Varlet is a turn-based JRPG made by FuRyu. Following the popular Japanese trend of completely immersing oneself in high school, the struggle with peer pressure, extracurricular activities, and camaraderie, players will have an immediate benchmark to compare themselves to.
The Persona series set a pretty high bar when approaching the many aspects of student life, splicing an alternate reality filled with monsters and threats that existentially threaten the real world, at the same time, allowing you to enjoy the many wonders and activities not only in the school, but in the city as well.
With Varlet, it seems their inspiration comes off a little more focused, strictly on the school life, or lack thereof. How well does this FuRyu JRPG stack up against the giant? Well, let’s say this class might be the one you are better off not studying up on.
Varlet
Developer: FuRyu, Aquria
Publisher: FuRyu
Platforms: Windows PC, Nintendo Switch (reviewed)
Release Date: August 27, 2025
Price: $59.99
Immediately, as you start the game, you are offered a fairly promising intro of getting to know the protagonist and his elder sister. In addition to being able to fully name your hero’s name and last name, you are offered a personality test.
Answering questions will result in gaining various personality trait points between morality, Altruism, being the “light” traits, Machiavellianism, Psychopathy, and Narcissism being the “Dark” traits.
These 6 different stats don’t come into play until a bit further into the game, so they don’t have a use immediately; however, as you progress and make decisions, they will increase accordingly.
Once you begin your school life, you are enlisted into a school club known as the SSS, or Student Support Group, which helps people around the campus with their many troubles and difficulties. Tasks will include mostly finding things off the ground, placing AR ads around the various spots of the campus, few other activities involve entering glitches, which are essentially mini dungeons that may have a monster or two to eliminate, or some loot.
Assisting the club also has a rating, plus a like gauge essential to progressing its favorability on campus, but what really burns is that you will quickly realise there is truly no incentive to ever do any of the activities or even do it at all. The only thing that happens is to increase the range of your “Sonar” that allows you to find items more efficiently. That, and also being able to learn more about other students, which, aside from lore and immersion, does nothing for the party.
Feeling unrewarded is actually quite a large and blaring problem that infests this game in almost every aspect of its existence. Not only in doing the pointless school activities, but even when you actually begin exploring the glitch world, where you get to engage in what’s the best feature of the game. The combat system is surprisingly clever and begs to have more to make it shine.
In classic turn-based fashion, you can select your commands, but when you do, they are placed in a queue solely decided by what “Step” value they have. The lower the value, the earlier the action will perform.
The strategy behind this is further reinforced by trying to ensure your offensive characters line up on the same step so they can perform a link chain, which will do massive damage not only to an enemy glitch’s health, but their stun bar as well.
The glitches don’t often allow you to perform these often, as many of them will attempt to do a “CB” ability, which can cancel out a special attack completely. The game is generous in allowing you to see all information about the battle.
It’s always above an enemy’s name, so you can always make the right choice. The six personality traits also make their usefulness known as they can enhance certain capabilities passively, altering combat techniques with additional effects.
Combat manages to be quite satisfying, but what isn’t is character progression. It really feels like they completely forgot to include this very crucial feature in the game. For starters, there is virtually no equipment system whatsoever. So finding chests during glitch exploration already feels very unrewarding.
The only use for money in Varlet is just for more consumables, since there’s nothing else to use it for to aid your combat prowess. Skill Trees are kind of late into the game, and to say the least, they are a complete disappointment. No abilities can be found in them, no real buildcraft aside from focusing on stats, and since every character you get is more or less a very specific archetype, it’s best to just focus on stats that prioritize their role.
Exploring the Glitches throughout the game all feel the same, pretty much from start to finish, with some distinction in the visuals, but really not by much. You will walk along paths blocked by very arbitrary monster glitch placements, and if you sneak behind them using the floor properly by creating a holographic bridge, it’s possible to create a preemptive attack.
Performing one of these will deal a large amount of damage to all glitches right at the start of the battle, but upon discovering this, I realized a very strong exploit. In certain parts of dungeons, enemies can respawn in the exact spot.
By standing at a perfect position behind their spawning point, I left my controller alone, repeatedly wiping out battles for free, gaining free exp. This could be seen as a good technique, but the game is easy enough as it is since you are in complete control of lowering the difficulty at any time with no trade-off.
Varlet isn’t a game I would recommend to anyone. Even for Japanese high school game enjoyers, there’s just not enough content or reward behind said content to really motivate interest in its pursuit. Every feature in the game feels half-cooked, with the combat system being the only interesting thing, but ultimately falls hard on its face since there’s really no feeling of reward or satisfaction.
Varlet was reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2 using a code provided by FuRyu. Additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy is here. Varlet is now available for Windows PC (via STEAM) and Nintendo Switch.
