AVARIAvs

I came into AVARIAvs expecting a gimmick and left genuinely impressed by the core idea, even if the full package doesn't quite deliver on its promise. Brooklyn-based indie outfit Juncture Media has essentially taken the party-vs-party structure of classic JRPG combat and flipped it into a competitive PvP arena. You pick a team of three heroes from a roster of sixteen, each carrying two distinct archetypes that determine their Focusburn ability and stat growth. Both players issue commands simultaneously through a radial menu, then watch the results play out. Matches are timed, and if you finish your selections early you can actively pressure the opponent's clock. It creates a low-key but real tension that standard turn-based games almost never produce. The class variety does most of the heavy lifting here. Tactician is your safe entry point, well-rounded and forgiving. Berserker trades all defensive capability for raw burst damage. Mender flips the script and heals through punishment. Guardian sits in the middle as the tank-plus-utility option. Warlock leans into status effects, and Sentinel plays the late-game punish game at the cost of any reliable healing. With 16 heroes split across those archetypes and over 200 abilities to mix, the party-building decisions are genuinely interesting and the mid-match level-up choices add another layer, forcing you to decide on the fly whether to deepen your damage or shore up a weakness. The Focusburn system deserves a mention because it's both AVARIAvs's most distinctive feature and its most divisive one. Triggering a Focusburn drops you into a brief mini-game pulled from a quirky Japanese aesthetic, including things like catching fish with a cartoon cat. For a game billing itself as ultra-fast, these interruptions feel tonally odd, though they do break the risk-versus-reward calculation in interesting ways. The "Real Life Debuffs" are more consistently satisfying: status effects that actually invert your controls or scramble your menu are a nastier twist on the confusion mechanic than anything most JRPGs try, and they make landing a Warlock combo feel genuinely mean. The honest problem is longevity and audience. The online playerbase has always been small, which makes the Ranked mode mostly a ghost town in practice. Offline bot matches are available and do track wins with unlockable art and titles, but the AI isn't exactly a challenge once you've learned the class matchups. Where the game genuinely shines is local split-screen, which turns it into a legitimately fun competitive session with a friend sharing a keyboard or controllers. The lore surrounding the two species, the Eoni and the Hume, exists mostly in loading screens and on the developer's website rather than in the game itself, which leaves the roster feeling somewhat anonymous. A promised story mode was still in development at launch and progress on that front has been quiet since. For players who value the concept over the community, AVARIAvs has a visually polished foundation, a slick radial-menu interface that keeps combat moving, and enough class variety to reward some genuine strategy. It's a one-session pitch that works best as a local two-player game. Go in with that framing and you'll find something worth your time. Go in expecting a thriving competitive scene and you'll be disappointed.

Alex · Scout Team

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