Various Daylife by Square Enix should have stayed on Apple Arcade. There I said it. This game does not work on platforms other than mobile platformers. Curious why? Let’s dive in.
Yes, I play Apple Arcade games – I usually play some games on my phone during my work break or on the couch. They differ from card games (I used to play a lot of Hearthstone) or platforming games, but I also love RPGs and other adventure-style games. With a mobile game, you can pace the gameplay, spreading it out over a few days to complete specific tasks since you don’t play a game on your phone for 8 hours straight. Take Jetpack Joyride (1 and 2), for example. Short bursts of fun and action, but a mission system keeps you entertained. Same with Fall Out Shelter – paced and gradual gameplay, precisely what you look for in mobile games. Well, then we have Various Daylife.
Various RPGs With Random Titles
For those who have never heard about Various Daylife, it is a role-playing video game published by Square Enix. The game was developed by DokiDoki Groove Works and key staff in charge of developing the Bravely Default and Octopath Traveler games. It was released on iOS, exclusively on their Apple Arcade service, in 2019 and on Nintendo Switch, Microsoft Windows, and PlayStation 4 in 2022. You would think that the game would be a smash hit with those names on board, didn’t you? Well, you’re wrong – sorry for being salty about it since I usually love Square Enix games. But, unfortunately, this wasn’t just my cup of tea on the Switch.
The story of Various Daylife begins with your character arriving 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’s borders. To help in the effort of expanding the town, your character joins an expedition team and begins fulfilling various odd jobs between excursions, making friends and allies along the way. A larger plotline does not define the narrative; instead, it’s the mosaic of smaller intersecting stories that comprise the bulk of the Various Daylife experience.
Noble Gameplay
So, I was; noble of birth, with a knack for intellectual stuff, working as a warrior to tame wolfs. Sound crazy, right? It’s just basic JRPG stuff, but when we look at the gameplay, it’s been stripped down to the absolute minimum. This isn’t to say this makes it a poor game overall, but it does require a specific adjustment of expectations to get the most out of it. The bulk of your experience will be spent picking up various jobs for your character to complete, such as waiting tables at the local tavern or culling the tiger population that is attacking merchants. You don’t do these jobs. However, you select them from a menu, and your character instantly does them while time jumps forward another half day.
Spreadsheet Time!
Even though you’re just selecting options from a menu, a surprising amount of strategy goes into how you live your work life. Each job will not only net you EXP to level up your character, but it will also grant EXP to your stats, which will jump up massively if you can manage to level them up. Every job has a different mixture of stats that it bumps up, and, crucially, there are usually one or two stats from which the job will take EXP away. To further complicate things, two stats will be randomly selected every new day and granted EXP multipliers for gaining and losing. Picking your next job is a fraught process of balancing multipliers and trying your best to maximize the utility you get out of them while minimizing the losses you face for those stats—time to gear up in Excel and spreadsheet the hell out of your build.
The jobs you choose to work will also directly inform the classes you unlock and use for your character in battle. Every party member comes with their class and skill set, but your character can learn every class with time. New abilities often come from working the right jobs related to that class. While it feels like you max out most classes’ growth relatively early, there’s almost always another one waiting for you to develop a little further. It felt a bit like Bravely Default Light, in a way.
Quests!
When you feel ready, you can grab three party members and head out on expeditions to carry out some quests, and this is where things start to resemble a traditional JRPG a little more – but most tediously ever. A quest consists of your party walking from left to right in a straight line while a progress bar fills up, which will often be interrupted by monster attacks. As you continue your march and the bar fills up more, your characters’ max health will continue to tick down, raising the stakes further depending on your actions. Sometimes you’re sent out to investigate a disturbance, which requires the bar to reach total capacity. Other times you need to retrieve three of a given item from felled monsters and can return to the city as soon as you have what you need. It felt like a chore and could have been changed up as they do in mobile games by completing these sections while away from the game… See where I’m going with this?
Conclusion
Various Daylife is the epitome of a mobile RPG. This is the kind of game you’ll have a much better time with if you limit yourself to only fifteen minutes or maybe half an hour a day. Stay within that time frame, and the daily stat management, quick quest runs, and the simple class system will hit the spot. Play for much longer, and you’ll soon realize how relatively shallow the gameplay loop is. Just pick this up on Apple Arcade, not on any other platform. You’ll be bored before you know it.
