Hello again! Bishop here with this week’s Awakening Wednesday update. I was hoping to have something graphical to show off this week, but it’s not quite done yet, so I’ll be talking a bit about the gameplay.

The topic this week is relationships and how they relate to gameplay.

Although you play as Dakura by default in Vacant Sky Awakening, events marked with the heraldry of another character allow you to change to that character’s perspective and make decisions as that character.

Sarian event icon

Decisions made while controlling another character affect how that character develops and interacts with others in the future, even when you’re not controlling them. In addition, the decisions you make while controlling other characters determines what skills they will learn. However, the most important use of character events is deciding who that character will spend their time with.

Most character spaces provide an opportunity to spend the event with someone else. This boosts the relationship between the two of them, which is crucial because…

In Vacant Sky Awakening, there are no levels or experience points.

Each pair of characters has a bidirectional relationship. The strength and nature of that relationship dictates how well those two characters perform together in battle. Each relationship confers certain benefits upon the people in it as long as both people are in battle together. After all, success in battle isn’t all about how talented you are as a fighter, but how well you work together with your allies.

Thus, the most effective team is often the one with the strongest relationships. Although characters who join you later in the game, like Naora, have powerful stats and abilities, you might want to consider visiting character spaces and hanging out with them to help them get to know the rest of your team better before chucking them into battle.

As a result, choosing how to spend your character events is an important decision. Do you want to bolster one relationship in particular? If so, you could spend all of Korelli’s events with Sarian and all of Sarian’s with Korelli, which will make them a powerful team, but you’ll be in trouble if you ever need to swap one of them out of the party. In addition, you might decide to hold off on using your character events until new party members have joined so that you can work better with them instead.

One of the primary goals of Vacant Sky Awakening is to make it a role-playing game in the purest sense of the word. Not only do you make decisions as Dakura, but you also direct the decision-making, growth, and relationships of everyone in the party. We’re putting a lot of work into making these choices an intrinsic and personal aspect of the game and hope that you enjoy seeing how it plays out!

-Bishop