It wouldn’t be a JRPG from Compile Heart if it didn’t have multiple endings, and in Dragon Star Varnir, one reigns above them all: The True Ending.
What Is The True Ending?
The True Ending is the best ending — the one that is most desirable and brings proper closure to the story, making everything worth it. Compared to Record of Agarest War 2 or Omega Quintet, obtaining the True Ending isn’t too difficult, but there are still hurdles you’ll need to clear.
How Do I Unlock It?
First and foremost: You’ll need to ensure your Madness remains at normal levels.
Signified by the orb at the top-right of the pause menu and it fills depending on certain actions and events, such as:
- Getting a Game Over
- Choosing certain dialogue options
Why is this so important? Because one of the endings, the Madness Ending, is reliant on the orb filling up. Obviously, you can’t get both endings at once because when a witch goes mad, the dragon in her womb hatches. You don’t want that.
Second, and this is the harder stipulation: Your Little Sisters need to survive.
As mentioned in the review, everything you do outside the home base causes time to progress. As it does, each Little Sister’s face icon will steadily go from green to purple. If any of their icons remain purple for too long, the corresponding girl will go insane and give birth to a dragon.
To prevent this, you need to feed them meat or blood, filling up the Satisfaction gauge (the yellow meter) in the process. However, the aforementioned Dragon Growth gauge increases each time the Satisfaction gauge fills, and the dragon will come out anyway if this happens too many times.
The girls will give birth if you take too long to finish most of the main story (ch.4 ~10), but there are fortunately ways to help ensure you finish before the worst comes to pass.
Okay, So What Can I Do?
There are a few tricks you can employ, so I’ll just list them:
- Don’t grind excessively: You can grind every so often if you need to, but don’t make a habit of doing so in every new area you enter — the game isn’t difficult enough to warrant it.
- Be concise while exploring: If you’re in an area, new or old, then know what you’re there for and remain focused on getting the task done efficiently. Get in, do your business, then leave.
- You don’t need to complete every quest: This might be a bit surprising if you’ve played past Compile Heart titles, but your quest completion rate has no bearing on achieving the True End. If you feel like a quest might take too long to accomplish, then just wait until Chapter 11 when the time limit is lifted.
- Buy Dragon Meat: The game leads you to believe the leading way to get food for the Little Sisters is to kill dragons. This is a trap. Not only can meat be purchased, but they’re cheap at a meager 300G each.
Before ending, I should mention that the soft time limit isn’t too strict, as I made a good number of mistakes and all three Little Sisters survived.
That said, following these guidelines will alleviate the stress that will inevitably come as you struggle to keep the girls alive, and attain the True Ending in a single playthrough.
