"Gen 5 is the absolute worst AC generation"->They played it on PS3
"Gen 5 is actually good you're just bad"->They played it on Xbox 360

Unfortunately, I've got to play the PS3 version in OG hardware and made Dark Souls' OG Blighttown look like Metal Gear Solid 2 in comparison. I have no feelings towards this game but FromSoft should be ashamed to have pulled one of the absolute worst running games I have ever played. Why is this generation such a pain just to be played normally??? On OG PS3 this runs like dogshit, let alone RPCS3; on Xbox 360 I saw it runs smoothly but you need good-ass hardware if you want to play it on Xenia, otherwise you've got to play it WITHOUT AC TEXTURES????

I've always closed an eye on From Software's absolute lack of capacity in terms of optimization, but this is too much I'm sorry.

January 2022 I played Dark Souls 2 : Scholar of the first sin for the first time, it took a while to click but eventually I fell in love with it and the series as a whole.

April 2024 It is with a heavy heart that I must face facts : I cannot play these games anymore. A similar thing has happened to me before, in 2022 I had the same realization about the total war games, but I have since been able to replay them a few years later. So I'd like to say its not "goodbye souls" but "see you later souls". I've simply grown too used to them, as replayable as they are, there is just nothing to excite me anymore. I will note however, that demons' souls was the last holdout.

Admittedly, this is probably less due to Demons' Souls' qualities than it is to the fact that I have done fewer runs of it than DS1 and 2 which I have played to death, by virtue of having to get my ps3 out of storage to play it, but nevertheless I find myself thinking about IT in particular lately.

Spoilers for Demons Souls I guess

The last time I played it I felt like the protagonist of Shadows over Insmouth or even 1984 when the cosmic horror hit as I made my way through the swamp of sorrows and thought to myself "oh god, I'm actually enjoying this". Miyazaki's psy-op finally got to me, whichever pheromone infused miasma the swamps emanate has made it into my head. Are these thoughts my own anymore? Am I but a vessel for the sacrifice to the great god of toxic swamp water that From Software has built an altar to?

Before any of the Demon Souls superfans get too pleased with their new convert, I think my overall enjoyment of DeS has stayed about the same; case in point I think I fucking hate 1-3 and 1-4. I think DeS strengths lie in atmosphere, in novel challenge revolving around environmental traversal, elemental match-ups, slow, methodical exploration and puzzle bossfights. In terms of straight up combat gauntlets its been utterly left in the dust by later entries, and its my least favourite aspect of the game. My ass also got killed because I accidentally climbed over a railing my rubbing too close to it and jumped into a 3 enemy gank, which felt less like punishing poor awareness and more getting fucked by weird controls. How hard is it to add a button press for mantling over obstacles? Either way, FromSoft abandoned that shit almost inmediately so its nice to know they agree with me.

The Blue dragon fucking sucks. The red dragon as an obstacle in 1-1 and 1-2 works perfectly, thematically and mechanically it serves its role of pseudoboss/setpiece wonderfully. The blue dragon sucks, whether or not you get past his second phase seems more luck to me than anything else given the disconnect between the visual outline and hitbox of his fire breath (especially if you rescue the knight dude) and given he guards the false king, as a player you're going to be seeing him a lot, leaving you to either absolutely master his bullshit timing or do the slow, tedious process of killing him with arrows. I have only ever fought King Allant "honourably" like 2 times maybe, because by the time I get to 1-4 my enthusiasm for DeS has grown thin and the tedium of the dragon and runback occupy such a space in my mind, that I usually just pull out the thief ring + poison cloud cheese combo, and I admit that with 0 shame. Its unfortunate, because the first time I fought King Allant I was legitimately sweating by the end of it, it was an incredible rush of adrenaline, but that fucking dumbass dragon had to fuck it up.

That's kind of DeS' double edged sword. It fucks with you, and dares you to fuck with it back, which is great when you max out health regen items so you can tank the poison and absolutely breeze through the swamp, but less great when you realize the optimum interaction with the world tendency system is to act in such a way that you dont have to engage with it at all i.e kill yourself in the nexus and always go in soul form. I get the logic in body form having the supposed risk/reward of extra health vs the chance to make the entire area harder if you die with it, but the usual obtuseness added to the fact that 25% extra health isn't particularly helpful compared to potentially getting into black world tendency, there isn't much of a choice. The added mechanic of item drop rates going up with black world tendency is also kind of pointless because pure white levels with sub-optimally upgraded weapons are infinitely easier than pure black with maxed out weapons. There's just not much of a choice here. You could argue that maybe there wasnt intended to BE a choice, given that the NPC which explained this mechanic was removed during development, but even as an opaque mechanic it cannot help but incentivise not bothering with it at all. Especially given the focus on cooperation I think they had to have realized people would crack the code on it eventually.

The poise system is weird, in that its an example of a system that is both too punishing and way too forgiving for the player, which is weird. Compared to the later souls games (though admittedly DS1 maybe went a bit too far in making poise OP) it fucks with the usual dynamic of the combat wherein you commit to every attack, both yours and the enemies' being slow and interruptable leading to tense back and forths. In DeS though, there is no poise, just hyper armor given by attacks. This leads to some weirdness. Take the scale miners in world 2. They are extremely tough skinned mindless workers in the mines of boletaria, they are very resistant to slashing damage but vulnerable to magic and pierce (and maybe blunt I think). So you'd think then that they would be able to shrug off any attacks from you and attack uninterrupted. This isnt really the case though, because hyper armor only kicks in during certain frames of attacks, hence if they start their pickaxe attack they are absolutely impossible to interrupt by quick thinking, as the attack has basically 0 windup before it enters the hyper armor phase, but if you hit em before they attack you can absolutely stunlock em into oblivion. The same is true of the blue and red-eyed knights who are way easier than they were likely intended to be because they don't have poise. This is what I mean, its both too punishing (doesnt seem to follow the dynamic of the rest of the combat) and too easy to abuse. The red eye knights in 1-3 are absolute dickheads for this, their charging spear attack can get spammed ad infinitum, with basically 0 cooldown and grants hyper armor. Thankfully I have a bow, but the amount of enemies in 1-3 is one reason why I hate it so much.

But nowhere is this poise problem demonstrated more than with Garl Vinland. Poor garl, serving a corrupt demon without poise. For some reason, of the heavy weapons which get hyper armor in DeS, seemingly the ultra greatswords and his fuck off hammer were excluded, and even if it wasnt easy as hell to parry him / get his hammer to smack the wall harmlessly, his dumbass heavy armor grants him 0 resistance to being stunlocked into oblivion. Compare him to Havel, who can also be cheesed, but at least he shrugs off attacks with a toothpick and hits you with his fuck off hammer regardless.

All that said, I love worlds 2,3 and to a lesser extent 4 and 5. 1-1 and 1-2 are great. Atmosphere and visual design wise they are great treats. I read an article I'll link here which brought up an interesting point I've been thinking about lately, which speaks to DeS' longstanding cult status. In the article they compare the flamelurker design in DeS and its remake, and how the latter looks like "artstation fire demon", which is harsh but kind of true. Its what you make when a director asks you for a fire demon, and if there is something that defines DeS I think, its that it embodies the opposite, for good and for ill. The vanguard demon, the storm king, maiden astraea, phalanx even, these all subvert usual genre expectations and give something rather unique without feeling try-hard. Everything else about its design from its mechanics to the art all seem to follow the rule of not just doing the obvious, the easy, the straightforward.

Think about the tutorial, where after maybe defeating the vanguard demon (which again, is not the type of enemy one would usually put as a beginner boss, both in its lethality and slight goofiness of the design) you are taken to an area with some loot and then are put in front of a giant humanoid dragon, who kills you not by breathing fire and melting you (i.e what you would expect) but by hitting you with a big old punch.

So all my complaints aside, I have to respect Demons' Souls, and if I manage to get back into souls at some point in the future, I hope I get to enjoy being brainwashed into liking 5-2 again. And despising that fucking dragon asshole.

Vanillaware i thank you for the meal. They once again did not miss. An excellently crafted SRPG with fun characters, good music, and of course, fantastic visuals. All of this formed to create a game that asked a very bold question: what if Genealogy of the Holy War was good?

Honestly despite the format obviously being different, that's not a joke. This game very much feels like FE4 in some ways and given the devs' obvious love for Fire Emblem (Alain is literally Marth), it makes sense for there to be some interesting similarities. The battles all take place on the overworld itself. The terrain that you see, the areas, that's what you're fighting on. The goal each time is to capture the enemy's main command post while defending your own and capturing outposts in between. It manages to convey that epic warfare feeling and actually gives weight to the whole "liberating" thing. I found myself looking to each battle and i legit started getting a bit disappointed when i knew i was running out of fights. Because it's just so good. The sheer flexibility that's on display here really allows this game to be replayed an endless amount of ways i think.

What i really like about the combat is that the battle forecast tells you exactly what will happen in that instance. It makes sense, given the sheer variety of factors that go into determining an outcome. Because the stages are real time, there's more that goes into the strategy than simply just parking your gigachad unit in a good spot and having enemies suicide on them. While there's normally no permadeath, the game still discourages suicide tactics since stamina limits how many times a squad can attack. Squads with zero stamina can't move, which isn't something you want happen to you in a real-time game. The enemy also plays by these rules though. Honestly, that goes for pretty much the entire game. Save for specific bosses, i don't think there's anything the enemy has that you don't.

Continuing on the gameplay, the classes all rock. Well almost all of them. But even the worst ones still fill their niches quite well and certainly have more versatility than Fire Emblem classes. For example, Armor Knights can actually do things. And the thing that helps all this versatility is that each class has both skills for in and out of combat (that is, map effects). For example, Armor Knights can negate damage taken from out of battle effects. Archers can make arrows rain down for AoE, bypassing enemy defenses because it's on the map. Witches can teleport the whole squad. There's quite a lot.

This write-up honestly doesn't cover all of it. Play the demo to get an idea.

When it comes to writing, there is a bit of a divide here. Is the writing as good as 13 Sentinels? lol no. 13 Sentinels' is still Vanillaware's magnum opus when it comes to storytelling. That said, there's a lot of elements to like here. The cast of characters is great and memorable and i like the game's take on Fire Emblem's Support system more than how Fire Emblem does it. I think Fire Emblem could learn something here, as Unicorn Overlord doesn't force it's Supports to completely stretch each conversation into the full CBA chain. I haven't gone through all the convos yet but i don't think there's a single character i dislike here. I also think the director is incredibly based for allowing every recruitable character to be recruited in one run. The game is inspired by Ogre Battle but not it's cryptic as hell character recruitment methods.

The game also has pretty good worldbuilding. You can get that through the convos, the Side Quests or just reading up the logs. Basically every location, however big or small, gets an entry and it does a good job at making the world feel alive. On the visual aspect, each country is very distinct from each other. I believe that visuals itself can serve as a form of worldbuilding, just look at Xenoblade. All of these elements, in my opinion, help support the main plot. The main plot itself is pretty basic but this is one of those games where you really don't get the full experience if you only stick to the main plot.

I really don't have anything really negative to say about this game. I do have a few minor nitpicks however. The Tactics system, as robust as it is, could've had a bit more specificity to it. And for how much control over things you have, a Path of Radiance-style "commands" system that you can give to AI controlled units would've helped. I also think it's kinda noticeable that the game ran out of money towards the end. In an interview they explained how they kept adding more and more recruitable characters which i feel kinda explains why a lot of the recruits are frontloaded into Cornia and Drakenhold. The Albion arc in particular is very short. Ironically, it's maps are probably the longest.

Vanillaware cooked, just like how they cooked all that delicious food in their games, good God, it's all gorgeous. I'd ask for a sequel to like, iron some stuff out but Vanillaware doesn't even do spiritual sequels so honestly, i'm ok with how this turned out. They spent 10 years on this game, ran out of money in the process, but it's ok because they put out an absolute banger. Want an FE4 remake? Just play this instead.

I just absolutely adored this game and could not put it down. I love tactics games and this unique turned based hybrid real time was just perfect for me.

Lets start with the story. There are some good twists overall but it's a pretty simple fantasy storyline of good vs evil which I really enjoyed. The characters are great and I love how involved with the story most of them are. They also have dedicated support conversations for every characters which fleshes out all the characters nicely. You are able to choose a partner in marriage which plays a big part in the story with a nice fully voiced proposal scene. The support conversations reminded me a lot of Fire Emblem which you can see this game has heavy inspiration from.

The gameplay as I mentioned combines turned based strategy with real time. Throughout the game you will earn honor points which let you upgrade how many units each battalion can hold. You only start out with 2 units per battalion but you will eventually get to twelve units with 5 characters per. This sounds confusing but it all gets introduced slowly and is easy to wrap your head around. You move these battalions in real time but can pause at any time. You setup what characters and what type of moves you want them to do most often or for specific circumstances. There is a ton of customization and it's a lot of fun to experiment. They have a bunch of different difficulty options which give you different levels to find your perfect comfort zone, and it can be changed whenever.

The world map is the biggest and best surprise about this game. It is fully interactive with tons of resources and secrets to find. Each village you build up with increase your honor score and then you can assign a guard which will auto gather resources for you. The graphics are just gorgeous in typical Vanillaware fashion. The characters always look great and the battles are super flashy.

Overall I just adore this game and can't say enough good things about it. Vanillaware you did again!

STOP DOING HYPER REALISM
VIDEO GAMES WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE REAL LIFE
YEARS OF SO CALLED TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT YET NO REAL WORLD USE FOUND IN MAKING A GAME HAVE MORE REALISTIC VISUAL AESTHETICS THAN METAL GEAR SOLID 4

Wanted to look better anyway for a laugh? We had a tool for that, it was called "ART DIRECTION"

"Yes give me SLIGHTLY more smudges on that brown stained floor, give me slightly more lighting that completely destroys the art style at the cost of taking HALF A YEAR from my graphics card's life expectancy." - statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged.

Look at what NVidia and it's mafia of bitcoin miners have been demanding your money all this time, with all the decades worth of beautiful low spec games in your backlog.
???????????
"Hello I would like my games to run and look worse please"
They have played us for absolute fools.

Unicorn Overlord is a very clearly a passion project and love letter to tactical RPGs and it is one that sticks its landing incredibly well. It manages to balance a wealth of new, fresh, and innovative ideas in its gameplay and presentation, while also bringing in a “best hits” mentality from the games that clearly inspired it. What results is something that I greatly enjoyed.

The blue haired, sword-wielding, prince & co. starting a revolution to take back a corrupted kingdom is almost identical to the setup of Fire Emblem 1- and there are clear ideas pilfered from games like Final Fantasy XII and Suikoden baked into the gameplay and worldbuilding, yet it remains very much its own thing. Combining real-time and turn-based elements in the gameplay mechanics was incredibly fun and interesting, and added new layers of strategizing I’ve not experienced before. Every tool in my kit felt like it had a place in battle, and I could experiment however I wanted. The party composition especially held a lot of depth that felt great to see the rewards of when I smartly approached it. When not in combat encounters, the world is incredibly liberating and I felt very rewarded by my own choices allowing me to take on harder battles early to explore entire continents well before the story took me there. Every corner had some new quest to do, piece of an objective to find, or simply an item to pick up that I could use to rebuild a town or heal in battle. I also loved that the final mission of the game opens up fairly early on, and you can choose to tackle it as early as you want if you feel equipped. This game is just a ton of fun overall.

The game loses me a little bit with its story. It’s far from being “bad”, it's populated with tons of varied characters, and (along with the rest of the game) is presented outstandingly- but it doesn’t take nearly as many risks as the gameplay does. It is very serviceable, and very much nothing I haven’t already seen many times over. I don’t mind serviceable stories, but when that is all that pushes along the adventure, it seeps into the gameplay and by the last chunk of it all I was ready to be done. It got a little repetitive admittedly, but not anywhere close to negatively impacting my feelings on the game.

Ultimately, though, Unicorn Overlord is the type of game that makes me sad knowing it’ll be overlooked by most when it deserves a lot more attention. I enjoyed my time enough to even grab the Platinum trophy on my Playstation. This was my introduction to Vanillaware and it has bumped up some of their other titles on my priority list out of virtue of how much I enjoyed this one. And while Atlus only published it I can pretty easily say this is my favorite new game they have put out since SMT4. If you enjoy tactical RPGs, Fire Emblem, gorgeous art direction, fantasy settings- or if a screenshot of the combat looks like the type of thing you might enjoy- try this game. It’s well worth it, and I had a wonderful time.

Edit ~one month later: I gotta say I really was in the moment when I reviewed this because nowadays I really, REALLY struggle to remember or care about anything story or character related. The gameplay loop is very satisfying and fun, the world is great, and I'm sure some will get plenty of mileage out of the cast- but to me I think it is really bland and it does kind of take away from the experience retrospectively. I was thinking about the 75 and counting JRPGs I have completed and I think Alain might be the single most boring protagonist of any of them..? I feel like he got zero characterization at all aside from being an honest and noble prince to save the day! I can't remember more than three or four of the party member's names either. If you asked me to describe the story I think all I could really muster is "Your castle gets overthrown and now years later you, the prince, must go back and stop the bad guys"- and to be fair, I think that really is all they give. I had a lot of fun with the game, but truthfully it really feels disposable, or the type of game I would say rent or borrow from a friend if those were still popular ways of playing games these days. The game has gone on some fair sales recently so I think if you can snag it with a price drop you'll have some fun for sure. Though if you are craving a tactical RPG and you have not played Final Fantasy Tactics or Fire Emblem Geneaology of the Holy War- prioritize those first. A lot of my praise of this game still stands- it's fun, gorgeous, and feels very liberating. However, I really can't turn a blind eye to how barebones and cookie-cutter the remainder of the experience ended up. I have bumped it down a star accordingly to reflect my marinated feelings on it.

I still hope this game is successful and gets an audience and that Vanillaware listens to fan reception and someday could maybe make a really great sequel that addresses a lot of the dissapointing elements. I'd love to play that game, but for the time being I think Unicorn Overlord as we have it now leaves something to be desired.

"A Rebirth Of Tactical RPGs"

I can't confess to having played Ogre Battle, the series which Unicorn Overlord has been compared to the most, however I've played enough Fire Emblem to appreciate the goals it set out for. This phrase, which was all over the marketing, touts it as a "rebirth", which implies that it will lean the most on being a throwback. If anything however, it's the fusion of old and new here that makes Unicorn Overlord work so well.

If we never get a Genealogy of the Holy War remake, I can at least relish in the fact that we got another game where a blue hair prince on a horse is fighting battles on maps that are 1:1 to the world map. Vanillaware considered this game their biggest undertaking yet, and it shows in how impressive the scale of it is. Each battle is elevated both by the sense of immersion that fighting on chunks of the overworld brings, and it's also a satisfying 60 hours or so of seeing more and more territory reclaimed. It also extends even further than Genealogy by letting you actually spend time in the world you are fighting through. The town rebuilding may not be the most mechanically satisfying, but it is also integrated well enough into just normal exploration that its never a nuisance. Alongside the other overworld sidequests, it helps to add enough texture to the world to make reclaiming it feel rewarding.

Of course it takes plenty of elements to make a great strategy game, and the great mechanical base that Unicorn Overlord has makes it worthwhile in it's own right. The unit system is an excellent way of forcing frequent optimization, paying careful attention to which pieces to mix and match. On top of this, the sheer variety of classes that keeps being introduced until the end keeps this process going strong. For even more depth, the Tactics system is a fantastic turn on the automated battles that most SRPGs have. A FF12 gambit system-styled form of programming provides a lot of room to further fine tune every aspect of the combat. In a lot of ways, this works well with the enemy design to elevate the somewhat basic map design, however the maps are still probably the biggest flaw. There are some interesting wrenches thrown in here or there, like a fog of war chapter or ones with strict time limits, but it feels too afraid to commit fully. A common sentiment I have seen is that this game is too easy, which is true, but Vanillaware's goal being accessibility is fine enough. Yet I still wish they were more willing to make players feel uncomfortable, which I think Fire Emblem succeeds at while also being fairly accessible. It's never easy to demand more content, especially in a game like this, but I wish they went further with what they DO have.

Speaking of a common sentiment, the majority of criticism has focused on the games story. It's fair for people to call it "generic" but it's also somewhat misguided to me. While I also rolled my eyes at first seeing the Tolkien-esque setting and the deposed prince premise, I don't think this is entirely an issue. While many of the elements of the world are trope-y, the countless smaller stories within them give them a unique flavor, particularly for the individual characters. In taking influence from Fire Emblem, Vanillaware must have wisely noted how invested people are in the characters in these games. Thus the rapport system serves as a valuable way to add more story where needed while also never being intrusive on the core experience. I would say it even surpasses FE supports in a way with how much it lets you pick and choose with what you want to do, and the sheer scope of interactions you can have is impressive.

Yet simultaneously that scope is what leads into my actual issues with the story. It's impressive to have 5 distinct regions with their own cultures and histories, yet we don't get nearly enough insight as we should. Being generic isn't an issue, there's genuinely interesting ideas being hinted at in each region yet it's hard to really get invested in them. Even though the game is 60 hours, if you split that up into 5 it doesn't leave much room for each area to shine as much as it could. Part of that is because so much of it is core gameplay, yet I would trade maybe a couple filler missions for some more narrative depth. Simultaneously this would make up for the main story with Alain being not that great, but it makes it come off a little worse instead. It feels like he lacks agency a lot of the time and has to take a backseat to these situations which would be fine if they had gotten more depth. There are some choices in the game, but they feel like pretty obvious ones most of the time. I respect the width it guns for, but its easy to see why it ended up unsatisfying.

Of course it's worth putting all of this in perspective too. This game took just under a decade to develop and Vanillaware ran out of money. 13 Sentinels also had a long and arduous development concurrently, with most of the focus being on the story. This isn't to say that Unicorn Overlord is made better by knowing this, but it would be also unfair to say the ambitions were misplaced ultimately.

Oh, so suddenly we're all against women's wrongs? They truly hate to see a girlboss winning and they love to see a girlfailure losing. We should probably do something about the Catholics though. I'm sure the debate about this has been very civil. Love to sit down with big hot cup of coffee to sip loudly while reading any history book on this.

With this and Misericorde, I might be really into nun based horrors, but with very specific presentation. Its too easy to miss the mark, and this really threads the needle. Things that haven't thread the needle for me:
- Sister Holiday Mysteries. Love the idea of a mean punk mystery solving nun, but the noir detective staple of "stumbling into problems and accusing the wrong person" feels like such shit when your character seems to care so little that she's ruining the lives of kids and coworkers.
- Lucifer Within Us: cyberpunk religious story just kind of sucks with its just completely uncritical about the church at all.
- coworker's personal published novel. Self-insert fights sin with a sword. Extremely embarrassing.

Nun dramas that have worked for me:
- this
- Misericorde
- Sound of Music

One day I'll figure out the pattern here, but tonight isn't that night.

NieR Replicant is an awesome game, which I really like and enjoyed. Even though I think it was a bit repetitive at the end, especially with getting all the Endings, I still had a great time overall with it. Especially the music, the whole soundtrack of the game is fantastic, and totally fits in with the cutscenes and moments in which it plays.
I also very much liked the characters, with Kainé probably being my favorite out of the whole cast.
The game was definitely worth playing, and I'm glad that I finally did.