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FurYu's Varlet is Taking a More Colorful Direction in Its First Demo

Developers FuRyu and Aquria is an underdog studio creating more digestible RPGs compared to the behemoths of Persona and Final Fantasy. The studio is best known for games like The Caligula Effect, Monark, Trinity Trigger, and Reynatis.

This year, FuRyu is launching Varlet, a brand new school life and dungeon crawling RPG that's similar to its own past The Caligula Effect and Monark releases. Anime News Network sat down to play a 20 minute demo of Varlet and also had the opportunity to speak with producer Hideaki Ito about the game's direction as well as FuRyu's venture into self-publishing.

One of the first aspects of Varlet that stood out to me was its art direction. Compared to Monark's dark red and black and The Caligula Effect's bright white and yellow palettes, Varlet opted for purple as its primary color. This helps Varlet differentiate itself from FuRyu's other games that have similar school settings. Its colorful aesthetic reminded me of Tokyo Mirage Sessions .

I've always admired FuRyu's 2D artwork, and that hasn't changed with Varlet. The character portraits that appear when characters speak are as vibrant as ever, especially with the more diverse color palette. The clean lines and crisp shade on the 2D artwork complement the 3D characters models on screen.

Whereas Monark was a tactics RPG and The Caligula Effect blended both real-time and turn-based elements, Varlet's battle system is much more straightforward. Your three characters take turns dealing damage to enemies and depleting their stun gauges. Once enemies are stunned, you can deal extra damage by attacking them in succession while they're down. So far, this battle system doesn't strike me as particularly innovative, so I'm reserving my full judgment until I'm able to experience it in full.

However, Ito tells me that this demo takes place very early in the game, so there are more battle features coming later down the line, saying, “The more you go into the game, battles are going to be more robust and complex.”

There's a unique system called the Leader and Ruler system, where the protagonist can switch between both styles. The former supports allies and grants buffs, while the latter focuses on dealing damage at the expense of hurting himself. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to experience both styles in this demo, but I'm curious to see how in-depth Varlet's combat system goes.

During the school day, I was able to walk around the courtyard and interact with NPCs, take on side quests, and increase your stats. The stats, in particular, were the most interesting part of this demo. Your protagonist has six: Morality, Psychopathy, Narcissism, Sympathy, Machiavellian, and Altruism. By performing certain actions, you can increase them and unlock battle buffs.

For example, I found a phone on the ground and it gave me the option to leave it alone or mess with it by taking a picture of myself. I chose the latter and it increased my Psychopathy. As a result, the protagonist could now reflect back a small amount of damage taken, but seemingly at the expense of reducing my allies' HP. It's an interesting take on a morality system that gives players agency in how they want to build out the protagonist.

In an interesting business move, FuRyu is also self-publishing Varlet. In the past, the company has worked with other publishers including XSeed, Atlus, and NIS America. “We wanted to challenge ourselves with self-publishing because that's not a simple thing to do,” Ito explained.

He continued, saying, “We also wanted to make sure this game was simul-released globally.” Ito previously worked at CAPCOM on games like Monster Hunter, so he knows the importance of having close release dates between the Japanese and global versions of games, and wanted to achieve that at FuRyu.

While I wasn't able to experience Varlet's battle system to the fullest extent, the captivating art style drew me in and the school life simulation aspect got me curious. As a fan of The Caligula Effect myself, I'm excited to see what Varlet has in store when it launches on August 28 for PC, PS5, and Switch.