Unicorn Overlord
Finished 5/4/24

As a fan of the tactics genre I sometimes have to face an unfortunate truth. I'm not really that smart. Denoting the tactics genre as something of an 'intelligent' genre isn't super productive or entirely all that honest but I think most people like to equate it as requiring a bit more patience and caution to every detail. The game of chess throughout history used as a paradigm of teaching tactical strategy, morality, higher thinking and the likes- unfortunately, in our middle school's gifted enrichment class I had the proud honor of being the 2nd worst chess player in our class ranking. I don't know, something about my planning functions just don't activate in the middle of a TRPG, sometimes becoming an issue in these tactical games. FFT, Capsule Monster Coliseum, Tactics Ogre- at least Fire Emblem's archetypal builds and borderline gambling chances have carved a niche in my brain as to how I proceed through those battlefields. It's a weird conflict of interest for me but one I enjoy wracking my brain with as the systems often take creative liberties to allow several different variables in handling their given puzzles. Leave it to Vanillaware to both alleviate on and twist the knife on this predicament.

Unicorn Overlord is a magnificent addition to the genre's canon, and would make a pretty good entry into the genre as of late, as Fire Emblem I feel has cornered itself in weird conflicting philosophies, in my opinion and other tactics franchises are mostly juggling through remakes at the moment. Ironic to recommend it as such given how much this game borrows from the canon wholesale, the gameplay is very much Ogre Battle 64, the world map and many plot beats reek of 16-bit Fire Emblem yet the later addition of Feather classes and Bestrals feel more akin to the Tellius titles. This is fairly typical for Vanillaware: Dragon's Crown, 13 Sentinels, Odin Sphere usually display their inspiration on their sleeve, although this still feels a bit more ‘prime’ for expansion but I'll elaborate later.

Props to Vanillaware having some of my favorite 'feel' in games. It's incredibly easy and satisfying going through VW interfaces. Something like 13 Sentinels being 90% narrative doesn't give you much to navigate, game-wise but even in a title such as that- it just feels smooth going through menus to find what you want. It should be a given that Vanillaware's attention to its art, its interfacing and music is top notch, just some of the best in the industry.

The world map is incredibly fun to explore, with the first nation providing a ton of features to interact with. Treasure maps, unmarked houses that give hidden items, different types of quests abound and town restorations to boost your renown, there’s a lot to clear out throughout Fevrith. I do wish later areas had more unique things to distinguish them, Drakengard gets a distinct coliseum but past that the latter nations feel a bit rinse and repeat. It's still fun to run around the new areas and there's some neat distinctions in later areas, Bastorias has a lot more harbors, Albion has goats? There's at least enough throughout the continent to explore and go back to once you acquire new units that can interact with certain markers, which freshens things up a little.

/////INTERMISSION///////
Selvie is best wife.
/////END INTERMISSION//////


I was worried the introduction of so many characters at once would have been an issue, and while it does front load you with several, several characters on the front end it more or less resembles a larger Fire Emblem title at around 70 characters (Radiant Dawn, Fates: Revelation and New Mystery range around 70-high 80s). It's still quite a lot, and not every character is an immediate winner but they've got some fun interactions and the amount of units you can use in battle allows for better expression of their character. This opposes certain titles like New Mystery of the Emblem, a game with several, several units at your disposal but only about 10 slots by the end game, 6 of which are pretty locked in, either for Marth/Kris or good ending requirements. Here, UO gives plenty of opportunity for you to build out self-sufficient teams as you unlock and expand your unit sizes and test them out in the main, side and liberation quests.

If Fire Emblem is a JRPG given a tactical playing field, Unicorn Overlord is a tactics programming game (apologies though, I have no experience with actual programming video games). Quite often I run into a situation where I throw a unit out into the battlefield, meet some friction and only halfway through a battle remember the spaghettified loadout I hadn't changed back from a previous battle. While the game has so many options and ways to customize your moveset, it only makes it easier to be bogged down by the potential of every variable rather than a clear solution. I do wish I utilized the loadouts more often, just to preserve a 'main' loadout and shift to certain other builds depending on the situation- didn't because I just, well, forgot…The game isn’t all that hard, not when you really get down into the meat of it all, but I admittedly felt pretty stupid at a lot of points trying to organize certain skills together only for the main issue to be something like character placement in a unit. Thankfully Vanillaware's ethos of providing a lot of items and secondary abilities somewhat mitigates sticky situations- it just kinda feels sillier when resorting to certain items for beating hordes of units when the outlook of a fight doesn't look favorable. The perfect result forecast is a godsend of a feature though, giving no hang ups as to how a battle might go but letting you know completely if you’ll get a good outcome in a fight. The only issue being its not precise in letting you know what damage or healing goes where, the results mostly act as a total ‘healing’ or damage so it pays to pay attention because too often i saw i was getting healed, went into battle only for a unit to take 16 damage and die but someone else to be healed 32 HP for a result of 16 healing, very perplexing.

At the very least this differs from my frustrations with FE: Engage, where I would often struggle with an in-game currency as to whether certain builds would be a waste of both time and experience. Here, it was more so just a confusion on smart, optimal, loadouts for certain units I probably didn't need battling certain other enemies in the first place. It admittedly took me a while to remember how exactly best to counter Wyvern Riders...
I do give props for the game utilizing various cliques/design elements from Fire Emblem's classes, although some of the same pitfalls apply as well. Bulkier, defensive units like Hoplites don't feel nearly as useful as Cavalier or Flying units- hell Cavelier units are certainly the best of the bunch here. Most every class is pretty alright though, I was able to make one of my units using Bruno despite seeing a lot of pushback on Gladiators, which might speak to how malleable and gameable the systems are here.

This feels like an odd inverse to Vanillaware's previous opus, 13 Sentinels, a title I honor in its densely layered, memetic entanglement of a narrative, but somewhat spartan in its tactical, wave management mode (fantastic music at least). Unicorn Overlord, despite its immense equipment-moveset-placement management and its abundance of items for tactical deployment has a fairly milquetoast narrative. It works, although I wouldn't say it strikes me as hard as some of my more favorite Fire Emblem titles or most of what I've played of FF Tactics. It's a bit hard to place as the game's heavy reliance on other games in the genre made it harder to really place my head separate from the parallels. Additionally, while I enjoy the methodical pace of going country by country to liberate Fevrith, many of the quests and fights began feeling pretty cut and dry rather than having a living, dynamic narrative that felt impacted by the progress of your crusade. You make a good chunk of progress through the mainland of Cornia, approximately freeing a quarter of the continent yet even with this massive chunk it feels a bit silly that there's still 4 major countries propping up these major occupants in the other nations. I guess there's mind-control-curse type shenanigans to fall back on for why you still need to go to each of the nations but it's funny when looking at the big picture. There’s a big lore drop around the last single digit percent of the game, and granted it's a neat explanation as to why the events have unfolded, it just feels too little for too late.


The main thing I want to impart is that this game is quite excellent on most fronts- it's perhaps a nation and a half too long though. The novels of the world, all the classes, the battling, the equipment swapping gets to be pretty redundant once you hit Bastorias. By then, a lot of the classes introduced start to feel like repeats of prior classes, a reskin of thieves, two reskins of archers, a hoplite reskin, etc. Looking closer these do have their distinct differences of course, some of which have better synergy than their compatriot but it feels harder at first glance to determine how to fit in these newer classes and playstyles, often I figure it best to just lump all of one region's new characters into their own unit and call it a day.

It is a shame, I doubt this'll see a sequel or follow up of any sort given that usually Vanillaware deals in one and done titles. While I don't necessarily want something on the same length, I think there's a lot that could be done to iron out some of the kinks of the unit/inventory management while expanding upon the way this interacts in the narrative. Nothing feels quite as good as changing that one variable in a loadout and making a battle go from a close shave to a complete trample, although by the third act much of the time it feels more like you’re plodding through useless trinkets for the specific battle while on the grand scheme of the game the fighting has stalled in narrative momentum.

I mentioned earlier VW's penchant to have games wear a patchwork sweater of references, and while UO isn't innocent of this I feel as though it not as ‘contained’ as something like a 13 Sentinels- a narrative that feels more open and closed by that game’s finale. I could earnestly see something at least in the same universe or style to Unicorn Overlord, although i don't know if they’d need to go through the same hoops as each FE continuity needing a ‘Fire Emblem’. Perhaps it's just that I felt left wanting a bit more on the narrative end, but I could go for another tactics title from Vanillaware, it checks a lot of things I’ve been wanting from Fire Emblem for a while.

Unicorn Overlord is a massive ordeal in tactical thinking, allowing for the customization of several cogs to trample armies, somewhat undermined by the ease of having so many options that forego needing to engage with the usual risks in the genre and running low on steam by the last continent.

Amazing game with a lot of combat depth. On lower difficulties, the game doesn't really force you to go TOO in-depth, but even on the standard difficulty the game definitely slowed down a LOT for me once I got past the first 3 areas just because there was so much to do with my units to organize and customize them as they got more skills and more AP/PP to use them. Unfortunately, you can kinda tell where they ran out of money (because Vanillaware) starting in the last main area, and the unfortunate lack of post-game shows it. But, at least there's some online PvP, even if you can only fight so many times per day.

That said, 2 legit flaws
1. While the character-writing is solid and way-less obnoxiously trope-y than Fire Emblem, especially the modern FE, the main character and his closest friends are utter cardboard. You can kinda forget how boring they are and get absorbed in the game, but come endgame the story sequences drag, being generic and predictable as possible.
2. Cavaliers not being the leaders of most of your units is almost always a mistake. Even when facing units that counter Cavs, they're still strong characters, and as leaders they're just twice as fast as any other unit. Which you can make up for with a skill that boosts movement speed, that makes the Cavs even just that much faster than the units that are on-foot. You don't really need to do this, but it's such a stupid advantage (especially with how it removes the time limit from ever being something you have to consider) and navigating the battle maps ends up feeling so slow without them. This removes a lot of the interesting decision-making around which character leads your units.