Varlet is a game that is more than the sum of its parts, but it still feels undercooked and overpriced.

The core pitch is going to seem familiar if you've played any RPGs of the last few years. It's a school-based RPG with a split between the battle/events and structured downtime. The battles are turn-based, largely traditional combat affairs where you use different abilities to bring down opponents. The downtime segments have you making dialogue choices to align with certain personality traits, spending one-on-one time with other students at the school to unlock unique interactions, and investigating strange happenings around campus. Most folks would probably be familiar with this kind of gameplay tempo from titles like Persona or Fire Emblem: Three Houses, but FuRyu has made several titles that slot into a similar format.

There's a virtual reality overlay called Johari that provides a context for the UI, digital interactions with the real world, and the general conceit of how strange things happen. The virtual reality component acts as the supernatural or magical element in other games. When things get weird, that's because there's a digital mishap and the heroes need to step in and handle it. Rather than dungeons, you step into Glitches that act as pocket spaces where the cast can access their over-the-top abilities, defeat strange beasts, and the like. It's nothing terribly groundbreaking, but it's perfectly serviceable and gets the job done.

It's all rather familiar territory, which is not a bad thing at all in and of itself.

In fact, I found myself pleasantly surprised by the first few hours in the game. I was initially skeptical of the school setting and the similarities with other games, but there was a bit more going on than I thought. The core cast is quite strong, with good performances by the voice cast and some playful interactions. What struck me most was that the dialogue between the characters felt very natural, and despite a few tropey bits here and there (“I'm your cousin and you can stay at my place and call me big sis!”), most of the characters behaved in ways that made sense.

I was a bit concerned about the overall presentation, though. The character animations were stilted and a bit bland. The combat choices didn't seem that engaging. The side activities didn't seem to have much of a point – but that's not a novel problem for an RPG to have. Sometimes it takes a few hours for a game to find its feet and reveal the wider depth on offer. Noa, Sota, Aruka, and the other students were enjoyable enough that I was optimistic about Varlet getting better as I proceed further.

Well…

The problem is that Varlet never fulfills its initial promise. There's simply not a lot of game here for a full-priced title. The enemies have next to no variety and are all the same handful of recolored character models. The dungeons all have the same two or three tricks in their layouts, and all end up playing the same. What I thought was an initial promise turned out to be most of what the game had to offer right out of the gate, but the game just keeps trudging along without much interest.

Perhaps most shocking and disappointing is the way the student activity segments fail to deliver. Between each story beat, there are times when you wander the school grounds solving problems for people. It's a free roam mode with some guard rails that lets you happen upon side events, small conversations, and so on. You are ostensibly doing this to increase the standing of the SSS and get likes for the social media page. The first few times I did this little mini-game-of-sorts, I found it simple, but it held promise. That promise went unfulfilled.

Very quickly, I realized that the first impression I had formed in the initial fifteen minutes with the mode was not a preamble – it was the entirety. What I initially thought would loop back into the character stories or mechanics in a major way turned out to be just busy work with no major benefit. I could just as easily skip those segments with next to no impact on the gameplay. Over time, I didn't find the conversations between the NPC students terribly fascinating, and ended up running around the school grounds pinging the AI-assisted radar pulse constantly to find meaningless pickups. As it turns out, this transition from “solid first impression with promise” to “shallow and repetitive with little redeeming qualities” was a throughline for the experience as a whole.

The combat isn't terribly engaging either. There's very little character customization, save for a barebones skill tree that gives you so few points and paths you might as well not have it. There's also no true mana or resource system in the game other than the speed with which attacks are put in the initiative queue. Enemies only have a few attack options, and most of them have pre-set responses that are your best option to deal with them. So you find your favorite or best attacks with each character and repeat the same actions over and over again, with minor variations as new cast members show up.

Again, this sort of thing happens in RPGs sometimes. In fact, a lot of my favorite RPGs have incredibly repetitive combat mechanics. But usually, there is some other element at play that adds spice to the mix. Maybe it's exploration and discovery, or interesting locales and varied monster designs, or maybe the real test of skill is in timed button presses or managing your logistics as you traverse dungeons. Varlet has none of these things and instead leaves you with just the repetition.

Even the other, more ephemeral qualities of an RPG are lacking here. The character animations are stilted in and out of combat. The dialogue options are often simple binary choices that don't seem to matter. The soundtrack is forgettable, and the same handful of dull locations get reused time and again. For a game that is charging you for a full-price experience, it feels incredibly empty and lackluster.

That said, I still couldn't bring myself to completely hate Varlet. A big draw here is, again, simply enjoying the character interactions. Many titles I've played don't have very good character writing, and when a lot of these games are spent reading/listening to dialogue between characters, that certainly counts for a lot. The character interactions being enjoyable isn't quite the same as having a great deal of thematic depth or interesting characterization, though. It's nice to hear their chatter, but I wouldn't say they are compelling character stories. It's above-average dialogue in a below-average, uh, everything else.

Is that enough to carry a game at full price? Sadly, not really.

Varlet is by no means a bad game. It is a functional experience that charms for a few hours based on quality character interactions and dialogue. Sadly, this is not enough to carry the full game on its own, as nearly every other aspect lacks depth and is mired in repetition. For a budget title or at a deep discount, it might be worth checking out if you simply must have another school-based RPG in your life, but the sticker shock is too high for what it's on offer.