So…I’m finding myself having a hard time deciding how to review this.

Dragons

The issue, essentially, comes down to how a lot of the different pieces fit together. I’m gonna boil it down to three pieces: The gameplay loop, the story/writing, and the presentation of graphics and sound. Let’s start with the gameplay loop, because that’s the simplest to talk about. Or more specifically, the combat engine.

It’s solid. Like, okay, this isn’t treading a ton of new ground. It’s not quite babby’s first JRPG, but it’s definitely teen’s third JRPG, if that makes any sense. The core combat gameplay is juuust a bit more than your classic “I-go-you-go left-right” Final Fantasy I gameplay, mostly by bringing in two key factors: 

One is time. My tabletop-poisoned brain wants to call it ticks, but basically every move pushes you further down a timeline of upcoming turns, and some push you more than others. So getting in one or two little quick attacks before you pop off with a big spell is a strategy.

The second, is positioning. While the game only sometimes does much with the basic forward-back-left-right grid positioning, every one of your characters can move up and down to three tiers of height, because all fights are in the air because you’re all witches. We’ll get back to that.

So these aren’t super meaty, but, I mean, there is meat on the bone, right? It’s a solid starting point. You can do a lot with it. And it mixes nicely with a system where you can spend points on these cores you get from enemies, to unlock stat boosts and new attacks and spells. Not perfect, but there’s, again, solidity here.

Witches

And then there’s the story, and this is where things get…Trickier.

So the setup as we get it is one where there’s a lot of conflict between what I’ll call “grimdark bullshit”, and “anime bullshit”. Right at the start of the game, we have some classic dark fantasy stuff. The world is plagued by witches, women of darkest magic who feast on the flesh of dragons and ravage the countryside, said to relish in the destruction that comes with their eventual eruption into a great and terrible dragon themselves.

Then the witches turn out to all be dressed like it’s Halloween in Akihabara. And when (spoilers for literally the first thirty seconds of in-game content) our main protagonist Zephy goes down fighting a dragon, these witches choose to save his life by feeding him dragon blood.

Which the one does by filling her mouth with it and kissing him.

Nothing says true love like swapping dragon blood out in the woods.

For reasons that I’m sure are plot relevant, this also gives him witch powers.

These include surfing on his giant, otherwise totally unused secondary sword.

And, see, that’s the problem I keep running into with Dragon Star Varnir. The game has these massive swings between highs and lows, between grim and comical, or just plain weirdly horny. I never even get the sense that these tonal shifts are intentionally contrasting, so much as just trying to have its cake and eat it too. And speaking of weirdly horny…

The big booba

So I mentioned the fashion the witch girls wear.

I didn’t mention just how, fucking, often the game threw fanservice at me. One of the central lead characters, literally one of the first three we meet, just has left the entire top half of breasts the size of grapefruits out and ripe for the picking. Now, I’m certainly not going to say that you can’t have horny games, or horny design aesthetic. Not at all.

But…Okay, two things.

Actually, make it three.

One, horny is a very strong and distinctive flavor. It doesn’t always go with everything. There are some things it really doesn’t go with. I wouldn’t put lime jelly on my cheeseburger, you know? And while I’m not about to try and prescribe rules for this sort of thing, it feels like…Well, like “horny waifus” and “grimdark fantasy world with grief and sorrow” don’t mix well as a story.

Except, two, it would be something if it at least attempted to mix. Because, see, none of the girls act horny. Nobody’s, frankly, acting in any way like they intentionally chose to dress this way. Miss Half A Top Is Enough, Right is in fact the one who’s hostile, confrontational and aggressive, as ready to stab you as one can get! She, to be blunt, acts like the sort of person who would only wear an outfit like this if it was required. Which, okay, the super modes when your inner dragon awakens do seem to be something that get put upon the characters despite themselves…

And that gets us to three. Because…Woo, how do I put this gently…

So we’ve got booby lady.

We’ve also got ladies who are more…petite.

While in a rather cutesy art style that emphasizes youthful features, and de-emphasizes signs of maturity.

What I’m saying here is that despite the girls in-fiction presenting and acting entirely as adults, I’ve chosen not to include certain screenshots because I’m not certain they won’t fall afoul of content laws.

I’m…pretty desensitized to the stuff that some sketchier anime and anime-inspired games can have. I also grew up in the time of the internet where people would just literally send you pictures of corpses to fuck with you. Some part of my brain is just blackened like gunmetal to endure some nasty shit, right?

And despite all of this, some of these outfits literally made me uncomfortable as I played the game. There were definitely things I would never want to have to explain to someone if they walked in the room at the wrong time.

Seeing stars

Oh and also it overheated my goddamned Switch.

I’ve never seen that happen before.

I’m sitting there, playing a visual novel scene, right? Literally it’s just PNGs sliding around in front of a JPG while text plays. This isn’t even “you could do this on a cellphone”; You could do this on an ebook reader.

And then my Switch just goes and says it’s past safe heat limits and will now shut down.

I pull it out of the dock, and I find it painfully hot to the touch. I straight up cannot hold my hand against the actual Switch for any length of time. I ended up holding it in front of a fan until it was only warm to the touch, and then quitting the game and letting it sit on the menu for a few minutes until the internal fan had pulled enough heat out of the device.

This was after I had a great deal of performance issues just running around the 3D world in handheld mode, despite that 3D world being…Incredibly simple.

Now, this is a port, of a PS4 game no less. So I’ll fully accept that the code might have some weirdness that was hard to wrangle. And we’re also talking a pretty small team, who have done a lot of projects.

And hell, I’ll even put forward the possibility that the problem is on my end. My Switch is a launch model; I’d be disappointed, but not entirely unsurprised, if it turned out that the problem was some failure in the fan limiting its ability to push heat out.

But it still happened.

Varnish

So where does all of that ultimately leave us?

I…I don’t know, man. I feel incredibly conflicted, honestly. There’s a lot to like here in the writing. There’s a lot of interesting versions of classic fantasy bullshit it’s playing with.

Aaaand then the girl drawn and 3D modeled like she should be studying for her high school entrance exams dragons out, and now she’s wearing what’s literally just some designs painted over her body, and I won’t lie, it feels unpleasant in a way that even the previous weirdly-horny games I’ve played didn’t.

Also there’s the whole “game tried to cook my Switch and melt it down to collect the precious metals” issue.

So…

Here’s where I’m left.

The game, Dragon Star Varnir, is, something for you to decide where your comfort level lies. I’d be lying if I said I saw anything here go further than other products I’ve seen. But I’d also be lying if I said that made it feel okay to me.

This Switch port, though? Unless there’s some serious performance patches, the only reason to play it here is if you desperately need it in your life, and also don’t have any other way. Just get it on PS4 if you’re gonna pull the trigger. At least there it probably won’t run quite this bad.