly lags behind the PS4 and PC versions pretty noticeably. First, the aliasing on the in-game models, especially during cutscenes stands out for sure, especially since there isn’t much detail given to them in regards to what we have seen on the Switch before, even from the same publisher. And, if you take a look between this and the PS4 version, you can see that the character models here have had significant details removed and are oddly much brighter as well. Given that the PS4 version still looks a generation behind, it’s likely an optimization issue here of not wanting to invest a lot of time and money into making the Switch port look better than it does. Even given those reductions in quality, the framerate also feels incredibly sluggish, making movements very jerky, and battles constantly have dips as it easily drops below 20fps consistently, even as you try to fly around wide-open bland environments.
Dragon Star Varnir is a very inconsistent game when it comes to its presentation, visuals, and pacing. Many story elements, despite being largely enjoyable, are often far too repetitive in getting their point across, and you’ll often hear the same story beats over and over again. The visual novel presentation is typical of the genre, I just wish more character portraits or artwork had been present during scenes that are nothing but sword slashes and the sounds of the blades colliding. Combat feels ok, but so many of its systems don’t get the room needed to fully make use of them. I don’t think Dragon Star Varnir is a bad game but it simply doesn’t excel at much of what it aims to do. I enjoy the characters, most of the story, and some of the flashier aspects of combat, but the bland presentation is just what kills this game for me, as with some better direction and a bigger budget, this could have been a damn good adventure.
Developer - Compile Heart. Publisher - Idea Factory. Released - August 3rd, 2021. Available On - Nintendo Switch, PS4, PC. Rated - (T) Blood, Language, Partial Nudity, Violence. Platform Reviewed - Nintendo Switch, Docked and Portable. Review Access - A review code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.