At its core, Unicorn Overlord features deep real-time strategy and tactical decision making that stays fresh for most of the game. Beautiful backdrops, music, and enough systems to keep managing your army interesting. Equipment not only affects your stats, but the abilities a character can use, a la Final Fantasy tactics. There are two currencies: Honor-- which you can spend on unit growth, and gold for buying items. Your army's Renown increases as you make a name for yourself by winning battles and restoring towns to their antebellum state, which in turn increases the maximum size of your units and applies a multiplier to the amount of honor and renown you earn. It's a satisfying loop.

Unicorn Overlord's call to fame is its tactics menu, which allows the player to set conditional statements for when each character's abilities trigger. This was a source of hours of fun for me. I would often stare at the tactics menu for a character for 20 minutes before getting on with the game. Once you land on a set of tactics that works, especially in the last quarter of the game when your characters have learned all of their abilities, then things can start feeling repetitive. Since the game shows you the outcome of each skirmish before the animation plays out (which I like), I found myself skipping the gorgeous visuals to get on with the larger fight.

Some of the other systems the game introduces felt clunky or misplaced. I didn't engage with the gift system at all, which did not impede my ability to gain rapport with my army. Stationing a guard at each liberated town nets you resources after each battle, which adds to the fun of the gameplay loop. But in order to station a guard at every town, you'd have to hire about 60 generic merceneries (as opposed to the "unique" main characters of the story). There is little reason to recruit them otherwise, as you certainly can't use that many characters in combat. And they just clog the same menu used to form units for battle.

Speaking of menus, I was constantly appreciative of how snappy, fluid, and beautiful the UI was in Unicorn Overlord. You're able to get a lot done with just a few button taps and in only a few seconds. That said, the equipment menu was a huge source of frustration. You cannot sort gear alphabetically. The most useful ways of sorting are usually by Order Acquired and by Not Eqipped. But as my inventory grew, I really wished I could sort alphabetically to find specific items-- especially since swapping equipment is such a key part of how battles play out.

I didn't find the story particularly interesting and I found the character designs somewhat lacking. The overworld sprites in particular were kind of odd and souless (and had different hair color than the character they were meant to represent?? Was that just me?).

I had fun with it despite these frustrations. I would recommend Octopath Traveler 2 or Triangle Strategy if the tactics system isn't for you but you still want the whole "build an army" thing. 13 Sentinels is still Vanillaware's best game.

Haven't finished at the time of writing, but this is genuinely one of the better RPGs I've played of the past few years. I was on the fence for a long time, since the marketing was truly terrible, like TRULY horrid at telling you what this game even was. I thought it was like some mobile auto-battler gacha. But when I downloaded the demo, my God was I hooked for all 7 hours of my allotted time. I was BEGGING for more when I timed out.

The robust strategy gameplay feels practically unparalleled, Ogre Battle fans are FEASTING right now. There are so many ways to build your units and the characters within them, and I've ALWAYS been a huge fan of FF12's gambit system, fuck what the haters say. The game is highly repetitive, but the battles are so fun that I couldn't care less.

And I cannot understate how GOOD it feels to be able to roam around the world and choose your path through the game. I played on expert and consistently chose to take on missions that were a higher level than me just to see where it would take me and not only does the game allow you to do this, it gives you all the tools you need to do it so long as you have the skill to pull it off. This way, I was able to enter Bastorias to see the bestial units I was waiting SO LONG for before even entering Elheim. The satisfaction I got from that was unparalleled, I don't think I've ever seen an SRPG that was able to give me that level of strategic freedom.

I won't lie tho, despite how much I love this game, I have a hard time convincing myself to pick it up due to one major flaw: the story.

Unicorn Overlord's story is just a straight up nothing burger. I'm honestly convinced that writing just wasn't a core pillar of this game's design, because the quality of story writing and literally everything else is literally night and day. I wouldn't say it's a "bad" story by any means, but it is very much a skeleton of a story that says or does very little, which is a shame for someone who is huge on story in games.

To me, Unicorn Overlord seems much more like a game where the fun is ALL in the gameplay, which isn't a bad thing in itself. But it's hard for me to find a reason to come back when I just don't care about these characters or what is happening to this world. There are very little actually interesting cutscenes that break up the monotony of "Defeat the enemy commander!" missions that make up the entirety of the game, which can easily induce burn out if you don't have a good stomach for this type of repetition. The better cutscenes and dialogue you'll find are largely akin to a good S-rank support conversation in Fire Emblem, focusing more on character interaction than plot. Which is funny, since this game also has FE's support system with support scenes to boot.

Despite that, though, this is a great game. An excellent game, even. I seriously have nothing but praise for this game outside of its story, and wish for only more from Vanillaware.

Ultimately just way too repetitive - it hooked me initially with a great style and interesting squad building & balancing mechanics, but the combat and overworld cycles are locked in rhythms that are just way too predictable to engage with regularly. A higher level of difficulty and more RNG in combat would have made the whole thing more interesting - the game wants you to solve the problems of each encounter by finding the correct configuration of units to counter the enemy squad, and ultimately this just becomes too simple and rote to be compelling.