Varnier of Dragonstar review: The fifth step of landmine evolution

Today's review starts with Landmine's "Galapagos Project". The term "Galapagos" was first used to refer to the islands that gave rise to Darwin's theory of evolution and was later introduced into Japanese business. "Galapagosization" is a Japanese business term that refers to the phenomenon of adaptation in an isolated environment and eventually losing the ability to compete with the outside world and becoming obsolete. Typical of this is the Japanese mobile phone industry, the goal of the Mine Society's "Galapagos Project" is to "make RPGS for specific users in Japan", and the protagonist of this review, "Varnier of Dragon Star" is the fifth work in the project. As part of the whole plan, "Dragon Star's Varnier" is really not high in terms of production level, can only be called a barely pass, but the better point is that the game puts forward more novel concepts to catch the eye.

Novel combat system

Here is the first to talk about the difference between compositional tactics and turn-based combat, although the two are only a word difference, but in the focus of the former tends to be the overall control, such as many SLG games, the latter is more focused on character development, such as the early Final Fantasy series. The most obvious difference between the two is the "board" in combat. Turn-based tactics put a lot of emphasis on the use of the board, but the concept of the board in early turn-based fighting games was very, very weak. As the game progressed, the distinction between the two gradually diminished, and it often appeared in combinations, so we often saw the introduction of the board in partial turn-based fighting games to enrich strategy in combat.

Dragon Star's Varnier uses a "floating battle" mode, which changes the horizontal space of the traditional board into three vertical Spaces, gaining more depth. The game is a turn-based combat game at its roots, and the main emphasis is still on character development, so this change preserves the board's own strategy without undermining character development elements.

There are two main aspects to this change, one is that some of the game's skill mechanics have changed, such as physics skills can only deal damage to the same level of units, magic skills can deal damage to several planes, and the game has added many trap skills to highlight the concept of three-dimensional space. This part of the trap skill is usually related to the position of the enemy, such as can repel the enemy one square or make the enemy drop one layer, etc., together with other displacement skills, it brings the concept of strategic chain reaction to the battle, after laying the trap through displacement skills, this point also has a flat chess board. However, this strategy becomes more flexible and rich due to the addition of vertical space in this game.

The second is the addition of part destruction, which is actually common in ACT and RPG games, such as the famous game series Monster Hunter, part destruction means that the player can develop strategies to weaken the enemy, because of the introduction of vertical space concept, Therefore, in the performance of relatively large units, the game usually makes them occupy 2-3 layers, each layer corresponds to a part, the player can decide which part to destroy first according to the configuration of their own team, and this change also makes this part of the enemy appear larger, in general, part destruction is a very good idea, more strategically rich. It also allows players to have more choices, and at the same time, it is also better in terms of performance.

"In 2019, there is no one else who can use a light effect to represent full-screen AOE."

However, another problem in this game is that due to the introduction of the concept of vertical space, the strategic plane is very weak, which is also expected, because if the plane is also greatly expanded, it will increase the difficulty of the game to get started. Therefore, as a test work, this game deliberately strengthens its characteristics and makes choices in other content.

More tedious role development

There is also a special in-game system: Swallowing system, this system is related to the battle and character development of two parts of the content, the combat part of the game added the "fear value" attribute, when the player with part of the attribute skills to cause effective damage to the enemy will accumulate the fear value, when the fear value is high, you can display the "swallowing" skill to kill, swallowed material can be used as the character's cultivation attribute. Simply understood, it is to add the receiving elements of the pet training game, and use the receiving dragon to strengthen itself. This system makes the battle faster from the positive perspective, but due to the blessing of the "thunder" attribute of the mine society itself, this system is not particularly ideal, and it always fails to swallow in some high probability situations. So when you only have a 30% success rate, you can usually start trying your luck to get the character to devour, and when you fail to devour, you take critical damage, but once you succeed, the battle is over, and this is also true for some elite battles. The devorage system works much like Pokemon, with players constantly smashing balls, but as a role-playing game it's not ideal.

The character cultivation associated with the devorage system is a mixed blessing, except for the shared attributes of the BOSS battle devorage, the other devorage attributes are character independent, which means that when players want to cultivate another character, they have to reload some monsters, and sometimes these monsters will be killed in seconds, so this part is very awkward. During the game, I often have the feeling that I am playing "Pokemon". On the one hand, this system makes character development more free, on the other hand, it weakens the original characteristics of each character, and makes it more cumbersome to cultivate new characters, and it is obviously not considered to put this "capture" development into the game. In addition to the training of the main role, the game also needs to take care of some "little sisters", this part of the role and the game's world view is relatively tight, so it is put together with the world view.

Unique world view setting

When I started this game at the beginning, I thought it was a harem game selling meat, which is true, but the world view setting of this game is quite different from this theme. In this game, players belong to the witch side, and the witch is set to eat dragons and have dragons in her body, which means that if the witch eats too much, the dragon in her body will break out. Choosing to fast will lead to insanity and eventually madness, which can be said to be a dilemma. This dark world view has always been enveloped in the game, the plot of survival and destruction and the warmth of the day repeatedly interlude, the sense of contrast does add a lot of color to the world view, the setting of this world view continues to the game system, the player needs to take care of three girls, control their food supply, to ensure that they balance the edge of survival will be destroyed. However, the game still follows the old path of Mine Society in terms of the rhythm of plot development. Players who are familiar with past works can certainly guess the subsequent development. The plot of this game is very short, which can be seen as an experimental work.

In addition to the short story, other constructs in the game can only be said to be ordinary, and as the main element of maze exploration in the game, it can only be said that there is no feature at all. Because the problem of determining the model in the game is basically difficult to use, it can be said that the mechanism of "backstab" to get the first hand is virtually useless, and there are very few characters in the game that can appear simultaneously. Only three characters can appear at the same time, although there is a high degree of freedom in character training, but in a single game of combat always have to switch roles, which is very annoying, and because of the engulfing training mechanism, in addition to the inherent skills, there is basically no division of labor, basically requires the player to become a "bucket number". In this way, it can avoid the problem of losing the function of the squad when the character is killed in the battle.

Conclusion

The overall action, modeling and performance effects of the game are very general, and the frame rate is not enough. It is better to look at 2D vertical drawing than to look at 3D models, which can be seen to save costs. In general, "Dragon Star's Varnier" does put forward more concepts and new ideas, the combat system and world view setting are more distinctive, but the overall lack of polishing of this game, the development intensity and production degree are not high, coupled with some unreasonable difficulty design, resulting in the overall level is very general, is a more targeted work.