Library of Ruina (Switch/PS4) Review – A Card-Battling Visual Novel That Knows How to Grind

Exploring the Cult Appeal of Library of Ruina

Project Moon has gathered something of a cult following with its release of titles like Lobotomy Corp, Library of Ruina, and most recently, the mobile game Limbus Company. I had been meaning to play Library of Ruina for a while. I already had it on PC. It’s a deckbuilder; I love card games and games about cards. I play several Trading Card Games and deckbuilders. But alas, it was lost to the backlog….. Until Arc System Works published a port of the game for the Nintendo Switch. I’m far better at playing games on the Switch. And this time, we got it done.

Unveiling the Story: Roland and Angela’s Journey

Library of Ruina stars the peculiar duo of Roland and Angela. Roland is a grade 9 fixer, a low-level mercenary in a mystical library he shouldn’t have been able to access. This library is headed by Angela, an artificial intelligence who wants to become human and leave the library. So, logically, she violently enlists his assistance in hunting down a particular magical book that will allow them to do so. Now, apparently, the only way to do this will be to fill it with more books, the stories of the outside world. The library does this by sending ‘invitations’ to people, making them fight and kill them when they enter, and turning them into books.

Delving into Library of Ruina’s Dark Narrative

This becomes the main narrative loop. Roland and Angela watch some people who have become the targets of an invitation before they eventually enter, and then Roland gets to work. While this may seem like a morbid setup that constantly throws its cast to the curb, the events start to play into one another, showing the depravity of the world in which this game is set.

The Nintendo Switch port suffers from small text, difficult menu navigation, and screen shake issues, making it hard to play undocked.

People are forced into doing dirty work to survive, and the corrupt play with lives from the top, leading to more powerful enemies and recurring characters who either escape from the library or willingly send others to their doom. I did find some story beats to be needlessly dark in a redundant manner. Still, ultimately, the story of Library of Ruina tells a rather compelling narrative as the library becomes a more significant and concerning threat to those at the top.

Meet the Supporting Cast from Lobotomy Corporation

There’s also a supporting cast of other librarians whom Angela awakens to assist in her plan. These are essentially the co-workers from Lobotomy Corporation, and this game is a direct sequel. You’ll enjoy more of the cast if you play Lobotomy Corporation first, but the structure of Library of Ruina allows one to play this first without too much trouble.

Roland is unaware of the events of Lobotomy Corporation, and thus, everything is explained to him as an outsider. The story sections with the other librarians will always have him present for this purpose.
Additionally, as a fun foil to this, Roland is the only one who understands the grim nature of the city and is relied upon to explain all sorts of aspects of it to everyone else.

Visual Novel Presentation with Full Voice Acting

This story is presented in a visual novel style, with full voice acting in Korean and now Japanese, added with the switch port. And it really needs it. To keep costs down with a frankly absurd number of characters, the cast members have one portrait a piece, which can make the game feel extremely static. There are a good number of CGs, though, which means you’ll probably find your favorite minor character in at least one group shot.

The narrative loop reveals the world’s depravity and the struggle for survival, offering a compelling story despite some redundant dark themes.

The combat in Library of Ruina is similar to that of a turn-based card game, with pages used as cards. Each page corresponds to particular actions with an attack or defense value based on a dice roll range, which you slap with someone to reduce their health to 0. You start with four cards at the start of the battle, referred to as an act, and draw one more each turn, called a scene.

Mastering the Card-Battling Mechanics

You can select as many pages per turn as you have a ‘speed die,’ these speed die will roll each turn and influence the turn order. Each page has a cost and will consume that many ‘lights’ to use, with characters starting with 3 or 4 max lights and that number growing as the battle rages, along with characters regaining one light per turn. Hitting someone with offensive pages will also decrease a stagger bar, stunning them if they hit 0.

You can see what pages your opponents will use and who they’ll target, allowing you to step in with the correct picks. It’s a lot to explain, and we’ll be here forever if I try to do all of it. Still, in the short version, you pick pages and zoom across the screen at your opponents to hit them with single-frame animations punctuated with satisfying visual and sound effects.

The game’s progression is hindered by excessive grinding, which significantly extends the playtime and disrupts the pacing

You get a bunch of different parties thanks to each librarian’s head effectively being a party leader for up to four other customizable characters, and your deck size limit for each character is nine. Each character can essentially have an armor slot tied to their deck and can fill nine slots with accessories obtained through battle. There’s a lot of room for depth here, and this isn’t even getting into the EGO pages. You can spend a while crafting your perfect decks to take on powerful guests and fancy abnormalities that function as challenging puzzle bosses. Figuring out the right combination of cards is excellent.

The Grind: Library of Ruina’s Biggest Flaw

There is, however, an issue with just how often you need to do so. The issue is not raw difficulty. The problem is the grinding. It cannot be understated how much grinding they added to this visual novel. To get new cards, you burn character pages you obtain from levels with several cards and equipment drops. You are eventually guaranteed all the drops when you burn enough pages, but this may require rematching your last opponent multiple times. You also can’t burn all of your pages because it costs character pages to enter stages.

Keeping the same deck for the entire game would be boring, so you’ll obviously want to find new, powerful pages as the game goes on. But Library of Ruina goes the extra mile in making the next set of pages constantly much more powerful than the last. This means you will want to grind multiple characters worth of pages every time there’s a new slot. The power creep between story events is constant, forcing you to grind repeatedly to ensure your cast can keep up with the competition.

But if you don’t have enough character pages, you might have to go backward so that you can grind a previous stage so that you can grind the current one. This is extremely tedious. It feels like a gacha game that wants its players to pull for the next significant character or weapon and grind daily. No wonder Limbus Company was a gacha release. Almost entirely replacing your deck is frustrating, too, because it feels like the player is locked into certain decks as puzzle solutions rather than being able to organically build stronger decks and slowly substitute cards while finding new strategies.

Porting Pitfalls on console

I want to read the cool and edgy visual novel with good music and a fun cast, and instead, I’m spending well over half my game time just grinding with no sense of satisfaction. I could deal with dodgy pacing and forced grinding in a smaller game, but Library of Ruina is using this grind to rock a play time length of well over 100 hours, putting the game in the same territory as titles like Persona 5 or 100%’ing Xenoblade game. Except those games don’t ever feel like they’re wasting my time.

There’s also a crippling issue we have to talk about with this game’s port. If you want to lie down and sink your teeth into this game casually, that’s impossible. Whereas, for example, a twin-stick shooter system such as Otxo will just play a bit better on PC than Console thanks to a different control scheme, Library of Ruina does not have this kind of discrepancy. The font is so minuscule on the Switch that the game is unplayable and undocked without straining your eyes. The font is far too small, and certain UI elements, which can include page effects, are impossible to read.

The screen shake used for ‘immersiveness’ in the visual novel sections is also dreadful on the Switch, blurring the screen far more than on the PC release and making the one thing unaffected by the unscaled text unreadable, as the backlog text is also far too small to reliably read. The menu navigation is also frustrating. On PC, you do everything with the mouse, and there are layers upon layers of menus. But on the controller, this is made more complicated by it not being terribly clear what parts of the menu can actually be selected. You have to press L, R, and the D-pad constantly to figure out what you can do. Touch controls would have done wonders here- except for the minor issue of things being nigh impossible to read.

Final Verdict: Is Library of Ruina Worth Your Time?

Library of Ruina is a game I really wanted to enjoy more. The story is good, the cast is good, the music is good, and the combat can be really good. But the way the game inflates its numbers is just absurd and turns progression into a struggle, more than doubling this game’s length.
And the state of the game’s port? Text issues like these are unacceptable.
If this game entices you, play it on a PC.