Best way to describe this game is a Real-Time Fire Emblem with little armies instead of individual units. The game has a gorgeous art style (Common Vanillaware W), and the cast of characters is expansive. However, once I tinkered with my unit composition I rarely changed it up, as it usually proved to be extremely effective. On that point, the game can be pretty easy, especially once you figure out how to pair different characters together for maximum efficiency. Still kinda annoyed that this game didn't really show the MC marrying the Maiden (In this case it was Morard for me), but I can just keep that as a little head-cannon for myself.

Great visual style and voice acting are par for the course for Vanillaware, so what else is there? An (almost) real-time strategy with plot that would not look out of place in a Fire Emblem (in other words, rather generic).
It’s a shame, because with some extra budget this game would’ve been absolutely stellar. So you have the well-designed stages and deeply enjoyable battle system, but then you step out on the world map. What awaits you there is extremely basic side quests, unit conversations which weren’t even drawn or voiced for whatever reason and…that’s it, really. There’s a mining mini game too, which is fun until you realize how many times you need to do it to get all treasure maps.
So, worth a playthrough? Absolutely. Worth sinking hundreds of hours into? Probably not. Here’s to hoping Vanillaware spread their resources a bit better next time.

Coming to this from 13 Sentinels it is almost precisely the opposite of what I expected. Where 13S has a phenomenal plot full of complexity, mystery, and deep characterization, UO's written like generic pulp fantasy—no, not even that, like a monster-of-the-week TV show apisiring to generic pulp fantasy. But where 13S's combat feels sloggy and bolted-on, UO's is consistently fun and reasonably engaging.

The core failing of the game is the fact that word, "reasonably". Although battles in the game are never boring, the systems promise far more than they're actually able to deliver. The game is stuck between two worlds: a stolid traditional Attack Magic Item Flee system and an FFXII-style fully automated luxury battlesim. It's straining towards the latter and it almost manages to grasp it, but the small gap remaining makes all the difference.

The goal of a system like this is to elicit in the player strategic thinking. Consider which characters complement one another's skills, which skills are useful in which circumstances, how to make a unit that's flexible, powerful, and effective against the present challenge. Find clever combinations of skills and equipment that exploit holes in your enemies' defenses. This is what Unicorn Overlord wants, and it's what it narrowly misses.

This is how a battle goes: your unit (composed of several characters) bumps into an enemy unit. Each unit is arranged on its own 3x2 grid, and each character has a set of active and passive actions they use under certain user-defined conditions in initiative order as long as they have resources. You can customize these before the battle, swap equipment with anything in storage, and the game will tell you how much net damage you will deal and how much you will take. Once you're satisfied with your setup, you hit go and the battle plays out automatically. Since resources are very limited, most battles only last a few "turn cycles" as they would exist in a Dragon Quest style system.

In practice, this system has a few critical issues. The first and most noticeable is the degree of variance in each battle. Whether hits are critical or miss entirely is up to the random number generator, which is of course quite sensitive to initial conditions—as indeed are the deterministic behaviors of a battle. This means that you can change a prospective battle from losing to winning often enough by simply rearranging your characters or toggling skills on and off arbitrarily, a practice which quickly overwhelms the amount of time you spend on actual tactical decisions.

The ability to change a unit's programming for each battle also erodes the gap between this system and something more traditional. With some finagling, you can usually choose fairly specifically which enemy will be hit by which attack, allowing you to essentially route around the automation and pre-plan a more standard RPG battle. That level of customizability undermines the conceit of programming.

At the furthest extreme, because you can swap any equipment with anything in storage before a battle or between battles, in principle the best way to play is to keep all your top-tier gear unequipped and just swap it on each unit before they fight and off once they're done. I couldn't bring myself to go to such noxious lengths most of the time, but I did keep a few "just in case" initiative boosters around.

I hypothesize that this game would be substantially more fun if you voluntarily chose not to change your unit's loadout after deploying them. I just wish this were something that was built into the game, rather than something players have to turn to upon discovering that the game doesn't live up to its own goals.

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.

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.

The game is fun; however, there is a big problem, the difficulty. The beginning up till the middle was amazing. It gave new classes that had new synergistic skills working with each other unit to make your own customizable kill squad, but eventually you lose interest altogether as you steam roll mobs and bosses with little effort.

The story was enjoyable but suffered from too many differing characters from each continent, that it made it more of an episodic game rather than an overall cohesive narrative.

I kinda wished this game had a meatier story to it, but even with the tiny bit of story this actually has it took me over 70 hours to beat so maybe this was for the best. I suppose the team spent all of their energy working on the gameplay and didn't concern themselves with the story too much.

The gameplay is actually really good. It can be very satisfying and fun trying to figure out team compositions that won't end up with your guys just getting slaughtered. Figuring it out can be pretty difficult at times, but once you have some good teams the battles become very entertaining.

I did feel the game was getting to be a little too long at around the 60hr mark, and with the way every section of the game more or less feels like going through several "villains of the week" so to speak, in that you just go to a place, beat up bad guy and recruit more people, and not much else, well it was getting a little repetitive. But I thought it was all worth it because the last few battles of the game are some of the most entertaining ones.

Also gay marriage.

Another fantastic game by Vanillaware. I fun tactics game with a story similar to Fire Emblem. Really loved the world they built. Even with so many characters, most of them felt fleshed out. OST was great. Combat is predetermined so I found myself skipping battles instead of watching the amazing animations.

So many lovable characters with unique dialogue towards others, you could completely miss out on recruiting people just because you didn’t recruit another one. I was definitely elf pilled lmao. Alain and crew are definitely gonna be remembered, all 60 or so of them.

fun gameplay and great art style and animations.

as someone new to tactical rpgs (but not JRPGs) i found that even on "tactical" difficulty the game was a bit too easy - you can just throw units at an enemy until it dies. difficulty isnt really explored in this setting until the very end of the game where the final boss forces you to think a little bit about unit composition.

at the same time it felt a bit too long with too many encounters, many of them being "liberation" encounters which are pretty short battles. I wouldve preferred a smaller shorter game with less encounters , but with longer individual battles and more options within the battles to play with and optimize unit comp.

Mainly got this to support Vanillaware without knowing anything about the title but ended up getting a very enjoyable game. This is a straight-forward no frills Strategy RPG and has a lot of the standard VW charm you would expect to see if you've played their other titles. The gameplay loop is VERY satisfying, organizing units and planning out team composition is great. Character art is great, music is great, and i love having an old-school 2D-esque overworld. As many others will say - the story is definitely a bit cookie-cutter, so don't expect anything revolutionary and don't pay the price of entry unless you just want to sit down and enjoy a 60-80 hour strategy game as there isn't much else going on in this title (i.e. don't expect something like 13 Sentinels).
Highly recommend for any SRPG fans!

There are heaps of interesting tactical decisions to make in designing your units to decimate the swordfodder obstacles in the way of you becoming The Nicest King Ever, but at least a quarter of the “skill” i built to play this game was “shuffling around pieces in your unit pre-fight to get a better RNG roll on the battle”. The preview screen holds a death grip on the entire combat experience: the information you are given is neither ‘perfect’ enough to do your own work, nor vague enough to allow improvisation and confidence to be your weapons, and so you ultimately have a black box simulator to press Go on when the numbers are good. I didn’t hate playing it, but from a theory perspective, this thing is not working to its potential.

And while I still have some qualms with 13 Sentinels’ plot despite enjoying it overall – considering its intricacy, I didn’t expect most every beat of Unicorn Overlord to be as complex as a butter sandwich. It is so, so flatly incurious about its characters’ interiority that it’s actually shocking. Every support conversation I saw was like a grey-boxed version of a scene that could be formulaic, but maybe charming too, if it were fleshed out – but they aren’t! The whole reading experience is at a level of cathexis and fidelity similar to a cheap flavored sparkling water.

The art’s execution is unsurprisingly good, though the character designs’ gender dimorphism is offputtingly consistent. Like, listen, I love Yahna’s b-cups, I’m not a joyless dyke, but if the women get to be this flamboyant and cheesecakey then why the hell do the men have no asses and stand like it’s their turn to play the xbox? Like at least give Ithillion some cheeks. It’s right there. Cowards. Anyway the HD2D by way of ‘overworld sprites illustrated like they could be pixelized but are left at full resolution’ is surprisingly good looking as well. also the mining minigame is weirdly satisfying. Overall I just feel worn down by the constant, tectonic level of friction between what the game could be, and what they actually did with it. (played on highest default difficulty, approx 130 hour final time)

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.