Dragon Star Varnir

This game is Trolldespair, glad I went for the true ending right off the bat overall 2 sessions of this game for 5hours each and I finished it 9/10

Do you have a game that you like only because you WANT to? It may have very serious flaws, that you are perfectly aware of, but the game as a whole just speaks to you in a way that makes you treasure your time with it.
This is basically my feelings towards Dragon Star Varnir. I can rant about its flaws for an hour, then pause and go "but anyway, the game is really good". I will now try to outline these feelings. (Also, I am assuming that you have at least passing familiarity with Compile Heart games, abundant slice of life and fanservice is a staple of this studio and as such I will not focus on them here)
Story
If story writing as a whole was like betting on a roulette wheel, then writers of this game would bet all their chips on characters and leave everything else empty. Setting is pretty standard, story twists are presented rather weakly, pacing (and tone for that matter) is all over the place and some exposition feels rather handwave-y. It's serviceable, but don't expect any intrigue it builds to pay off in an interesting way. On the other hand, characters are insanely engaging, relationship dynamics and development are pretty fun to watch, and thankfully story understands that this is its greatest strength and puts this front and center. Also, this game has an optional dating sim mechanic. I am well outside of dating sim target audience, but I would like to say that Charlotta's plotline is something I found deeply touching and even restarted my old diary after watching it.
Gameplay
So, this game has something of a mechanics overload. By that I mean, when we are talking game design, games tend to have some kind of focus, a theme, and designers make mechanics around that theme more mechanically complex to enforce it, draw attention to it, and things that do not help the theme tend to have less detail and complexity. There is (minor spoiler) an amazing, outstanding example of this in this game starting from Chapther 4, Little Sisters. You have to take care of them by feeding them, and wether you don't feed them well enough or overfeed them - they die and you don't get best ending. This reinforces the game's narrative of delicate balance witches need to keep to survive, overpowers game's tempo and is in the center of your attention all the time. Building the game around this is enough to have something super unique. Unfortunately, it ends up kinda clashing with entirety of the game. First of all, there is an entire second mechanic that affects narrative, Madness, that you are free to not engage with at all by just avoiding bad dialog choices and dying. Then, Sisters get hungry only while you explore dungeons, and do so at absurd rates, where you can watch two weeks worth of story and they will be totally fine but go into dungeon for 10 minutes and they are losing their minds. And I don't know about you, but I feel like after making a dungeon crawling game with a ton of secrets and occasional grindy quests you should not then encourage player to avoid exploring and basically speedrun through the content. Of course, making Sisters' hunger entirely story dependent would be equally strange, so there should have been some kind of point system that adds hunger not by time of active gameplay but by actions. Thankfully last chapter locks the hunger and allows you to freely engage with everything you ran past, which is good, because both dungeon crawling and combat are absolutely amazing and I found gameplay loop to be highly engaging - there is a mechanic to oneshot any enemy AND get their abilities, that makes going to old locations with new characters totally worth it and painless, and you cannot just use most overpowered abilities since they have a limit of power when building your characters' kit. I didn't even mention Elixirs, which is something of a Colloseum with gear rewards that can be used as a band aid for running past everything in the dungeons. Combat is pretty tactical, too, but I sure you've read advertisements of this game so I don't need you to tell you that.
What I am trying to say is, the game has a lot of awesome ideas, it just needed to tweak how it put them together, because current system results in a serious mechanic clash.
So, overall, a game with a mediocre story, but super engaging character focus, and with a ton of good ideas that sometimes clash violently. A flawed, but interesting and engaging experience.

Bought this game on sale, almost did not due to some negative comments, but glad I did.
It has a nice story and characters (some strange loopholes though), and they incorporate the dark story they tell with cute girls quite well. And not to mention the male MC is good.
The combat and skill system is a bit iffy until you understand it, but once you do it is very flexible and you can make your party composition and how you use them up to your liking.
Two things I did not like:
- The taking care of lil sisters part. I wouldn't mind if you just needed to feed them after a while and strike balance. But the more you feed them the more dragon grows so it is like a "doom" timer which kinda makes you go faster through the game. Also, it didn't help that the game didn't explain it to me through the story. It threw me in the next dungeon, but since I read online what it was I went back to den and to lil sister room which kickstarted the tutorial for them...and they almost went insane at that point.
- You can't switch skills in the fight, so have to make a varied skill party for mobs but then the boss is an issue. What I did with bosses was that I saved, went to the boss to see what the weakness was, restarted the game and loaded the save game, and prepared for it.