SOULVARS

[h1]Grind Your Soul[/h1] [h2]Story[/h2] The game starts with some impressive cutscenes, but the characters have very minimal characterization and dialogue. At best, Yakumo is looking for another Soulbearer, but we don't know much about his relationship with that Soulbearer and one of the antagonists. Even the glossary barely explains anything substantial about any character. [h2]Gameplay[/h2] The game has an interesting deckbuilding system where your characters have a "hand" of 5 soulbits and you draw from a "deck" to refill that hand. However, once you have less than 5 soulbits left, you have the option of reloading all Soulbits at the cost of HP, with the cost being higher on hard mode. To make the most of your deck, you need to set up Arts, which combine Soulbits into stronger actions. And to use up more Soulbits in one turn, you must fulfill conditions to increase your AP temporarily, such as buffing, healing, guarding/dodging an attack, landing a crit, or most commonly, hitting a weakness. Sometimes, it pays to cancel an art in order to use the individual Soulbits in a way that nets you more AP next turn, allowing you to use bigger Arts. While this battle system is creat…

Truly a hidden gem on steam. Perfect combination of deckbuilding and jrpg, although the story aspect is quite weak. But if you are looking for a creative jrpg focus on fluid and enjoyable combat you should give this a try. Also the battle music is the best. I still listen to it sometimes.

Bonus: The game play and deck building are really fun, especially the different tricks to get specific cards. The leveling system is also interesting, and doesn't take too much grinding to build up new stats and card combos. The execution in general is very fun and you need to watch which cards you use, as reloading them costs HP. Malus: The story is very hard to understand, partially due to the quality of the translation and partially due to it just suddenly telling you new information with no foreshadowing. As an example, someone who was left behind in an early dungeon came back to reveal some major lore that would have fit in Cosmic Star Heroine, but there were no real clues that I could parse that gave me any indication that what was revealed had been going on.

I picked this game up after watching a friend stream this for the music. After trying it out myself, this game does have some challenging moments but this game is also fun and enjoyable to play through.

Soulvars is a highly customizable and fast-paced turn-based battler that seems to draw inspiration from games like Megaman Battle Network, Kingdom Hearts:CoM, Baten Kaitos, and Shin Megami Tensei. It claims to be a deckbuilding game but that's only true in the sense that you do, in fact, build a deck. Players build decks by equipping armor, weapons, and accessories to their characters in classic JRPG fashion. This loads Soul Bits into their decks. Soul bits are like cards that each hold a move a character can perform. They can use them in various combinations to create combo skills that deal massive damage and hit multiple times. Each character gets a hand of 5 Soul Bits per turn and you can use them to hit weaknesses and earn extra actions for the next turn or combine them into a more effective attack that might not net you that bonus round and consumes those points you banked last round. The battles are deeply strategic and the customization system feels genuinely rewarding. By the end of the game, every soul bit you play is incredibly important to your overall gameplan. You can overcome weaknesses with consumables you can purchase from various shops around the map but the econ…

This game wasn't engaging enough for me to finish beating it. The combat is okay, but it's just not for me. I'm not fond of the very idea of attacking being related to RNG, as it makes strategy a mostly moot point. The only real strategy there is is building around specific equipment/skills, which is just utilizing combo skills, which are reliant on RNG. The art style is decent. To me, the music blows, and the level design is bland, ugly, and boring. The story is essentially non-existent. There's very sparse dialogue, and the dialogue that does exist is just asinine garbage that amounts to nothing. The characters basically don't even have personalities. The only thing to this game is the combat, but the enemies that I ran across in the time I spent playing, were just boring. There was never any strategy outside of just trying to spam combo skills. It's no SMT or Etrian Odyssey. This game just ain't for me.