At this point, it seems almost certain that Square Enix is using an AI to randomly generate new titles in the “Underlined Serif Title” RPG series. Triangle strategy already felt like it was pushing the boundaries but we are now honored with the delicious Diverse 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 rather high…) price of thirty bucks. Offers a bite-sized look at the kind of gameplay that catapulted titles like the Brave standard and Octopath Traveler for success, Various Daylife turns out to be quite a fun experience, but it also shows that the phrase “less is more” also applies to playtime.
The story of Various Daylife begins when your character arrives 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 limits. To help expand the city, your character joins an expedition team and starts doing various chores between excursions, making friends and allies along the way. Thus, the story is not defined by a larger storyline as such; rather it is the mosaic of smaller intersecting stories that make up the bulk of the Various Daylife experience.
Spending time with your allies in events similar to Persona‘s social ties will take those characters’ individual stories further and tell you more about their histories. An example is of a priest struggling with a drinking addiction because of the weight he feels from being the sympathetic ear for members of his beleaguered congregation. Another example is a merry warrior who talks about his experience of forming a ‘found family’ for himself after being alone for so long. You’ll find over time that each of your group members has a lot more personality than the standard styles they fulfill can indicate, and this more character-oriented direction for the plot turns out to be satisfying in the end.
The gameplay in Various Daylife is a bit bizarre, and it often feels like a JRPG stripped down to the bare minimum. This isn’t to say that this makes it a bad game overall, but it does require some adjustment of expectations to get the most out of it. Most of your experience will be spent picking up various tasks for your character to complete, such as waiting tables at the local tavern or killing the tiger population attacking traders. You don’t actually to do these jobs, but you just select them from a menu and your character does them right away while time jumps forward another half day.
Even if you’re just selecting options from a menu, there’s a surprising amount of strategy that fits how you live your work life. Each task not only gives you EXP to increase your character, but it also gives EXP to your person statistics, which will rise massively if you manage to level them. Each job has a different mix of stats that oppose it and, crucially, there are usually one or two stats that the job will yield to take EXP away from. To complicate matters, two stats are randomly selected each new day and awarded EXP multipliers for winning and losing. So choosing your next job is a fraught process of balancing multipliers and doing your best to maximize the utility you get out of it, while minimizing the losses you incur for those stats.
To add even more to the mix, you also need to consider the stamina and morale of a job. Both diminish with each job, and both can have progressively more negative outcomes if you don’t take care of them. Lower morale increases the chances of you “failing” a job, meaning you won’t get paid as much. Decreased stamina increases the chance of an accident, forcing you to rest in bed for a few days and, as a result, suffer huge losses to your stat EXP. Choosing to rest will increase your stamina, while spending time with friends will boost your morale, but if you choose one of these options you will not be working and so you will miss out on 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. Each group member has their own class and skills, but your character has the ability to learn each class over time. New skills often only come from doing the right jobs associated with that class, and while it may feel like you’re maximizing the growth of most classes relatively early, there’s almost always another one waiting for you to start a career. to develop a little further. It doesn’t come close to the class hacking system found in the brave series, but we still enjoyed this simplified version of it. Growing your character into a powerful and diverse jack of all trades feels satisfying and gives you a greater sense of being able to face the various enemies roaming the wild.
When you’re ready, you can grab three party members and go on an expedition to do some quests, and this is where things start to feel a little more like a traditional JRPG. A quest consists of your party walking in a straight line from left to right as a progress bar fills up, but this is often interrupted by monster attacks. As you continue your march and fill the bar more, your characters max health will continue to drop, further increasing the bet depending on what you’re doing. Sometimes you’ll be sent out to investigate a malfunction, requiring the bar to be full. Other times you just need to retrieve three of a certain item from felled monsters and you can return to the city once you have what you need.
Battles unfold in a traditional turn-based style, with the welcome addition of the ‘cha-cha-cha’ combo system. To start a combo, a character must ‘change’ an enemy’s status, for example by making them wet or setting them on fire. After an enemy is hit, they can be ‘chained’ by other characters who also change their status with their own attacks. Each new status change adds one to the ongoing chain, and this is then ended with an ‘accidental’ attack that deals more damage the more you build up the chain. Common enemies don’t really last long enough to get a good feel for this combo system, but the bosses and mini bosses offer plenty of opportunity to see the importance of building chains and maximizing damage here.
Managing the growth of stats and doing the occasional expedition is satisfying enough in the short term, but the gameplay loop of Various Daylife feels like it has a critical lack of interactivity. For example, you are only told about the myriad jobs your character participates in, while the player’s level of involvement here is relegated to a single entry. When you go on an expedition, you’re essentially just watching a loading bar fill up until an enemy encounter starts again and the battle screen appears. The city is literally a straight line that you walk along to visit different shops or locations. Instead of actually going on a grand adventure, it feels like you’re constantly one step away from the adventure; the kind of immersion most RPGs can create just isn’t quite there here.
Now, this release did start out as an experimental, cheap, mobile game, so it doesn’t feel quite fair to compare it to an excellent full-fat release like Xenoblade Chronicles 3 or even something smaller like Jack Move. Obviously, Various Daylife is aiming for a very different kind of experience, and while it feels like that experience is inferior, the sheer effort to create something unconventional is admirable and worth considering. Genres only grow and evolve over time when developers feel empowered to try new concepts — even if they don’t nail the execution every time, it’s worth thinking about what worked and what didn’t. Diverse Daylife may not be a title you should buy, but fans of the genre may want to check it out to see something that isn’t afraid to be different.
As for the presentation, Various Daylife seems to be using a modified form of last year’s visuals and art style Bravely Default II, characterized by slightly chibi characters with a slightly toy-like sheen. Unlike the gameplay, no risks were taken here, but we were generally pleased with the visuals, although not particularly impressed. For example, we’ve noticed many instances where a cutscene started and it took a few seconds for all textures to fully load for the new environment – it’s not a huge technical accident, but it does feel a bit distracting given the simplistic visuals on display.
Conclusion
Diverse Daylife is the epitome of an experimental RPG. This is the kind of game you’ll enjoy a lot more if you limit yourself to just 15 minutes or maybe half an hour a day. Stay within that time frame, and the daily stats management, quick quests, and simple class system will almost hit the spot. Play 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 obsessed with Team Asano’s work or for those who want a simple and light RPG for their Switch – if neither describes you, you’re not missing out much by choosing to succeed in front of.
0 Comments