I have to admit to having a certain bias towards Unicorn Overlord, and it's not just that I love Vanillaware. They're perfectly capable of putting out mid. (Guess exactly which games I'm talking about! If you're wrong I'll fill your bed with ants.) It's just that this is maybe the hardest Vanillaware has come for me specifically, as a person who loves old-school Fire Emblem. And also they came for me by putting Berengaria in it.

I'm going to be the smartest person on this website and not preface everything positive I say about the game with complaints about the story. Bitches see a simple, sincere fantasy RPG bursting with deliberately old-fashioned charm and be like "why did the developer forget to put in as many weird plot twists as they did in their sci-fi/mystery De Facto Visual Novel? Are they stupid?" The game is extremely effective at creating the ultra-specific vibe and tone that I associate with pre-Awakening Fire Emblem, but I honestly can't do a deep dive into my feelings about that without it becoming a long, terrible, disjointed, off-topic rant on which I've forbidden myself from going here, you're welcome. The point is, the writing (in tandem with overall presentation and particularly excellent voice direction, not that that's a thing Fire Emblem has ever had outside of maybe SoV) is in fact a huge part of why the game is an absolute delight to me. They know exactly what they're doing: feeding a niche that's been starving for years.

That said, none of them involve the words "boring" or "clichéd" but there are more interesting things to critique about the story. It is, in all fairness, a genre staple but UO does go heavier than most on being, just, relentlessly monarchist as a narrative--they're very much channeling Kaga here. (Do not be misled by my enthusiasm for specifically old-school Fire Emblem including a couple of the Kaga games, Shozo Kaga is fucking wack.) All the worldbuilding around Bastorias is also... look, we're gonna keep drawing Fire Emblem comparisons here, this was clearly an attempt at doing Tellius that falls really flat, although not as flat perhaps as a race of bunny people who were almost completely exterminated by the protagonist's own father and the one you recruit doesn't even care about that and it literally never comes up in the plot again outside of the one conversation with her and it only comes up in their supports as setup for a repetitive joke about how they want to breed a lot, get it they're bun[We apologize for this long, terrible, disjointed, off-topic rant about Fire Emblem Awakening. The reviewer has been tranquilized and will resume writing at a later date. Thank you for your patience.]

So the gameplay! Unicorn Overlord is a game with a vast breadth of different experiences you can get out of it based on what you put in. The core mechanics have a level of depth that can trap a certain kind of person on menu screens weighing their options for hours (this is a good thing), but the difficulty settings offer enough variance that you can either autopilot through it without understanding a damn thing or be absolutely required to master the system, to your preference. I didn't bother trying the lowest difficulty setting, but normal mode is already quite easy if you're getting absorbed in the strategy. The highest (starting) difficulty, on the other hand, is a hell of a jump--I think anyone who's complained about the gameplay being basic or too easy definitely didn't try changing settings. I won't pretend I stayed on it for most of the run--I basically 100%ed the game as I went along and ended up spending about 90 hours on it, which makes a challenge level at which you're routinely resetting battles a big ask. The game is also just not overly susceptible to being boring when you are having an easy time, since at least on normal you do still have to put together pretty strong units to keep cruising when you get to the later story maps. But I'm definitely cranking the difficulty up and committing to it when I inevitably replay the game a ways down the line--whenever I did dip my toe in, the tension was fantastic and all the mechanical depth felt heightened by how much more important it was to optimize.

A big reason I spent so long on the game is that even the overworld is honestly pretty great. It's shockingly big and dense. It's also just explorable enough for the process to be really addictive without feeling like a grind or a distraction from the main gameplay loop, and it's rewarding to do a lot of exploration because the economies for both gold and the secondary currency, Honors, are nicely balanced. Even doing basically everything, I never felt rich enough that I could just grab up everything I wanted in a shop without thinking about it, and it took right up until the end of the game before I had maxed out my unit slots with Honors, which freed up the remainder for weapon upgrades.

Oh, I did also really want to talk about the upgrade system! The idea of one in a strategy game sounded dicey to me when I first saw upgrade materials available in a special shop, not having encountered the game's only blacksmith yet, but I actually think it's genius. You don't gain access to the mechanic until the late game, and it accomplishes a lot of interesting things while also being rock simple: no matter which weapon you're forging, the upgrade just makes its stats equal to those of the highest tier of weapons (which can't be forged). This means getting to the smith is a huge explosion of new and powerful options, since you've been collecting weapons with useful secondary effects that fell off in terms of stats throughout the entire game--a thing that the game could do, making new equipment feel constantly exciting and juicy while maintaining an increasing power curve, because they knew the smith was coming and everything would be useful again in the end. Crucially it also rewards players with hoarding instincts, a moment of karmic catharsis that SRPG fans have had coming for decades. It's a relatively small part of the game, but it really stands out to me as a design masterstroke.

Probably the low point of the game is, just, everything related to what I guess I have to call the marriage mechanic. The fact that you can kind of a little maybe if you squint almost have Alain marry another man but not really is an extremely valid critique that I feel somewhat strangely about considering I mostly just think the game would be improved by not having a ludonarrative Marriage Mechanic at all. Sorry for still being salty about Fire Emblem, but I can just about, somewhat charitably, rate Alain average as a Lord. The last thing he needs is to moonlight as a fucking Avatar. And, true to Fire Emblem Avatar romances, even Alain's straight options that are actually explicitly confirmed are perhaps the blandest, most lifeless pieces of romance writing in the developer's catalogue. Still, as much as I'd rather just sidestep the romance, it must be said that I don't think Vanillaware realizes how gay their core audience skews, which is funny for a studio that made its name with a sexy anime opera about doomed romances between people with self-worth issues who can't decide how they should feel about their parents.

That's the heaviest ding I can give it, but I still think Unicorn Overlord is easily top three material from one of my favorite developers. It's a simple, nostalgic aesthetic experience layered on top of a vast, freeform, addictive tactical gameplay loop that can be as accessible or as crunchy as you choose to make it and, I think, will prove incredibly replayable for a game as long as this.

And don't let anyone fool you, this is peak fiction.