Vanillaware, the developer of the beloved 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, and publisher Atlus, describe their game as “the rebirth of the tactical RPG” and for good reason. Unicorn Overlord is a declaration of love for the SRPG series Ogre Battle (particularly Ogre Battle 64 and Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen), although there is also DNA from the Final Fantasy 12, Final Fantasy Tactics and Fire Emblem series. It’s a tactical role-playing game in which you, as the commander of the initially small but later massive “Liberation Army,” command an army of one to five warriors. Unlike the Fire Emblem series, you do this on the fly within levels, which are not grid-based but offer complete freedom of movement wherever the terrain allows.
Unicorn Overlord is fundamentally – like all good tactics games – about making a lot of well-thought-out decisions. Regarding unit composition (which soldiers should be included in the same unit to make it most combat-effective), positioning (which units should be sent where to make the best use of time and be as little restricted as possible by difficult terrain and other obstacles) and What weapons, equipment, and items should each soldier be equipped with (how can I continually optimize my soldiers to be both independent and interdependent).
Each storage cell consists of a grid of six squares: three squares in front and three squares in back. At the start of the game, your unit only has room for two soldiers, so it’s wise to put a tanking soldier in front (such as a heavy knight or an evasive rogue) and a more vulnerable but damaging or supportive one of soldiers at the back (such as healers, mages, or archers). Each unit also has a leader, and different classes offer different leadership effects: For example, healers, mages, and archers can assist other units from a distance, while the gladiator – a muscular axe-wielding warrior – can more easily Smash the roadblocks on the map.
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You always deploy your troops from a main base, with the goal of defeating enemy commanders and laying siege to their headquarters. If you don’t succeed before time runs out, you lose, and if enemy units lay siege to your main base, you lose. The game is all about balancing effective offense and defense, and while it’s fairly simple at the beginning of the game, later courses can be mind-boggling (at least on the Expert difficulty level) as you fight against reinforcements from every base on the map Race while terrain, traps and roadblocks impede your progress.
But smart positioning and resource utilization are only half of the gameplay; the other half is, of course, combat. Before I dive into the game’s amazing and completely addictive combat system, I want to make a disclaimer: Combat in Unicorn Overlord is automatic , actual gameplay involves setting up the tactics of your soldiers and units beforehand. It’s a good thing that this issue is addressed, as I’ve read a few people expressing their frustration with the game being so-called “auto-battle” after trying the demo. If you’ve played Fire Emblem and similar games, you’ll know this isn’t a problem, but the focus is elsewhere in such games, and if you also have to actively manage combat after all the brain-consuming preparation, this It’s really just a burden. Plus, you can always fast-forward through other great combat animations or skip them entirely.
So how exactly does combat work? Well, a battle begins when two units collide on the map. The preview always shows the exact outcome of the battle, but you can manipulate the outcome by changing the formation of your units or using consumables before the battle begins.
To do well in combat, it’s important to optimize your soldiers. You can do this by equipping them with good weapons, armor, and other useful equipment, but the most important thing is to develop smart, well-thought-out tactics for each soldier. Each troop class has different active and passive abilities at their disposal, and the order in which they should prioritize these abilities and under what circumstances they should be activated is essential to creating an effective unit where soldiers reinforce each other and minimize weak points. It’s important. For example, tell your archers to always prioritize griffins and rogues, your mages to prioritize enemies in heavy armor, your healers to prioritize the lowest health ally in your unit, and your knights to ride on horseback. Prioritizing rows of enemies with his spear, your mercenary always attacks the enemy with the lowest health so she can take advantage of abilities that allow her to attack again after landing a critical hit.But skilled strategists know how to optimize relationships between soldiers
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Let me highlight an example that hopefully demonstrates, at least to some extent, the complexity of the system. My unit consisted of three warriors: a heavy tank knight in the front protecting an archer, and a mage in the back. On its own, this is a very solid formation that, despite its poor mobility and lack of healing, has advantages over many types of enemy soldiers: my archers can easily shoot griffins out of the sky, and I My mages can easily kill heavily armored knights, while my own knights only scratch their armor when infantry attacks. But with some modifications to the unit tactics, I could take it to a whole new level.
So I equipped my mage with a staff that allows the fire mage to jump from one enemy to all enemies, my archer that shoots rockets, and my knight with a medallion that allows the first unit to attack The one attacks with greater force, albeit with a lower chance of hitting the enemy. Since my archer has the highest initiative (the attribute that determines who attacks first), he will be buffed by the medal, and since he has the passive skill “Eagle Eye”, making his next attack a 100% sure hit, I can Ignore the side effects of medals. Thus, the Knight gives him a guaranteed devastating attack while igniting enemies, and when it’s the Mage’s turn, he can use the effect of Fire Arrow to spread fire to all enemies in the opponent’s unit.
With a few modifications, I made an already powerful unit powerful – and with only three fighters. Now imagine that later in the game, your unit consists of five soldiers – also the enemy’s – and each character has up to ten tactics that can be customized, and you can easily see that there are a surprising number of options to design. Trust me: this game is like a drug for those of us who like to rack our brains and see just how far we can push the envelope when it comes to designing creative and deadly builds.
The missions and its strategic gameplay aren’t the only things that make this game so addictive. In between missions, you have a vast world to roam freely, collect resources and donate them to the city, complete side missions, strengthen bonds between characters, buy equipment, recruit new soldiers, expand your units and test each other, Upgrade your soldiers to cool advanced classes, and more. It all comes together in a very satisfying gameplay loop that supports the entire purpose of the game, which is to make the player feel like a commander who starts off small but later commands an unstoppable army. The game is also huge, and if I have one complaint it’s that the mission structure itself becomes a bit predictable and monotonous over time.
Well, I guess we have to go through this story as well. If you played the demo, you know that the game follows the noble blue-haired prince Alain, who must free his kingdom from the tyrannical General Valmore, who has brainwashed everyone in the kingdom through evil magic. powerful families and embedded them in his ruthless empire of Zenoylan. Alain inherited a powerful ring from his mother, capable of breaking the spiritual chains of black magic, and must free the brainwashed leaders one by one so that they and their troops can join Alain’s Liberation Army and participate in the overthrow of Valmore fighting. It’s not the most original premise for a fantasy story, and while it does take some interesting turns, the narrative is carried by a bunch of archetypes, and the dialogue is consistently dull, predictable, and presented in an overused variation of Shakespeare’s Old English to pass.
However, the game never gets boring. True to Vanillaware tradition, it has excellent art direction, runs well on all consoles, and looks like a living, illustrated book with a medieval fantasy theme. Sadly, the game’s visuals, like the story and dialogue, are overly influenced by genre stereotypes: noble, invulnerable knights with hair in every color of the rainbow, bandits with arms so bulky you’d think they They’re injected with paraffin oil, and last but not least, another vanillaware tradition: sexist female character designs. In the land of Feverris, women and teenage girls are clearly dressed in bras and panties ready for battle, and the game’s heroine, despite her diminutive stature and childish voice, possesses huge breasts that pop with her every little move. Bounce and swing. It’s too hilarious to take seriously, and frankly it’s annoying that Vanillaware and so many other developers don’t care about realism and logic to attract a bunch of waifu-loving womanizers.
Another sin of the game, in my opinion, is that it’s too charitable in the way it tells its story. Characters who commit heinous acts are not held appropriately accountable because developers are too eager to forgive them so players can recruit them into their armies. So the bandits and thieves who steal, murder and rob small villages are just brainwashed or just want to provide food for their sick, bedridden sister! So on and so forth. Although players may occasionally choose to pardon, imprison, or even execute these characters, as the player you feel obligated to pardon them because you don’t want to miss the opportunity to recruit them into your army so you can do better on the battlefield. The more ruthless decisions are therefore left to future replays, but the thing is, it’s unclear whether you’ll ever replay a game of this scale.
If you can get past the many archetypes, dull dialogue, and some sexist character designs, there’s many, many hours of deeply engaging strategy here. If you can’t stand spending most of your time on the menu and hate watching battles passively play out before your eyes, you can easily skip Unicorn Overlord. But for those of us who like to have complete control over every little game variable, and get excited at the thought of a bottomless tactical system with endless possibilities for creating your own deadly army, this is a very, very dangerous With gaming, it’s easy to completely ignore your social life for a long period of time. My game of the year so far.
