At this point, it seems almost certain that Square Enix is using an AI to randomly generate new titles in its “Underlined Serif Title” RPG series. Triangle Strategy already felt like it was pushing the limits, but we’ve now been graced with the delightful Various Daylife. After an initial exclusive launch on the Apple Arcade subscription service, this new, low-key RPG from Team Asano has made the jump to Switch for the low (but still kinda high…) price of thirty bucks. Offering up a bite-sized take on the kind of gameplay that catapulted titles like Bravely Default and Octopath Traveler to success, Various Daylife proves itself to be a decently fun experience, but it also demonstrates that the phrase “less is more” applies to playtime, too.
The story of Various Daylife begins with your character arriving in the city of Erebia on a new continent. As part of an ongoing colonization effort, Erebia is full of opportunity and promise, and there is still quite a bit of untamed land and mysteries beyond the city's borders. To help in the effort of expanding the city, your character joins an expedition team and begins fulfilling various odd jobs between excursions, making friends and allies along the way. The narrative, then, is not defined by a larger plotline as such; rather, it’s the mosaic of smaller intersecting stories that comprises the bulk of the Various Daylife experience.
Spending time with your allies in events not unlike Persona’s social links will progress those characters’ individual stories and fill you in more on their histories. One example is of a priest who struggles with a drinking addiction because of the weight he feels from being the listening ear for members of his beleaguered congregation. Another example is a jolly warrior who recounts his experience of forming a ‘found family’ for himself after being alone for so long. You’ll find with time that each of your party members has much more to their personality than the stock tropes they fulfill may indicate, and this more character-focused direction for the plot ultimately proves to be satisfying.
The gameplay in Various Daylife is a little bizarre, and it often feels like a JRPG that’s been stripped down to the absolute minimum. This isn’t to say this makes it a poor game overall, but it does require a certain adjustment of expectations to get the most out of it. The bulk of your experience will be spent picking up various jobs for your character to complete, such as waiting tables at the local tavern or culling the tiger population that is attacking merchants. You don’t actually do these jobs, however, you just select them from a menu and your character instantly does them while time jumps forward another half day.
Even though you’re just selecting options from a menu, there’s a surprising amount of strategy that goes into how you live your work life. Each job will not only net you EXP to level up your character, but it will also grant EXP to your individual stats, which will jump up massively if you can manage to level them up. Every job has a different mixture of stats that it bumps up and, crucially, there are usually one or two stats that the job will take EXP away from. To further complicate things, every new day, two stats will be randomly selected and granted EXP multipliers for gaining and losing. Picking your next job, then, is a fraught process of balancing multipliers and trying your best to maximize the utility you get out of them while minimizing the losses you face for those stats.
To add even more to the mix, you have to also consider a job’s stamina and morale cost. Both decrease with every job, and both can have increasingly negative outcomes if you don’t tend to them. Lower morale raises the likelihood that you ‘fail’ a job, which means you don’t get paid as much. Decreased stamina raises the chance of an accident happening, which will require you to be on bed rest for a couple of days and suffer huge losses to your stat EXP as a result. Choosing to rest will raise your stamina while spending time with friends will boost your morale, but picking either of these options means that you aren’t working and thus will miss the stat multipliers for that day.
The jobs you choose to work will also directly inform the classes you unlock and use for your character in battle. Every party member comes with their own class and set of skills, but your character has the ability to learn every class with time. New abilities often come about just from working the right jobs related to that class, and while it feels like you max out most classes’ growth relatively early, there’s almost always another one waiting for you to develop a little further. It’s nowhere near the class-hacking system found in the Bravely series, but we enjoyed this simplified version of it all the same. Growing your character into a powerful and diverse jack of all trades feels satisfying and gives you a greater sense of being capable of meeting the various foes that roam out in the wild.
When you feel ready, you can grab three party members and head out on expeditions to carry out some quests, and this is where things start to resemble a traditional JRPG a little more. A quest consists of your party walking from left to right in a straight line while a progress bar fills up, but this will often be interrupted by monster attacks. As you continue your march and the bar fills up more, your characters’ max health will continue to tick down, raising the stakes further depending on what you’re doing. Sometimes you’re sent out to investigate a disturbance, which requires the bar to reach full capacity. Other times you just need to retrieve three of a given item from felled monsters and can return to the city as soon as you have what you need.
Combat unfolds in a traditional turn-based style, with the welcome inclusion of the ‘cha-cha-cha’ combo system. To start a combo, a character needs to ‘change’ an enemy’s status, such as by getting them wet or setting them on fire. After an enemy has been affected, they can then be ‘chained’ by other characters also changing their status with attacks of their own. Every new status change will add one to the ongoing chain, and this is then finished with a ‘chance’ attack that does more damage the more you’ve built up the chain. Common enemies don’t really last long enough for you to get a good feel for this combo system, but the bosses and mini-bosses provide plenty of opportunity to see the importance of building chains and maximizing damage here.
Managing stat growth and doing the occasional expedition run is satisfying enough in the short term, but Various Daylife's gameplay loop feels like it has a critical lack of interactivity. For example, you’re merely told about the myriad jobs your character partakes in, while the player’s level of involvement here is relegated to a single input. When you go on expeditions, you’re essentially just watching a loading bar fill until an enemy encounter starts again and brings up the battle screen. The town is literally a straight line that you run along to visit various shops or locales. Rather than actually getting to go on a grand adventure, it feels like you are perpetually one step removed from the adventure; the kind of immersion that most RPGs can manage to create simply isn’t as present here.
Now, this release did begin as an experimental, budget, mobile game, so it doesn’t feel entirely fair to compare it to an excellent full-fat release like Xenoblade Chronicles 3 or even something smaller like Jack Move. Clearly, Various Daylife is aiming for a much different kind of experience, and though it feels like that experience is inferior, the sheer effort to strike out into something unconventional is admirable and worth considering. Genres only grow and evolve over time when developers feel empowered to try out fresh concepts--even if they don’t nail the execution every time, it’s worth reflecting on what did and didn’t work. Various Daylife may not prove itself a must-buy title, but enthusiasts of the genre may want to give it a look just to see something that’s not afraid to be different.
In terms of presentation, Various Daylife appears to be using a modified form of the visuals and art style seen in last year’s Bravely Default II, characterized by somewhat chibi characters with a slightly toy-like sheen. Unlike the gameplay, no risks have been taken here, but we were overall satisfied with the visuals, though not especially wowed. For instance, we noted many instances where a cutscene began and it took a few seconds for all the textures to fully load in for the new environment—it’s not an egregious technical mishap, but feels a little distracting given the simplistic visuals on display.
Conclusion
Various Daylife is the epitome of an experimental RPG. This is the kind of game that you’ll have a much better time with if you limit yourself to only fifteen minutes or maybe half an hour a day. Stay within that time frame, and the daily stat management, quick quest runs, and the simple class system will just about hit the spot. Play for much longer, and you’ll soon realize how relatively shallow the gameplay loop really is. We’d give this one a very light recommendation for anyone who’s obsessed with the work of Team Asano or for those who want a simple and light RPG for their Switch—if neither of those describes you, you’re not missing much by choosing to pass.
Comments 40
You know, as a non JRPG guy i'm always looking for one that seems interesting enough to me. Something with real-time combat, maybe BOTW sort of graphics (setting doesn't matter though, medieval for example would be nice!) - but sooo many JRPGs always got this PS2 graphics vibe. I guess it's just popular? If it is, great, but to me it always feels like it's sort of just laziness? And yes i can see that this looks better than PS2 but at the same time...not really.
The title alone is enough to make me avoid this game, but that art style certainly doesn't make me carry any regrets either.
"At this point, it seems almost certain that Square Enix is using an AI to randomly generate new titles in its “Underlined Serif Title” RPG series. Triangle Strategy already felt like it was pushing the limits"
Bravely Default already exceeded those limits.
About what I expected from what I saw in the Direct. On a small tangent, I think the thing I hate the most in regards to this type of Squenix game are the graphics. I am in no way a graphics snob (my two favourite series are Pokemon and Ace Attorney for crying out loud) but I feel as though this style of trying to imprint the style of the beautiful key-art onto painfully basic 3D models looks really bad. It's the main reason I'm turned off of Bravely Default to be honest: gameplay looks fun, but that graphical style just doesn't work for me. I'll just stick to my HD-2D games thank you.
@StefanN
You might like the tales of series.
The entire game feels somewhat AI-generated...it all looks a bit generic.
Not really interested tbh
This game was barely interesting on the iPhone. I'd play it for fifteen minutes and think, "Hey, this kind of fun," then not think about for two weeks. The Switch announcement made me consider going back to it, but I wasn't disappointed to discover it had been removed from Apple Arcade. I'll be fine continuing to not think about it.
I don't understand the draw of job/life trends in gaming right now. Personally, I don't want to complete mundane jobs in a game to make it more like real life, I want to escape real life, even if it's just for 15 minutes! I pretty much bail completely on games these days when it feels like I'm doing a "job".
Bad time for this to come out when Valkyrie Elysium is here.
@StefanN
I think it's not a matter of laziness, but a matter of budget. Various Daylife isn't one of Square Enix's big blockbuster hits. It's a smaller, modest game, trying to provide an interesting little experience, which means it isn't going to get a lot of resources poured into it.
Oof. Not a single word or imagine in this review makes this game seem appealing to me.
Bravely Default, as a title, at least has some charm to it. Like, it'a a default game, but bravely so. Triangle Strategy was pushing it, but at least it was very descriptive of the game systems. Various Daylife, though, is on another level. This is peak bad naming. Unless their next game is called Repetitive Movement or Control Input.
@Deemo37 Hey thanks for the recommendation! I'll look into it! Would you recommend a specific entry?
@EarthboundBenjy Well fair point!
Another day, another JRPG.
How are these all economically-viable for developers and publishers? The Switch is saturated in the things. I'm trying to get through Xenoblade and it takes so long! Can't see myself needing too many, yet the Switch is swamped in them.
Never written off a game so fast and definitively. I didn’t mind the other titles, even if they were odd, but this one just immediately made me facepalm. Then the game that followed just made me look away in an already farm-heavy nintendo direct. Welp, good to know I’m not missing anything.
@StefanN
Tales of arise is the most recent but isn’t on switch. It’s also the only one to use a 3D battlefield for combat. Apart from that I don’t think you can go wrong. All the others have 2d combat and should all be good starting points.
@Mince Indeed. 1 point added on for being a Square Enix game - so realistically a 5
Everything looks so various.
@dkxcalibur I can only speak for myself, but the appeal of Life Sim games is the immersion.
As you just said, we play games to escape our lives a little bit, and to some, it's easier to escape when you feel like you're living the life of the character you're playing on screen. Little immersive moments like being hungry in a video game and deciding to either grab lunch at the local inn and socialize or just make some food at home and chill.
I'm not always in the mood to play action-oriented games that demand me to be on my toes all the time. I understand it's mundane to others, but it's very relaxing to those that enjoy life sims.
worst name ever
@Astral-Grain You're absolutely right. I do actually get that. When Animal Crossing came out during Covid, it was something that my sons and I fully jumped into playing for the reasons you provide.
I think I was looking at this slightly different though and being a bit judgmental of a game I know very little about.
Hmm, I will wait on a sale but bite sized games are all I can afford to play right now. I’m either too tired or too busy after work.
@dkxcalibur Oh no worries, I'm not so sure about Various Daylife either, it doesn't seem to have the warmth of a good life sim.
I liked doing part-time work in Persona 4 because you got to see little variations of cutscenes depending on the job you selected and they increased different stats based on what you did. There were even little side stories with each job. I wouldn't even consider Persona 4 a life sim, it's a JRPG with life sim elements, but it still did it better.
Based on the review of Various Daylife, that whole experience was reduced to selecting a job from a menu and then instantly progressing to the next day.
If the whole game is as hollow as this, I don't think it's for me.
@StefanN nah it's definitely not because it's a popular look, because it really isn't!
This game looks vari lame.
Wow, it's almost like this repetitive RPG for short sessions works best in a mobile setting! Who'd have thought?
Personal recommendation for others... Pick up Voice of Cards or Dungeon Encounters instead lol
Played an hour of this game on Apple Arcade and I just couldn't find a reason anyone would want to play this game. FURTHERMORE, I wondered how this game even got to the point where it was approved by SquareEnix as something to devote devs to. It's so bad, seriously don't waste your money.
@RPGreg2600 It's very lame indeed.
Gameplay sounds about as exciting as buying it and watching it download.
I am not mad at this game. It was made for specific audience. I am sure they dont expect everyone to buy it. I just wish they stayed away from the Bravely Default character models thing. Thats something special for that series. Just move on..
May not be relevant, but I swear, every single time I see a 6/10 review on here, all I think about is this ...
I mean, this meme is a literal fossil at this point, but I just can't let it go. I always quote it for every single 6/10 review that pops up on all these sites. It's just so funny to me for some reason.
@RubyCarbuncle Lmao, wasn't Valkyrie Elysium also destroyed by critics? XD
Menial Mundane Missions up next!
... Wun can only hope.
@fenlix It got mixed Reviews. From what I've played of it so far it reminds me somewhat of Nier and Drakengard and I really like those.
@RPGreg2600 That's cause it was originally a mobile game. All Square did for this version is take out the micro-transactions.
@Serpenterror lame. If they're going to port stuff, why don't they pott stuff we actually want? The list is huge. Chrono Trigger, FF1-6, FF Tactics, Bahamut Lagoon Valkyrie Profile, dragon quest 8, I could go on and on. Dammit Square.
@RubyCarbuncle I think "mid reviews" would be more accurate XD Anyways, The DioField Chronicle seem to be doing better in reviews.
I think from what I’m reading is that this should be one of those “on sale” games. I liked the presentation during the Nintendo Direct but I’ve never heard of the game before the port to the Switch. I would pick up this game physical to be honest.
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