A Guide to Verbal Duel a.k.a Mouth Gun

A simple rule explanation of Verbal Duel. The game's translation is not great, but after some trial and error, I've figured out the rules. Now you can learn how to debate properly too. (And yes, the game occasionally refers to Verbal Duel as Mouth Gun.)

This Guide

In case you just stumbled upon Verbal Duel and got just as confused as me when I clicked it the first time, do not worry. I've figured out the rules and rewrote them so we can all talk nonsense like a pro. Additionally, this guide has some advice on strategies and an overview of all abilities that can be drafted during a Verbal Duel.


This guide is WIP. I already published it so people can at least read the basic rules. I'm still figuring out a lot of the details and unlockables. This should at least serve better than a janky in-game translation.

Terminology and Clarification

Due to janky translations, sometimes terminology gets completely mixed up. Here's how I refer to it and how the game will sometimes refer to it.

Verbal Duel is how I refer to the Minigame. Sometimes, the game will refer to this as Verbal Debate and very rarely Mouth Gun. The 'cards' you draw in game are also sometimes referred to as Verbal Duel, but this is not how I will be referring to them.

Arguments are the 'cards' you draw in each Verbal Debate and can have special effects. Mind that the game refers to these also as Verbal Duel, which is highly confusing. In this guide I will exclusively refer to these as Arguments and will also replace any mentions in the effects of Arguments.

Abilities is one of the tabs in the character menu. It has all your abilities for your kungfu, crafting, etc. but also the abilities relevant to Verbal Duel.

How does Verbal Duel work?

Verbal Duel is nothing more than a game of chance, and in terms of logic plays similarly to things like autobattlers.

The minigame starts off simple, it grabs your character's current Spirits and pits it against your opponent's current Spirit. Whomever Spirit hits 0 first loses, at which point the winner gets to choose an effect to happen, or increase the effectiveness of the outcome and play another round with the current deck. Mind that only you as the player can continue, AI will always end the Verbal Duel and then choose what to do with you.

The Spirit bar at the start of the round, both characters currently have 130 Spirit. The Verbal Duel Power gives an indication of how high the levels for Verbal Duel are for the character.

Immediately upon starting the game, the game drafts 5 unique arguments from your Verbal Duel collection and immediately plays a round. (Early on, this will include a lot of Nonsense, which permanently change to better arguments as you play the game and unlock more arguments.)

You will play rounds until someone is out of Spirit. A round is seperated in two phases, the "Draft" phase, and the "Play" phase.

Draft Phase

Draft Phase is simple. You either add an Argument from your choices to your Verbal Duel Pile, Rethink to reroll the available Arguments, or skip ahead to the next Play Phase. It's ideal to keep your Verbal Duel Pile as close to 9 in size as possible, to make sure your Play Phase is as consistent as it can be.

If you check out your Verbal Duel Pile, you can click any argument in there and remove them, as long as you have Removal left.

Rethink also has limited charges and do not refresh between rounds, only between full duel cycles.

The UI for the Draft Phase. In the bottom left you can review your current Verbal Duel Pile. In the middle it shows your draft options.

The amount of rerolls and options you have to choose from increase based on your skills, which are mostly earned by just playing a bunch of Verbal Duels.

Play Phase

Play Phase is where the real meat of the Verbal Duel is. First off, 9 Arguments get drawn from your Verbal Duel Pile at random. Then, base eloquence gets tallied from all Arguments drawn, and then any possible effects on those Arguments get triggered. Skill activation starts with the Argument in the top right, then triggers down and left. Every time an effect is succesfully triggered, also add 0.1 to the score multiplier. Arguments with multiple effects can affect score multiplier multiple times, as long as their effects get triggered. The only exception I've found so far is that cards that remove themselves do not trigger another stack on the multiplier.

The UI for the Play Phase. The yellow arrow displays the activation direction. The green line indicates the Eloquence Multiplier, the blue line indicates the base Eloquence that was scored this turn, and will later show the total Eloquence after multiplier. The red line indicates the total Eloquence both parties have scored over the rounds that were played.

Important to keep in mind that at the beginning of Play Phase, it always draws 9 random Arguments. There's no "discard pile", so you don't rotate through your 'deck'. It's always 9 random Arguments.

After all Arguments get tallied and triggered, the score gets updated and the Spirit bar's values will shift. That's basically it. This is in essence how Verbal Duel works. Now naturally, there's abilities, strategies, unlocks, all that good stuff. But you do now know enough to experiment and figure stuff out for yourself.

Abilities

There's a total of five abilities that affect Verbal Duel. Obviously leveling these will help you get the edge in Verbal Duels.

• Top Left: Empower Spirits
  Gives more maximum Spirit, 10 for each level, for a total of 60 extra Spirit.
  Levels can be acquired by playing Verbal Debate.
  
• Top Right: Open Mind
  Adds 1 Verbal Duel (Argument) choice per level during Draft Phase, up to three more options for a total of six.
  Levels can be acquired by ???
  
• Middle Left: Basic Debate
  Unlocks new Arguments to draft during Verbal Debate. Unlockable skills are "Long Story Short", "Beat Around the Bush", "Pride Turned Humble", "???", "???" and "???".
  Levels can be acquired by winning Verbal Debate.
  
• Middle Right: Rethink
  Gives additional Rethink to be used in the Verbal Debate. One extra Rethink per level, for a total of 9 Rethinks per Verbal Duel.
  Levels can be acquired by "Craft Verbal Duels in Debate" (I wish I could tell you what that means, though apparently there's some cards that can combo into other cards when they're on the field, which is considered "crafting".)
  
• Bottom: Contemplation
  Gives extra removal options when looking at the Verbal Duel Pile. One extra removal per level, up to 9 total removals per Verbal Debate.
  Levels can be acquired by removing Arguments in Verbal Duel. This can either be done by removing them manually from the Verbal Debate Pile, or effects of Arguments removing them.

Arguments a.k.a The Verbal Duel Deck

The Verbal Duel Deck in the ability screen shows you all Arguments you've unlocked. (I know the game refers to these also as Verbal Duel. That is confusing, so I will be referring to these as Arguments.)


Arguments are the abilities you draft for your Verbal Duel Pile. The top left of their UI shows the Argument's name. Beneath it is its Base Eloquence. This score gets tallied up first in a Play Phase.

Top right shows the rarity. This affects how rare it is for this ability to show up in draft, if they show up at all. As far as I'm aware, the four rarities are Common, Rare, Epic and Crafted. Crafted cards do not show up naturally and have to be combo'd with other cards to be added to your deck.

Underneath the rarity it shows the type of Argument. These can be Idiom, Kind, or Malicious. This has relevance to effects of certain cards.

The rest are possible effects the Argument has. An argument can have multiple effects, each seperated by a line. If a card has a % chance effect, this effect can trigger whenever this card is among the 9 cards drawn each Play Phase.

The Verbal Duel Collection shows 52 Arguments, most of them show their unlock conditions, but for all of our sanity, I'll make a full list of all available Arguments in the section below.

Argument Database

This is WIP. Eventually this section should have an overview of all Arguments available in Verbal Duel, for all your strategizing needs.

Name	Eloquence	Rarity	Type	Effect(s)	Unlock
Nonsense	1	Common	Idiom		Starter
Barbed Words	3	Common	Malicious		???
Muddy Waters	3	Common	Malicious		???
Cower	3	Common	Malicious		???
Analogy	1	Common	Kind	100% chance to remove adjacent [Muddy Waters]. For each one removed, gain 2 Eloquence.	???
Benign Assertion	3	Common	Kind		???
Brash Ignorance	3	Common	Malicious	Remove 4 [Brash Ignorance] on the field and gain 1 [Cut to the Chase]. 30% chance of generating 1 [Nonsense].	???
Old Ways	4	Rare	Idiom	100% chance to remove adjacent [Benign Assertion]. For each one removed, gain 2 Eloquence. 30% chance of generating 1 [Nonsense].	???
Bared Fangs	4	Rare	Idiom	For every [Apprehension] in the same row, gain 4 Eloquence. Remove 1 adjacent [In Your Element]. For each one removed, permanently increase the starting Eloquence of each Argument by 3 each turn.	???
Apprehension	4	Rare	Malicious	For every [Bared Fangs] in the same column, gain 4 Eloquence. Remove 1 adjacent [Cower]. For each one removed, gain 1 own Base Eloquence.	???
In Your Element	5	Rare	Kind		???
Desperate Measures	4	Rare	Malicious	30% chance to remove adjacent [Old Ways]. For each one removed, gain 10 Eloquence. 100% chance to remove adjacent [Perseverance]. For each one removed, gain 3 Eloquence.	???
Persuade	1	Common	Kind	For every 1 adjacent Kind Argument, gain 2 Eloquence. 100% chance to remove adjacent [Barbed Words]. For each one removed, gain 2 Eloquence.	???
Recount Tale	1	Common	Idiom	For every 1 adjacent [Nonsense], gain 2 Eloquence. 100% chance to remove adjacent [Benign Assertion]. For each one removed, gain 2 Eloquence.	???
Long Story Short	3	Common	Kind	100% chance to remove adjacent [Nonsense]. For each one removed, gain 2 Eloquence.	???
Cross Purposes	5	Rare	Malicious	15% chance to turn into [Perseverance]. When removed, gain 7 Eloquence.	???
Perseverance	4	Rare	Kind	Remove adjacent Arguments with no effects. For each Argument removed, gain 2 Eloquence. When removed, gain 8 Eloquence.	???
Pride Turned Humble	2	Common	Kind	If the adjacent Left is a Kind Argument, gain 3 Eloquence. If the adjacent Right is a Malicious Argument, gain 2 Eloquence.	???
Beat Around the Bush	3	Rare	Malicious	When in one of the corners of the grid, increase the base Eloquence of 1 adjacent Argument by 1.	???
Weighted Words	???	???	???	???	Carry over 3000 load.
Inference	???	???	???	???	Battle 3 or more opponents simultaneously.
Case For Yourself	5	Rare	Idiom	When all other Arguments are Idiom, multiply your own Eloquence by 3 times. 30% chance of removing itself, gaining 1 extra Rethink.	Master in Basic Debate
Classic Quotes	???	???	???	???	Own over 20 Skill Manuals
Stretching Matters	???	???	???	???	Guru in Basic Debate
Slander	???	???	???	???	Fabricate 3 rumors
White Horse Ain't Horse	4	Rare	Malicious	Remove adjacent [Perseverance], for each 1 removed, add 0.1 to your multiplier. 30% chance of generating 1 [Cower].	???

Argument Database (Continued)

Name	Eloquence	Rarity	Type	Effect(s)	Unlock
Sophistry	4	Rare	Malicious	For every 1 adjacent Argument with no effect, gain 3 Eloquence. 15% chance of generating 1 [Word of Wisdom].	???
Broken Context	???	???	???	???	Become Unwhole (become infertile by means such as Groin Kick)
Pester	???	???	???	???	Active Lotus in Heart (not sure what this is)
Honeyed Tongue	6	Rare	Kind	100% chance to remove adjacent [Case For Yourself]. For each one removed, gain 3 Eloquence. 20% chance of generating 1 [Persuade].	???
Clashing Words	???	???	???	???	Acquire Skill Halberd Breaking
Jabberwocky	???	???	???	???	Have 7 offspring
Witty Barrage	4	Epic	Kind	For every 1 adjacent Kind Argument, gain 5 Eloquence. 20% chance of generating 1 [Case For Yourself]	???
Spot On	???	???	???	???	Counterattack 5 times in battle.
Words of Wisdom	3	Epic	Kind	For every 1 adjacent [Classic Quotes], gain 2X base eloquence. Store 1 Eloquence each turn, gain 3 times the stored Eloquence when removed.	Become Sage in Basic Debate
Flowery Flattery	???	???	???	???	Acquire Skill Flower Rain
Flowing Oratory	???	???	???	???	Cook 1 Unfulfilled Destiny
Cut to the Chase	???	???	???	???	Increase Weapon ATK to 100
???	???	???	???	???	???
Agree to Disagree	35	Crafted	Idiom	When all adjacent Arguments are different, gain 125 Eloquence.	Activate Inner Kungfu with 4 types of Chi at the same time.
???	???	???	???	???	???
???	???	???	???	???	???
???	???	???	???	???	???
???	???	???	???	???	???
???	???	???	???	???	???
???	???	???	???	???	???
Hit the Mark	35	Crafted	Kind	When in the center of the grid, gain 65 Eloquence. When in a spot adjacent to the center of the grid, gain 45 Eloquence. Finale Choice: Inflict 3 stacks of Shattered Spirits. (Dunno what Finale Choice is supposed to be)	???
???	???	???	???	???	???
???	???	???	???	???	???
???	???	???	???	???	???
???	???	???	???	???	???
???	???	???	???	???	???

Thank You

Thank you for reading my guide! Hopefully this will help you to talk your way out of getting beat up by someone with 9000+ more Vigor than you.

[Rosemagwin]

Not as far as Im aware

[NimrodX]

Wait... so the other guy (NPC) doesn't also have a deck and doesn't also follow the same process?

[Rosemagwin]

Oh like that, it's kind of random, their base scoring pool is based on their innate skill in verbal debate, and after that, their random score pool gets 50% stronger whenever you fight another round.

[YoinerSploiner59]

Yeah I get that, but what decides how many points the opponent get? Is that number based off anything in particular? Thanks

[Rosemagwin]

You and your opponent just keep scoring until someone's spirit hits 0. Having one worse hand doesn't immediately spell the end.

[YoinerSploiner59]

I have a question. How do you lose a round of verbal duel? When I have a bad hand what determines if I win or lose that round?

[Rosemagwin]

all fixed!

[Matimus Prime]

Thank you - this definitely helps explain some of what is a very obtuse minigame.

sidenote - fase is spelled 'phase'