The Secret of Varonis
One thing you have to grant The Secret of Varonis is a lack of embarrassment about its influences, in this case the SaGa aka Final Fantasy Legend games on Game Boy. Or not, depending on how you feel re: the artist's struggle against tradition, I guess? My point is it's not the kind of thing in which characters turn to the camera to make lazy jokes about how adventure story structure or RPG conventions are artificial and weird, so if like me you aren't a fan of that, well, good news. As long as you are a fan of Final Fantasy Legend.
You might say Varonis is a little too enthusiastic, as devoted as it is to the look and sound of FFL. The item names and battle log text borrow quirks from the original English translations of FFL 1 and 2, even. But Varonis also includes the standard suite of modern conveniences. You can turn off such 1989 staples as random encounters, weapon durability, and whiffing attacks vs. dead enemies rather than automatically re-targeting, and even within that set of conventions the devs were careful about minimizing frustration. For example, if you hit an enemy's elemental weakness, it'll go down outright--once you've solved the puzzle of a particular enemy, you aren't forced to perform a long sequence of rote motions every time you encounter that enemy afterward. Assuming you have the resources, anyway--menu-based RPGs are after all resource management games, and that's especially true of FFL--but the dungeons in this one tend not to demand a full inventory worth of investment. I won't say there are no long tunnels full of dead ends, but there aren't all that many.
I went with my usual FFL2 party of a human, two espers (this game's mutants), and a robot. I expect things are balanced such that any party composition would work, though an all-human party could become grindy given that, as in FFL1, humans only level up by slamming stat-up potions, which you have to buy. But for all that robots aren't as overpowered in Varonis, espers level up fast and can gain skills quickly, so my insistence on bringing two of them has finally paid off however many years later. You just have to be careful not to mash through the level-up prompt and replace your one attack spell with ESP again. I didn't mess with monster characters, but my understanding is that monster evolution is much more predictable and easier to control than in FFL, so maybe it's worth a shot.
While the writing sticks close to the FFL model, those games were weird to begin with, pots containing every available ingredient. I mean, the original SaGa box art is a good indicator of what to expect--the computerized empire and the sword-and-sorcery feudal provinces aren't islands on the timeline, they're both places you can walk to. I guess that was more common at the time, that kind of cartoon genre maximalism or whatever you want to call it ... I've been thinking recently about how those settings stuck with me, how NES games involving magical fairy worlds under attack by bio-horrors and witches vs. space robots and whatever else informed how I'd come to think about what fantasy can do. Suffice to say I'm always happy to see this approach, but Varonis also deserves credit for having fun within the parameters of its aesthetic mission. As in some other games with similar party-building, personalities are assigned to the party slots, and mostly they fall short of heroism in a way I like.
This is probably apparent from the number of occurrences of "FFL" above, but Varonis's biggest flaw may be that it's hard to recommend to someone who doesn't already know what they're getting into. If you lack the context for this but have the patience for an RPG made for a medieval handheld, there's no reason not to just play the originals. Otherwise you could maybe think of Varonis as an argument for what's compelling about those games that skips over some of the tedium.