Unicorn Overlord (2024)

Unicorn Overlord is a masterfully crafted video game. The player is given as much or as little to do as they wish, with every new nation, stage, backstory, and time-engrossing side venture all weaving into one another in a way that never feels forced. All of this is actualized with music and visuals to consistently dazzle and delight as the world is delved into deeper.

This pacing is crafted with incredible flexibility such that one player may spend minutes doing something another will spend hours on and both finding their time well spent. Combat is a constantly shifting bout of delightful visuals as tactical options and classes keep things enticing. It takes a special title to reach all gaming sensibilities and Unicorn Overlord does so with such style and flair that everyone should test it for themselves.

Vanillaware's charms are something quite irresistible, like a nice bowl of vanilla ice cream, eternaly appealing to everyone's tastebuds, and considering I've been running through their catalog before this game's release, I've had but one worry

"What if it's not as good as their other games?"

And then I finished the opening section and all my worries were washed away, oh yeah, this was gonna be a banger

The artstyle is, as always, some of the best 2D art in the industry, unbelievably detailed, every location a painting to another land in its own right, every environment as wonderfully brought to life as the last, this is just another vanillaware game in terms of art, sure, but their high standard stays up to snuff no matter what, love it.

The music was also shockingly amazing. I adored some melodies from odin sphere and muramasa, and the ambiance of dragon's crown is memorable if not slightly underplayed, and 13 sentinels has some chill tunes I still listen to often. But this game is probably their best work with music yet. It's so grandiose yet so calm and soothing, the battle music hits hard and the exploration themes are absolute earworms. And spoilers for the endgame THE BALTRO BATTLE MUSIC IS SO GODDAMN GOOD, and the fact that it's used at the start of the game and then at the end is great too, I love it when games remind me that I just wasted 60 hours of my life

Well uh... What about the actual gameplay?

The gameplay is split into 2, exploration and combat, tho you'll most likely be doing the latter less.

Exploration is good... Enough. I guess games like Xenoblade 3 spoiled me on exploration and now anything less than that seems to feel underwhelming to me, but it's still quite good, and I enjoyed it greatly (and it's an unfair comparaison).

As for combat... I can't comment since, despite having played on tactical difficulty, I didn't fully engage with it till the fight against galerius because wtf happened there? 150 heal up after every match? I couldn't win if I didn't cheese it through online research..., I hope I would try harder on playthrough 2 on a harder difficulty but for now... Yeah it's cool? I mean it ain't for me but it says a lot that I love this game despite that, you know? It's just that good

Story's pretty generic, but it's effective at the very least. Thankfully the characters and world-building deserve a massive amount of praise. 60ish characters? That's quite the amount, and it's impressive I can remember a majority of them despite that number, and they're all generally cool. I mean they're no heroes from Xenoblade 3 but they're definitely great and memorable in their own right.

Conclusion : I admire Vanillaware's craft for many reasons, the art, the sound, the gameplay, and the worlds, but what I admire most is the seamless weaving of all these elements in an effortless fashion, there ain't a studio quite like vanillaware, and they should be remembered as one of the greatest video game studios in my opinion, and for now, unicorn overlord acts as their grandest and most impressive title.

Edit: but the countless translation issues in the rapports is extremely questionable, what the hell happened there...

After a whopping 60-70 hours I have finished Unicorn Overlord. It might be closer to 50-60 hours as I do tend to leave games on and running, but even so, what a long game. In all honesty, it did not need to be that long. Though maybe it's more accurate to say that the very first nation did not need to be that long. With each nation you went to, it's very obvious their individual stories and battles got shorter. Albion, the final nation, took nearly no time at all to complete compared to everything else. Which is honestly ironic consider Scarlett's character gets done so dirty by the story. Guess it's only fitting that Albion, her homeland, is but a speck in the game's runtime.

Anyway, the game is solid. The most fun part of it is undoubtedly the time you spend in menus, tuning your units with gear and skill priorities. These days I find myself wishing for games to record the time I spent on menus really. The battles themselves, while some fun and interesting, are all too simplistic and linear. Part of the reason is that battles take place directly on the overworld itself, which ultimately makes it difficult to create interesting and dedicated battle areas. Even so, it was quite fun seeing how some battles played out, I just wish there was a bit more strategy involved. Much of the end game battles were really just sending Alain and his incredibly powerful harem, alongside with three other units, all fliers that easily bypassed a majority of terrain obstacles. Really, Griffon and Wyvern Riders are kinda nuts for overworld stuff, able to increase unit speed immensely whilst Wyvern Rider rains down hell with constant dives.

Still, I had a good time with the game. I'm not sure I'll ever replay it, even after unlocking a new difficulty. The nature of the game makes it difficult to find much replay value in it apart from forcibly mixing up unit synergy, which I honestly wouldn't find very fun to do. Also, it's too long!! If anything, this game made me want to revisit Fire Emblem Engage...

I don't think I have ever wanted to redo a battle as much as I do with the battle stage of the Another Prince quest. After seeing the seemingly uncountable hordes of enemy units approaching from all directions, I thought I'd be miserable but I had the best time. I wish they placed something like this sooner because it showed me the great value of so many things - garrison points and watchtowers, catapults, and valor actions. I just can't stop thinking about how I could improve my earlier performance.

There's a high chance I'll reload an earlier save tomorrow to play the stage again. I hope my success tonight was not a fluke.

Finally reaching other regions in the game and am still impressed and gushing over the overall game design and features. It's a simple enough game loop that sounds like and looks basic enough at first glance, but there's layers of systems and mechanics that can be tweaked or further interacted with by the player that really add a surprising and fun amount of depth.

Even simple elements like exploring the overworld map give you plenty of little things to do that don't feel tacked on, but instead all feed together into the primary gameplay of managing your units and completing battles.

Available battles also continue to expand outward across the map allowing you to challenge harder maps faster should you feel confident, or steadily chug along working your way up from the lower level battles to the higher ones.

The biggest critique I've seen in reviews has been the straight forward and basic plot, and while I can see a bit of disappointment that this isn't going to do Final Fantasy Tactics or Tactics Ogre level complexity stuff with the plot or world building, I do think what is here is well done enough in presentation to still feel entertaining.

Is it weird to say this game has grown on me after well over 25+ hours into it? I'm still having alot of fun messing around with units and map design has definitely gotten way more interesting in the other continents. Unit size and the amount of abilities they carry with them have increased to the point where it's weirdly satisfying watching a single battle play out. It's also quite funny tweaking a unit and their ability priorities, sending them into battle, and it playing out exactly how you did not want it to.

The dialogue and story is also better once you leave the first continent as well, though not by much. I'm actually quite sad and a little baffled at how they make Scarlett just take a backseat once she rejoins you. She practically has zero screen time (at least in the 2nd continent I cleared) throughout all side and main story dialogues. Lex still shows up now and then but I had honestly hoped Alain, Scarlett, and Lex would be a constant trio group going forward. One thing I also found rather disappointing, though not surprising, is how most characters have very little rapport conversations with each other save for very specific pairs. With how big the roster is, it's certainly not surprising every character doesn't have three rapport conversations with every single unit. Though it certainly won't stop me from being salty that some of my more liked characters don't have three rapport conversations with certain characters.

I've said it before, but this game is maybe too big. It's becoming obvious that I probably won't be able to finish this before Dragon's Dogma 2 release on Thursday, which will be my sole focus for a while. I don't want to rush it either so I think I'm just gonna have to accept I'm not going to finish this game until sometime in the future.

I'm still mixed on this game. I think the most fun part of the game is honestly the menu-ing. The amount of tuning you can do to influence a unit's attacks and order is honestly fun to play around with. The actual battles themselves feel way too simple and linear in how they play out. The majority of battles in the initial continent all play out nearly exactly the same where you just go capturing strongholds in a linear path until you win. Even on Expert, there's very little thinking involved as there's only a single objective to worry about for victory and defeat. The first Main Story battle in the next continent actually has multiple objectives you need to capture but I feel they took waay too long to introduce that as a mechanic. The first continent is honestly pretty big but feels like a massive tutorial that gets a little dull after a while.

Still mostly enjoying my time but it feels like this game is pretty big... maybe a bit too big. Probably won't get too sink too much time again until the weekend.