Apple Arcade review #47: Various Daylife

From time to time during this endless, Sisyphean task of reviewing every single Apple Arcade game, there will be times when I just have to admit defeat and move on.

Various Daylife is a traditional JRPG from Square Enix that looks and plays like a Nintendo 3DS game. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with that: the user interface isn’t very attractive or polished, but it does look like a “proper” old school 3DS JRPG. I’m guessing that’s what they were going for, and they succeeded. To a point.

The whole game appears to have been designed for the 3DS: the top half of the vertical screen shows your character in the world. Below that is the “control area”, where you can slide and tap your finger to move left or right. And below that again (on what would be the 3DS’ second screen) there’s the map.

It honestly feels like a half-hearted, maybe even lazy, implementation for a high-resolution touch screen, and it didn’t make we want to continue playing. The uninspired art and the countless text screens didn’t help. Again, there’s nothing wrong with reading lots of text, but the generic setting and story didn’t grab me.

Look, the moment I booted up Various Daylife I realised I couldn’t give this game a fair shake. It requires a level of investment that I’m not ready to make, and there’s absolutely nothing about it that appealed to me. That may be unfair, I know, but no one’s paying me to write these reviews, and I only have so much time left on this planet.

There’s probably an audience for Various Daylife, one that’s eager to dig into a “classic JRPG” on their phone. That audience isn’t me. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the game, so if you’re potentially in that audience, you should probably seek out more informed (and more in-depth) reviews than this one.

Sorry.

Link: https://apps.apple.com/no/app/various-daylife/id1439754817