Library Of Ruina Guide Pt1 English Script

Introduction

I was hoping that the follow-up video to my LobCorp guide wouldn't be this basic, but here we are.

Skip to the timestamps on screen if you want to go directly to the guide.

Why I made this video

There's so much to love about the two Project Moon games.

The punishing gameplay that's so satisfying to overcome.

The stories, while not that particularly deep, have lots of important plot points that it's hard not to spoil anything.

The worldbuilding, a refreshing take on a grimdark corporate dystopia.

Then there's the art style and direction, which provides a stark contrast to the previously mentioned setting.

And the soundtracks... perfect examples of what an indie game developer should do with a limited budget.

But there are a couple of problems that that still remain even after two games.

First is the marketing.

Sure Lobotomy Corporation is marketed as a quirky SCP-inspired game, but that doesn't fully explain what it is.

As such people tend to think it's something like Fallout Shelter or Oxygen Not Included, when it's really a Rogue-lite with a wide range of Abnormalities to manage.

The SCP part doesn't stop with "ooh... creepy anomaly" that you can beat to submission anyway; in the game they actually have Special Containment Procedures, Dos and Don'ts that you have to keep in mind as you play the game.

It almost feels too easy at first, but by the 10th or so abnormality everyday starts to feel like defusing a bomb.

A bomb that only becomes more and more complicated as the game goes on.

Then it's topped off with an X-COM-like agent management part which includes research, equipment, leveling up, and real-time combat.

Library of Ruina has the same marketing problem: the trailers don't really tell much about the gameplay and makes it look like a visual novel card game...?

Well, yeah, it is, but the gameplay goes so much more deeper than that.

The other problem with Project Moon games is with the learning process, that is, the Tutorials and the Manuals.

LobCorp's tutorial crammed so much info in 45 minutes that new players are bound to forget important things once they start playing the main game.

Ruina sort of addresses this by spreading out the tutorial over a couple of hours of gameplay, but there are still walls of text that can cause new players to miss minute details.

It also somehow takes a few steps back by failing to include very important concepts in the manual.

And so here we are.

I originally thought of doing another tips video, but given that there's no proper gameplay trailer and after seeing new players struggle with the game mechanics, I've decided to go even more basic and make my own version of the tutorial.

Notes before we start

A couple of things before we start:

As with my other video, I'll try to make this as spoiler-free as possible.

I'll be using footage from the first few stages and avoid showing future content like enemies and cards.

My previous video had a full section dedicated to avoiding spoilers.

I strongly recommend checking that one out before continuing.

Also, I'll be using in-game terms even for common card game terms.

Calling a "Card" a "Combat Page" sounds awkward, but I find jumping between common terms and game-specific ones even more awkward.

There's a link to a glossary in the description below.

With that out of the way, let's proceed to the guide.

What is Library of Ruina

What is Library of Ruina?

It's the follow up to Lobotomy Corporation.

And that's pretty much all I can say about its story without spoiling anything.

You know how Nier Automata is the follow up to Nier, and how Nier itself is a follow up to Drakengaard? and the huge spoilers that tie the games together?

That's what we're dealing with here.

Fortunately, just like those games, you can play Library of Ruina without completing LobCorp or consuming the side material.

Ok, so talking about the story is out of the question, what about the gameplay?

Library of Ruina's a deckbuilding card game ...is what you might assume based on what little the store page and the trailer shows of the gameplay.

But it isn't just a deckbuilding card game, just like Slay the Spire or Monster Train aren't quite in the same genre as Magic: the Gathering or Hearthstone.

For example, Slay the Spire, while still using many card game concepts and mechanics, leans more on a Rogue-like gameplay, with the deckbuilding aspect reliant on knowing which decks to build from the random options presented to the player.

Monster Train's on the same boat with the concepts and mechanics, but turns it into more of a tower defense Rogue-lite.

So, what does Library of Ruina resemble then?

Board-based tactical games

Yes, we're talking about games like Heroes of Might and Magic, X-Com, and the so-called SRPGs.

It might sound weird considering that the game doesn't even have a board or grid, and that for the first hour or so of the game the battles don't seem to be that much different from simpler turn-based games like JRPGs, but it will make sense when you think about it.

First off, the top-level game loop shares a lot in common with those games.

In Library of Ruina, you have Receptions where your Librarians fight Guests.

Whenever you defeat Guests, they turn into Books.

These Books can then be used to invite Guests in future Receptions (or in plain terms, open up new stages).

The Books can also be burned to receive new Pages which then can be used to improve your Librarians and their Shelves.

Receptions can be repeated as much as you want, though losing one means losing the Books used in inviting the Guests.

As you can see, it's not that different from SRPGs and other board-based games.

The gacha or booster pack mechanic may be annoying, but the current iteration with almost guaranteed pulls after just 2 or 3 tries means it's not as grindy as other games.

Think of it more as an incentive to re-play Receptions with different strategies.

And trust me, the game used to be much much much more grindy.

Don't get me wrong, Library of Ruina is still very much a deckbuilding card game, but having the correct mindset will help a lot in understanding and appreciating the game.

As I'll be sweeping the SRPG elements to the side to give way to the card game mechanics, I'll take this opportunity to add some other games with non-card game mechanics to help with the mindest:

In terms of actual combat, there's Devil Survivor where individual units do multiple sub-actions in a single clash.

In overall game flow, there's the OG 1998 Rainbow Six with a lengthy planning phase followed by a relatively quick execution phase.

A more apt comparison for the turn-based planning followed by simultaneous execution would be Frozen Synapse, as the execution phase is fully hands-off and has a bit of RNG involved.

Alright, enough stalling, here's the actual tutorial.

Preparation Phase

A Reception starts with a preparation phase.

Here you are presented with the Guests and you choose which Librarians to receive them.

Each unit has their own Bookshelf filled with Combat Pages.

You can check out the Guests' Bookshelves to see what you'll be facing in this Reception.

Similarly, you can also check your own Librarians' Bookshelves and double-check if you've got the right Pages equipped.

You'll typically setup your Librarians' Bookshelves outside of a Reception though the game also allows you to edit them here.

Librarians' Bookshelves hold 9 Combat Pages.

You are free to remove Pages from the Shelves, but the game will fill any empty slots with random Pages from the default Shelf, forcing the Shelf to always have 9 Pages.

That's not a big deal here in the first Reception as we are given the default "deck".

You'd want to avoid this as much as possible later on, however.

One last note about this screen, you can leave via the leave button if you feel totally unprepared for the fight.

There's no penalty in leaving at the start of the Reception.

But if you leave in the middle of a multi-part Reception, you will forfeit the wagered Books.

Let's proceed to the actual Reception.

The Reception

Each Reception is split up into Acts.

We're still in the early game so this Reception has only one Act.

Acts progress through a series of Scenes.

You can think of Scenes as "Turns", but with how things play out simultaneously,

you can think of "Rounds" instead to avoid confusion.

As expected of a turn-based card game, each Scene is made up of phases.

Scenes begin with a Ready Phase.

Here the game will process all of the start-of Scene effects like Page draws, but the most visible sign that we are in this phase is the rolling animation for the Speed Dice above every unit.

What that tells us is that this is now a new Scene and the game is waiting for the Player's go-ahead to randomize the Speed Dice and to choose the Guests' actions.

Apart from that, there's really not much to this phase as pretty much everything you can do here like reviewing the battlefield can be done in the next phase.

We can proceed by clicking the top-center part of the screen or pressing the spacebar.

The next phase is where you will spend most of the game on: the Planning Phase.

As mentioned earlier, the Speed Dice values and the Guest actions will now be revealed.

For now we'll ignore the numbers and just treat the dice as action slots.

There are two parts to an action:

a Page which represents what the unit will do, and a target for the Page.

Clicking or hovering over a Speed Die will show arrows indicating actions targeting the die as well as the current target of the die.

Right-click outside of a die to deselect it and hide the action lines.

As you can see here, all of the Rats have played a Page targeting our protagonist Roland.

It's now your turn to choose what actions to do with the Librarians' speed dice.

Once you're done, you can again click the top-center section or press spacebar to let the actions play out in the next phase, the Combat Phase.

There are a couple of things you can do with your Speed Dice.

First off, you can just do nothing.

Sounds stupid as you can see the Rats ganging up on Roland here, but there are situations where doing nothing can be the better option.

Most of the time, though, you're gonna play a Page and target enemy Speed Dice.

Combat Pages

This is what a Combat Page looks like in Library of Ruina.

It has a Light cost, a number of dice, and the occasional Abilities.

And let's not ignore the wonderful art.

Light is your typical card game cost mechanic: units begin an Act with full Light, and recover 1 Light every Scene.

Units can only play Pages that they can pay for in Light, which will then be subtracted as the Page is used.

Speaking of familiar mechanics, the game uses a mostly standard drawing mechanic.

Units start the Acts with 3 Pages in hand, and they draw 1 every Scene, first Scene included.

The main difference comes with the discard pile, which doesn't exist; all used Pages are immediately shuffled back to the Shelf.

Another difference is how the hand size works:

• the game will prevent any Page draws once a unit's hand reaches 8 Pages
• but technically the maximum is 10, which can be reached via non-Page-draw effects.

And finally, there's no penalty if a unit tries to draw on an empty Shelf.

Of course, apart from drawing no Pages while everyone else gets to draw.

Back to the subject at hand, in order to play a Page, first select a Speed Die, then choose a Page from your Librarian's hand and target an enemy Speed Die.

In case you changed your mind, you can always cancel an action by right-clicking the Speed Die.

When a Page is played against another, this sets up a Clash.

This is denoted by double-ended yellow arrows.

During a clash, the dice in both sides' Pages are added to queues and are pitted against each other.

Each die has a minimum and maximum value, which are rolled when they come up on the queue.

Draws are the least interesting outcome, both dice simply do nothing and are discarded.

What's more interesting is what happens when one is greater than the other: the result depends on their their type.

Dice (Offensive Dice)

There are two main die types in the game Offensive and Defensive

Let's start with the easy one, the Offensive Dice

Color coded in red, they can be Slash, Pierce, or Blunt.

Your first thought may be that this is one of those Rock-Paper-Scissors things where one gains a bonus facing another, but no, they're all functionally the same, at least in the Clashing part.

In a clash, it's all a matter of who rolls the higher number and the winner deals the respective damage and type to the target.

This damage popup is slightly more complicated than what you'd see in other games, but it conveniently lets us segue to talking about the game's Health System.

Health System

Each unit has two health-related gauges.

The red bar represents the HP.

This is your typical "if it goes down to zero they die" health bar.

Then there's the yellow Stagger Resist bar, which I'll just shorten to SR.

These are similar to the stun bar in games like Street Fighter.

They're also usually much lower than the HP which makes them much easier to deplete.

Once a unit's SR goes down to zero, they are Staggered

Staggered Units:

• won't be able to act for the rest of the Scene up to the next Scene (which also means all of the remaining played Pages and dice are discarded)
• they also won't draw or gain Light in the next Scene
• they'll eventually recover in two Scenes, returning to full SR
• and finally, staggered units have their Resistances reduced to Fatal

And this leads us to Resistances.

Resistances

As previously mentioned, instead of a Rock-Paper-Scissors mechanic, the 3 different attack types deal different damage based on the resistance values of the target, both on the HP and the SR side, so 6 different resistance values all in all.

They can range from ineffective, all the way to Fatal.

Going back to our example,

Lenny received 3 Pierce damage which she is Weak to so receives 4.5 damage to both HP and SR.

Damage is rounded down so in the end Roland deals 4 damage.

Moving on to the other die type...

Defensive Dice

Color coded in blue, there are two defensive die types,

Block and Evade.

In a nutshell:

One is risk-free, the other carries some risk but with potentially high reward

one deals Stagger damage, the other allows you to restore SR

Let's start off with Block.

It's risk-free because whatever happens, damage will be reduced. When Offensive dice wins against Block dice, damage is reduced by the Block die roll.

On the other hand, when a Block die wins, defender takes no damage while the attacker takes Stagger damage equal to the difference of the Block die roll and the Offensive roll.

Then there's Evade.

It's risky because if it fails, the defender takes full damage.

but if it succeeds, the defender not only avoids the damage but also restores SR equivalent to their roll.

In addition, the die is also re-added to the front of the queue to evade future dice.

And this is why I didn't say that the dice on the Pages face off against each other but instead specifically mentioned that dice are added to queues; the Evasion dice recycle mechanic means that a single die can evade two or more Offensive dice

The counter to this would be other Defensive dice:

whenever 2 Defensive dice clash, both dice will be discarded afterwards regardless of result.

The results of the interaction between Defensive dice can be a bit tricky, so let's go over them:

If the winning die is a Block, it will deal full Stagger damage.

If it's an Evasion die and wins against Block, it will restore full SR.

On the other hand, the winner of an Evade vs Evade will not gain anything except for "On Win" triggered effects.

Long story short, if you keep on facing annoying Evade dice eating up your attacks, get Pages with early Defensive dice to break through.

I haven't talked about that "break through" part, though.

That is, what happens when a dice queue runs out when the other queue still has dice?

This leads us to One-sided Attacks.

One Sided Attacks

Offensive dice is easy, they automatically win and deal damage.

Defensive dice on the other hand, neither deal Stagger damage nor restore SR.

Instead they are retained by the Speed Dice until the end of the Scene.

This applies only to unused dice, already recycled Evasion dice are not retained.

These saved dice are then used when it's the unit's turn to face a one-sided attack.

This is one way the game lets units deal with multiple enemies simultaneously.

Be aware, however, that if a unit defeats another unit and there are still Defensive dice on the former's queue, they will not be retained as they were technically not used in a one-sided attack.

This may or may not be a bug in this version.

And that's about it for the basics of Combat

You start a Scene, make your moves, and let the clashes play out.

Let's take it up a notch and learn about Speed and Redirection.

Unit Speed

Even though they represent how many Pages a unit can play every Scene, we don't call these indicators "Page slots" or "action slots".

Instead we call them "Speed Dice" because of the huge numbers inside them: their Speed values.

They determine when units' actions will take place, with higher values going first.

In case of a tie, the game chooses the order among them randomly in the Combat Phase itself.

Let's start with an example:

Here we see Roland with a 3 Speed die, Pete and Lenny with a 2, and Mang-chi with a 1.

As expected, Roland will go first.

Pete will go next as Lenny is already staggered.

His one-sided attack is deflected by the retained Block die.

Then finally Mang-chi goes in with a one-sided attack.

Another example:

Both Roland and Pete have 2 while the rest have 1.

The game resolves the tie and chooses Roland to go first, attacking Lenny in a clash.

Then Pete goes in with another deflected one-sided attack.

Now you might think that the game will have to decide between Mang-chi and Lenny on who will act next.

But since Lenny was already involved in a clash, the game counts her action as completed, giving Mang-chi the final move for the Scene.

To recap, this was the initial order.

Pete and Roland will go first, with the game randomly choosing who among them will actually go first.

Then Mang-chi and Lenny will go next, and again randomizing who will go first and let's take note that Roland and Lenny are in a clash.

And here's the the order that eventually happened in the Combat Phase, Roland going first, then Pete, then Mang-chi.

Lenny doesn't act because her clash with Roland ate up her action.

Given this result, you might be tempted to ignore slower units already involved in clashes.

This might be your mental model for the scenario, taking out Lenny from the 1 Speed batch.

And it works, just not all of the time.

Let's see the outcomes where it works:

There's the one we've already seen where Roland goes first.

Then there's one where Pete goes first.

Then let's see where it doesn't:

What if Pete gets to act first and somehow staggers Roland?

Then Lenny will be able to do a one-sided attack on Roland as well.

This opens up 2 possible outcomes, either Lenny goes first, or Mang-chi.

To be fair, the unaccounted results will only happen if Pete is successful in staggering Roland so ignoring slower units in clashes is still a valid shortcut.

My point here is to show you that you shouldn't look at Library of Ruina's Speed mechanic the same way as Initiative and Turn Order mechanics in other games.

Ruina has more randomness involved, yet at the same time, it's not totally random.

It's constrained enough that you can make sound tactical decisions based on what you're given.

Redirection

If you thought that was already complicated, we're gonna go a bit further.

For this, I'll need to unlock a new Librarian

so the Rats can attack someone other than Roland.

When you have a higher valued Speed die, you can use it to redirect any lower speed action towards that die.

Here, Mang-chi's attacking Roland, but Christopher has a higher Speed die than the attacker so he can intercept the attack and clash with Mang-chi.

Similarly, Lenny's attacking Christopher and Roland has a higher speed.

Roland can choose to ignore Pete and intercept Lenny's attack instead.

Modeling the order, notice how just two redirects radically change the order of the battle.

And let's see how this plays out:

Between the two 4 Speed units, Roland goes first and attacks Lenny, staggering her and retaining a Block die.

Then Christopher attacks Mang-chi, who fails to dodge and dies...

We would move to the 2 Speed, but Lenny's already staggered so we go to the 1 Speed.

Pete attacks, but is blocked by the retained die Mang-chi doesn't do anything because he's already dead.

Let's have another example, one where our Librarians have lower speed die.

Here we can see that lower or equal speed Librarians can still attack higher speed die, but it will be a one-sided attack if that target isn't attacking them initially.

And with that I can set a battle where everyone's doing one-sided attacks.

It's not something that you'd want to do, but let's just try it for illustration purposes.

As expected, the 2s start their attack:

Pete goes first and retains his Evade die, then Roland, who just barrels through Pete's retained die, then Christopher, who kills Mang-chi again, and finally Mang-chi, who's still dead so can't act, again. Then we move on to the only 1 Speed unit, Lenny who unfortunately used a one-sided Evade that does absolutely nothing.

Digression

By now you should realize that we're not quite in card game land anymore.

Hence the tactical board games analogy I put forward at the start of this tutorial.

Think about it: what does having a 2 or 3 dimensional battlefield do to combat?

We can talk all day about different mechanics but it all boils down to positioning:

getting your units into places where they can hit others or where they won't get hit.

Card games also have some of the same positioning mechanics, after all, many of them are ultimately inspired by table top tactical games, with playing areas being simplified approximations of full battlefields.

But being approximations mean they couldn't quite capture the maneuverability options that tactical games offer, having to add special abilities to make up for it.

Library of Ruina, on the other hand, captures the idea of positioning to hit or not get hit really well, and only needs its Speed and die retention mechanics to set up complex skirmishes.

You could even argue that Ruina has a deeper combat system than turn-based tactical games thanks to its simultaneous nature, giving you exponentially more options to consider as the number of units and Speed dice increase.

Managing Complexity

Setting up epic battles sounds fun on paper, but the reality is, you can easily be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of options presented to you by the game.

Fortunately, there are available options to make it more manageable.

First off, rather than going around and clicking and hovering over Speed dice, you can display all of the targeting and clash lines with the buttons at the upper right corner of the screen.

The red switch toggles the display of enemy targeting lines, the yellow is for the clash lines, and the blue is for your units' targeting lines.

Their hotkeys are 1, 2, 3 respectively.

I personally leave the red and yellow on most of the time, and I'll just check my units' Speed dice if they're lit up to see if they've already been given orders.

Another thing you should use is the Cycle Clashes button.

This pops up when you click an enemy Speed die with multiple attackers.

This lets you cycle through all of the possible interceptors and assign them to the clash.

You can also use Tab as a hotkey.

Previously, we Early Access players had to use a clunky workaround, that is, to cancel the dice we want to clash and re-play the Page to set the clash up.

Some people in chat your might suggest you do that when you're getting confused about how clashes are assigned.

To be clear, this approach still works fine and is pretty intuitive:

you can think of it as you ordering something like "No, I changed my mind. Roland intercept the attack, everyone else either flank or follow-up." but I strongly recommend using the new Clash UI to make your life a lot easier.

Emotion

At this point, savvier gamers would've noticed some glaring flaws with the mechanics.

Units regain only one Light per scene?

That may be fine for real-time card games but that's too slow for a turn-based one where resources are usually fully refreshed and even increase per turn.

Then there's the ideal strategy in team vs team battles like in RTSs and RPGs.

The easiest way to win in these battles is to focus fire on single targets.

This will mathematically give you an advantage over an enemy that targets evenly or randomly.

So why choose some other strategy if this boring, yet effective one, exists?

Enter the Emotion system.

Library of Ruina revolves around emotional battles.

It discourages passivity and safe gameplay by rewarding actions that lead to more intense and climactic Scenes.

These rewards are the blue and red lights that you've been seeing pop up in the examples for the past 15 minutes or so:

the Emotion Coins.

The blue ones are Positive Emotion Coins.

They are rewarded when the battle goes the unit's way, like when an enemy dies.

They represent units getting more fired up.

Conversely, the red ones are Negative Emotion Coins.

As expected, these are "rewarded" when the battle goes wrong.

This time, it represents the units getting more desperate.

Here's the combined list of conditions.

There's one exception with the winning and losing part, that is, Evade vs Evade doesn't result in any coins.

I mean, it's not like you'll be fired up when both you and your opponent are just standing there waiting to evade.

Based on this list, it's easy to see that clashes are the most reliable way for gaining coins, especially since units can do multiple die clashes a Scene, with each rewarding 1 or 2 coins.

Note that One-Sided Attacks are not included in this list.

They can reward Emotion Coins through min-max results or defeating enemies, but overall they're not as reliable as clashing.

Emotion Levels

So, what are these Emotion coins for?

Well, when a unit reaches a certain amount of coins at the end of a Scene, regardless if it's Positive or Negative, they will gain an Emotion Level.

You can see the current level for each unit at the bottom left and right status UI, next to the portraits.

Progress towards the next level are also tallied here.

Like the health status, some of these info are repeated in the UI.

Hovering the number shows the benefits of getting a higher Emotion Level, with ones already active highlighted.

To avoid confusion, I've blurred out the rewards that you'll have to unlock as you play the game.

Anyway, we can see here that one of the rewards is gaining another Light slot.

And it's not hard to guess from the pixelation that the next 2 levels also give the same Light bonus.

What's more important to us, however, is the unwritten bonus: not only do units gain an additional Light per level, they also refresh all of their Light.

This solves both of the mechanics problems mentioned before: you don't need to skimp on Pages early on in an Act as one or two clashes will refresh your units Light, and you're discouraged to focus fire as the lower Emotion Coin rewards will result in most of your units running out of Light.

By the way, your enemies also gain the same benefits out of higher Emotion levels.

But this is a good thing: higher levels also mean they'll produce higher quality Books once you defeat them.

Better Books means less time grinding Receptions. Usually.

You can see the drop rate by using yet another UI element for showing the Emotion Level, the top bar.

Hovering over the units will show the current rate for a Guest based on their current level.

The top Emotion bar also shows the overall Team Level, which increases as units in a team gain enough Emotion Levels.

Additional stuff will happen when teams go up in levels, but I won't spoil this group bonus here.

Well, I guess I can spoil the fact that it affects the music higher levels means better music and if the music sounds off and non-floor specific, it means your team is lagging behind in Emotion Levels.

To quickly summarize the Emotion mechanics, choosing clashes over one-sided attacks are often the best choice.

Sure, you can still focus fire and quickly end battles, but you'll have a harder time getting better Books.

Worst case, your team might lose outright if the battle drags on.

Wrapping Up

Let's wrap this video up by going over the other basics that we haven't covered yet, followed by a quick summary and a bonus tip.

Burning Books, Rarity

At the end of every Reception, you receive the Books that you gained from defeating the Guests.

As mentioned before, these Books can be used to invite other Guests into the Library and some are required to progress the game.

They also serve as booster packs; by burning them you will receive new Combat Pages as well as Key Pages.

Key Pages represent Guests that you have defeated, and by equipping them on your Librarians you gain their Stats, Resistances, and any passive abilities.

There's really not much to say about the Key Pages at this point aside from reminding you to equip your Librarians with a Key Page immediately.

Even the earliest Key Pages, the Rats, give a 40% and 47% increase in HP and SR respectively.

Back to the Book burning part, note the numbers on the list of possible Pages.

This tells you how many are left in the current payout table.

Once you burn enough Books to get all of the Pages, the payout table will reset and you can receive more of the same the Pages again.

Here we have received all of the Pages for this Book, so burning it will give us another Dirty Blow and Pages from a fresh payout

There are some limits to how many you can own though, and it's based on the rarity of the Page.

Pages, both Key and Combat Pages, are classified into 4 rarities:

• Paperback, color coded in Green
• Hardcover, which is blue
• Limited, purple
• and finally, Objet d'art in Gold

You can only own 5, 4, 3, and 1 copy of a Key Page of each rarity.

They're taken out of the payout table once the limit is reached; burning more Books will not give you more of them.

That limit doesn't exist for Combat Pages.

However there are limits within Bookshelves:

you can have up to 3 of each Page per Bookshelf for each rarity apart from Gold, which is limited to only 1 of each Page.

So while you can have 3 sets of 3 purple Pages, you'll have to use 9 different Pages if you want all of them to be Gold.

And that's about it for the basics of Library of Ruina's gameplay.

To summarize everything, I'll circle back to the start of this guide.

1-minute Summary

What is Library of Ruina?

It's a story rich tactical game with deckbuilding card game elements.

Story rich because it's smack dab in the middle of an indie multimedia franchise.

It's a deckbuilding card game because lots of elements are still there, both gameplay and strategy-wise.

But it's more of a general tactical game as there's more emphasis on directing the flow of combat with Pages being more like equipment and skills.

Also, the use of randomness is somewhat flipped around.

Card games tend to avoid adding more random elements like die rolls as shuffling of the decks already add enough randomness to the game.

In this game, however, the low deck size allows the game to use RNG elements similar to how RPGs and SRPGs use them.

Timestamp skippers, there's a Chapter List in the description that can lead you to where I discuss the various points in the list above.

One tip for Beginners

Before I end this video, I'll take this opportunity to give a tip to new players.

READ

Yes, that the tip.

Take your time to read what's displayed on the battlefield, your enemies' Resistances and Passive Abilities.

The Pages currently being played against you.

The buffs and debuffs on all of the units.

and so on...

I'm saying this because it's become a minor meme in the community that a disturbing number of Library of Ruina players don't bother to read and just leave everything to luck, ironically in a game revolving around a Library.

This leads players to think that they've lost (or won) more Receptions due to RNG rather than knowing the mechanics or figuring out the order actions play out in the Combat phase.

While you're at it, go ahead and read the non-gameplay related stuff in the game, like the Key Page Stories and the often missed unit dialogue.

End

And that's it for this video.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comment section below.

For more spoiler-y questions, make sure to add 3 to 4 lines of spoiler warnings to hide them behind a "Read more" cut.

Thanks for watching, and see you in the next video where I'll cover more advanced topics

...if I get around to doing it considering this video's about 4 months late.

I still can't get over the game's weird decision to simplify mechanics that take 6 minutes of this tutorial to explain down into 3 unassuming lines.