Wizardry Variants Daphne is the latest (at time of writing) game in the Wizardry series, with music by Hitoshi Sakamoto. I don't know a ton about the developer Drecom. The only things of theirs I think I've touched before this were Disgaea RPG and, briefly, the mobile version of Everybody's Golf. They seem like a pretty mercenary mobile game developer, but I haven't run into enough of their games to know them by reputation otherwise. Variants Daphne so far seems like something of a cross between a typical dungeon crawler (I'll say Elminage or Demon Gaze as a point of comparison since those had more discrete dungeons you accessed from a map) and Radiant Historia. You take on the role of the Man from the Abyss, the Masked Man, a ghoul-looking adventurer who woke up in the Beginning Abyss one day with a mysterious power in their right hand that lets them turn back time on objects. As the tutorial progresses, the scope of this ability expands and it becomes apparent the Masked Man can time travel in an attempt to set the timeline straight. It's neat, and I'm having a pretty good time with it. I wrote a bunch of tips down at the bottom so just hit End if you're trying to get an idea of what to look out for.
2024-12-15: The game has not added any new content in a month. I'm still checking in daily, more or less, but there's just not anything new to say.
2024-11-14: The game's stuck in a maint with a TBD end time again, so I'll talk a bit about what we've worked out in the last week or so. I hit level 50 on some of my main party and with the way the xp scaling works, upping their grade before getting the XP was a mistake. For the fastest XP gain it makes more sense to leave everyone at level 30 and farm the ship until they hit the cap. It seems like they forgot to do the check for xp max for units sent out on dispatch.
2024-11-04: I got through the end of chapter 2 now. It seems like that's the end of content for now. The fights were pretty decently-balanced, and I was starting to sweat at the end of the boss fight. It looks like they're planning about eight more chapters now, and then I guess they'll go from there.
2024-11-03: I got through the iron grade exam, and now most of my party's around level 42 or 43. I've gotten back to making progress on the main story and I'm most of the way through the arena fights now. I'm using the japanese wiki page to figure out what to do to advance because it's a bit unintuitive in places. The purple garlic quest stumped me a bit, but the bit the guide there was missing was that to start it you need to talk to someone in the tavern.
The iron grade exam wasn't too bad. It had one of those plant monsters but the main thing seemed to be casting a spell that increased the party's resistance so that they wouldn't get poisoned. The guide recommended Latumofis level 3, but Kinapic seemed to do the job just fine. The game continues to be pretty buggy but I'm still having a pretty good time with it.
2024-11-01: The first event is out and it's pretty straightforward. Most of the items in the event shop seem pretty bad, but the scrolls to let you upgrade any skill seem pretty good. Farming it seems like it's going to be pretty annoying but I don't really want the helmet even though it gives some IK resist. It seems like the strat for farming currency is to drop down to easy and run around B4F of the event's dungeon.
2024-10-28: I hit bronze rank today. The main issue I was having with the bronze grade exam was not using a staff on my Priest, causing me to lose out on about 70-100 points of healing, which is about double what I was doing. It seems like the ideal team right now is to go all in on buffing Debra with Lanavaille and Alice and Elise's passives, and probably using Yekaterina in the neutral mage slot for her passive ambush prevention. I'm gonna chill out on grinding for a bit since a bug's stopping me from selling items to get back below the cap and I'm ahead of the progress curve anyway. I'm a couple floors and a few fights from clearing the second main dungeon, but that can wait a bit.
2024-10-21: I've been playing this one for about a week now so I figure I'll write a page about it. I've just finished clearing the tutorial dungeon and rescuing the king, so I have some idea what the game's doing now. There's not a whole lot of information about the game out there right now, so I'll write a bit of what I've figured out with some of the goons in the lab. You probably want Skelly to be Neutral. It lets him fit into parties a bit more easily. Lanavaille's passive end of fight healing and damage boost if all the units in a row are good/neutral makes her probably the best SSR unit right now, and I'd probably recommend picking her when the bone seller gives you the option to get an SSR of your choosing. It falls off a bit towards the end of the tutorial but it's not like there's anything better that could fit in that slot right now. Marianne's passive reducing MP costs makes her arguably the best priest right now since most of her spells cost about 33% less than any of the other options. Lulunarde's advice is pretty much always correct. Her introduction is sus as hell but she's not led me wrong yet. The monster in the room on B2F respawns indefinitely and XP gained is based on what level the unit is when receiving it. If you can manage it it's better to bank a bunch of levels and then go back to the inn. Lanavaille makes farming this room way easier. The boss at the end of the Lead Grade exam is undead so you'll want to bring anti-undead weapons. The Guild Exchange tab at the Jeweler has 2000 gold seemingly weekly and that's one of the main progress blockers right now, so remember to grab that. As with most Wizardry titles mages are better for crowd control than they are for doing damage, at least early-game. KATINO and BATILGREF are your friends, since an enemy that's asleep is an enemy that's not doing damage for at least a turn, and an enemy that's slowed down is getting less turns, respectively. Let's see, what else? Reversing the stones on B8F opens up shortcuts on B7F that let you avoid the poison floors there. You can get no-grade guild tags by dismissing adventurers. Nameless units give one tag, named units give two, SSR units give three (just dismiss the nameless units). I'm not sure how the higher grades work yet. Permadeath is possible in this game, though you'd need to fail to revive them twice for it to happen, and I think the revival success rate might just actually be their Fortitude number, since revives are more likely if their Fortitude is over 50. Fortitude continues to heal even when a unit's dead so just leave them be until it's at 100.