Various Daylife Guide: Tips, Cheats, and Strategies

In our Various Daylife guide, we cover the basics of this hit new JRPG, including a complete breakdown of how to play it and how it works and a bunch of tips, cheats, strategies, and tips to help you make the most of it.

In case you haven’t heard of it, Various Daylife is a brand new JRPG that just launched on Apple Arcade that was designed by the makers of JRPG hits Octopath Traveler and Bravely Default.

It involves exploring a brand new world full of adventure with a colourful cast of characters who you’ll bond with over the course of your journey. There are turn-based battles, bosses, gear to collect, and the usual JRPG tropes of levelling up and picking your character’s job.

Various Daylife Guide – How it Works:

If you’ve played a JRPG before, you’ll be pretty familiar with Various Daylife. You play as an unknown hero who arrives on the shores of a brand new land that’s ripe for exploration.

While you’ll partake in plenty of adventure, Various Daylife is also interested in the mundanity of everyday life — much like The Sims or similar games of its ilk.

Let’s take a look at its various systems and mechanics.

Jobs:

To afford your adventuring equipment for you and your allies, you’ll need to perform a variety of jobs from secretary work to waitering and even dancing. There are tons of jobs to perform, and the list will go as you progress throughout the game.

Each job has it’s own subsequent job — which acts in a similar manner to a class in other JRPGs. These range from the standard Warrior, Knight, and Hunter to the rather unique Servite, Server, and Tailour.

Working:

The different classes benefit from different stats, which you can boost individually by taking on work. Generally, Warrior jobs will boost Warrior stats and so on, though you might want to take a broader approach and keep all of your stats topped up in case you want to change your job later.

Equipment and Food:

You’ll also earn money, which you can spend on equipment, items, and food that will help your characters on adventures. You can also spend it in town, on food, drinks, and activities that might provide you with a temporary statistical boost courtesy of “tips” you’ll pick up from nearby clientele.

Bonding:

You could also spend your cash on inviting a friend to spend some time with you. This will increase your bond with that particular character over time, improving the power of their special attacks — powerful joint attacks that involve both you and that character attacking the enemy at once.

Training:

You’ll also need to spend money on levelling up your fellow cast members (you gain experience yourself by performing jobs, but have to train your party members separately) and purchasing equipment for them.

Quests:

Quests are easily the most fun part of Various Daylife though, and you can head out on these by visiting the local guild. Before you head out on a quest though, you’ll need to first choose three party members to join you, and the items you’ll bring.

Items:

You’re limited to four items, though you can increase this number by bringing certain characters with you. Items include healing and mana potions, revives, food, monster repellants, and many more. Deciding what you’ll need to survive the battle ahead is half of the battle.

Battles:

The other half serves as an actual battle though. While exploring the nearby areas — which you’ll do automatically whenever you set out on a quest — you’ll trigger random turn-based battles against the local wildlife. These play much the same as classic Final Fantasy games or similar older JRPGs.

Whenever it’s a party member’s turn, you can simply attack, cast a spell or use a skill, defend to absorb incoming damage, or use an item. You can also choose to flee, which ends the current quest and sends you back to town but prevents you from losing experience in various stats, which is the punishment for death in Various Daylife.

Change, Chain, and Chance:

As is typical of this particular studio, the battle system has its own quirks. These include Change, Chain, and Chance attacks. Change is the name of the various different status effects in Various Daylife, and range from poison to dazed and many more.

While an enemy is in Change state, you can perform a Chain attack, which changes the Change state to something else and increases your current Chain by one, or a Chance attack, which has a chance to instantly kill the opponent. These typically appear when you use a skill or spell with an elemental advantage, like using a Thunder spell on an enemy that is soaked in water.

Chains can go all of the way up to 10, and you’ll deal huge damage to an enemy whenever you break the Chain, with the biggest increase in numbers each Chain level all of the way up to 10. For example, you’ll deal way more damage by breaking a chain at level 10 than level two.

Camping:

Between battles, your character will walk automatically forward on a 2D plane, and will slowly lose maximum HP as they get more tired. You can restore your maximum HP by camping and eating food, which comes in various different forms.

If you can afford it, you can also use the expensive monster repellant item to keep monsters at bay, allowing you to get eight hours of sleep. This totally restores your health, maximum health, and mana, and is very handy to use when you’re approaching a boss battle.

Night:

If you’re in a particularly dangerous zone, you might want to sleep over night as that’s when travelling is at its most dangerous. Powerful monsters with red glowing eyes show up at night and can devastate even the most prepared party if you’re particularly careless or unlucky.

Quest Rewards:

Aside from earning a ton of cash, as you complete quests for the guild, you’ll unlock new characters, jobs, activities, locations, adventure mechanics, and more. You’ll also see more of the world, which is made up of different biomes that affect your adventure in numerous different ways. Rainy biomes, for example, reduce your maximum health a lot faster than drier biomes.

Various Daylife – Tips, Cheats, and Strategies:

• Bring a balanced team into battle: As you progress throughout the game, you’ll unlock a bunch of new characters that each have different jobs to select from. At first you won’t have much choice, but later on you’ll want to select characters that complement each other in battle, and are well-suited to the challenges ahead.
• Prepare for the unique challenges in each adventure: Each quest in Various Daylife differs in numerous different ways, from the tasks you have to perform to the length of time you’ll be gone for. Bring the particular items and characters you’ll need to get the job done. Generally, you’ll want a good healer, MP restore items, and food on every adventure. During longer quests, you’ll benefit from bringing at least one monster repellant to allow you to sleep and fully restore your HP and MP. This is near essential to perform just before tackling a boss.
• Bond with your favourite characters: We recommend that you try and achieve the maximum bond level with every single character, but, at the very least, make sure you do so with your favourite battle characters. Increasing your bond with them improves the damage and properties of their special attack in battle, which can really help during tougher fights.
• Keep your mood and stamina topped up between jobs: Each time you perform a job, you’ll lose mood and stamina points. Lose stamina and you might have an accident during a job, setting back your progress improving the various different stats and losing you a few days to bed rest. Mood is less dangerous to drop, but can result in you getting poor sleep, which reduces the amount of stamina you restore, and can result in you failing a job, which grants you less experience and cash rewards. Keep both of these topped up and you can get your hands on on excellent score when performing a job, which considerably boosts your rewards.
• Try and out level the quests: Quests can prove a decent challenge, and we found the game a lot more manageable by out-levelling them. Just train up your character and allies to be a couple or more levels above the recommended level for each quest and you should get through each of them without a hitch.
• Pick up tips: You can receive temporary statistical boosts by picking up tips from your fellow citizens. Simply visit a location in town and interact with it to get a chance at a tip. You could eat at the restaurant, visit the pool, or go down to local tavern for a drink or two.

Glen Fox

Head of Editorial

Glen has over a decade's worth of experience in gaming journalism, writing for Pocket Gamer, Pocket Tactics, Nintendo Life, and Gfinity. When he's not badgering everyone about the dangers of passive text, you can probably find him playing Wild Rift.