Unicorn Overlord

There's not really a term to succinctly describe the genre Unicorn Overlord falls under. It's a direct and extremely faithful spiritual successor to Ogre Battle [オウガバトルサーガ], a beloved cult series that hasn't had a new game in nearly two decades, and very very few other attempts have been made at any similar type of gameplay since.

But whatever you want to call the gameplay loop, it's certainly addicting. The battles/missions involve managing an army of recruitable units that you organize into 5-man squadrons and move them along a map in a part-tactical RPG, part-RTS style. But when units bump into each other, they skirmish in a JRPG-style 5v5 auto-battle, where you don't get direct control over the units, but instead preconfigure your units gear, abilities, and logic trees (perhaps inspired by Final Fantasy XII [ファイナルファンタジーXII]'s gambits or similar AI customization systems) and then you watch these battles unfold. The goal of each mission is to capture the enemy city, resulting in you gaining control of city on your world map and recruiting the enemy commander into your army. Between these missions, you can freely move around the world map, visit new cities, talk to characters and questgivers, and discover hidden items, giving the game a healthy dash of kingdom management and top-down JRPG world exploration too. UO's resulting mesh of genres is super unique and a total joy to play through.

Highly notable for JRPGs/turn-based games, the game is also surprisingly open world. Starting right after the first few tutorial quests, the game lets you freely navigate between four of the five main regions without any hard blocks. Within each region, there's a loose sequence of quests that guide game progression, but overall, Unicorn Overlord lets you bounce around the world map and approach most the game's missions in whatever order you choose. As long as you're able to beat a prerequisite mission (no matter if it's the same level or twenty levels higher than you), the game lets you choose wherever you want to go. This is something I really love, as the "skill"-gated open design meshes well with the hodgepodge of different genres the game has in place, and it gives the player so many options for progression to help keep gameplay fresh. You can always find something new to do without feeling stuck or bored in a particular zone.

After sinking about 60 hours through the game's run, I can confidently call this the crown jewel of Ogre Battle-like gameplay, admittedly a genre with thin competition. But despite the love put into this game, it's hard not to feel like there's some frustrating missed opportunities. And I'll fully admit my bias here, maybe it's the rarity of games like this making me judge it a little harsher than I should be, like a couple clouds the day Halley's comet rolls around. If it had a stronger story or better gameplay depth, Unicorn Overlord could've had potential to be one of the best games of the decade, but it never felt quite there for me.

The plot is an unremarkable "good versus evil" story without much else to say. You play the young prince Alain on a journey to liberate the world from the plainly evil dictator Lord Galerius, as you go from town to town convincing new regions to join the fight against the empire. With some fairness to the game, even from the outset it does not pretend to be a particularly philosophical or morally complicated game: most of the enemy commanders are canonically "mind controlled" by Galarius (not even a spoiler, but a plot mechanic introduced in the first few minutes of the game), and Alain makes it his mission to break everyone free of Galerius's control. While there's a few recurring characters central to the story that you'll see through the game, the majority of the game follows a clear "character-of-the-day" format, where once you've completed a mission and recruited the main unit from that city, you'll never see most of them in the story much again.

There's some occasional flashes of interesting subplots in a few missions, but most of the writing in the game is light and episodic, seemingly more designed to introduce you to the the new daily characters you can recruit rather than advancing much of a broader plot. And although there's occasional story choices the game lets you make, their impact on the game ends up being rather minor and underwhelming. The English localization (a bit controversially) uses heavy regal/medieval prose for dialogue. While I never minded the writing, I didn't find it to be a particular strong point either, and it felt more to me like the localizers were trying their best to make the most out of what's just fundamentally a weaker story. It might be worse for those coming directly from Ogre Battle, because in contrast to the game's predecessors that are very well-renowned for their strong plots and meaningful narrative choices, Unicorn Overlord lacks either.

With all that said, the story in the game is not overly long, and could probably be breezed through by players that are only interested in the gameplay. But while the gameplay structure itself was largely a blast, I found myself disappointed by the lack of difficulty, at least for a veteran of TRPGs, even on the hardest mode. And there was just a small collection of slight design decisions I disliked that caused the game to miss out on so much of the potential depth that it could've had. There's probably too much that's worth going into with just a review, but I overall felt a little teased by the gameplay mechanics, which had so many cool systems to offer, but where most of them didn't really end up coming into play given the simplicity of all the story missions. For some players, this really might not really matter for you. But for experienced game tinkerers and min-maxers, you can find yourself optimizing the fun out of the game without much difficulty, and wishing the game gave you a little more to really chew on.

Still, for the smaller team size and the way Vanillaware was able to revitalize a beloved series, I have a lot of praise. I feel Unicorn Overlord is lacking some of that special factor, but I still seriously enjoyed my time with the game, and most people looking for a really fresh style of RPG gameplay will probably love it too.

I'd like to say this is a masterpiece, the next best thing since "Let Us Cling Together". Unfortunately, this game is so abusable that you can trivialize the hardest difficulty if you know what you're doing. The balance is simply all over the place, and so is the map design. The former suffers because you're afforded much better equipment than what enemies have access to and the latter suffers from open world syndrome, interspersing lengthy side quests with short battles (that tend to have a particular gimmick). Not to mention the overworld, where you'll be relegated to gathering resources and making deliveries, enthralling.... The whole experience ends up playing out like your typical Ubisoft game, where quantity and tedium test your endurance. Each region is also very homogenous, with the same looking terrain, buildings, and enemies everywhere. Let's not even talk about the writing, it's unremarkable and bland, carrying the plot forward to the next land mass to conquer.

Where this game really shines is in its gambit-like system, where you can specify both the order and requirements for character actions, add actions through equipment, and synchronize them with unit formations. There's a lot of classes to choose from as well, with an adequate variety of type matchups and six slots to play with. During battles, valor points provide a good balancing act between deployment and valor actions, while the time limit encourages aggression. It's so mechanically sound and full of creative freedom that I've considered this a worthwhile experience, despite my problems with it.