After the excellent 13 Sentinels: Aegis RimVanillaware and Atlus return with a beautiful throwback to the tactical RPGs of yesteryear with Unicorn Overlord, which even with its influences on the surface manages to stand out on its own merit and become an instant classic of the genre.
Unicorn Overlord It is available for PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch.
The kingdom of Fevrith was conquered by General Valmore, who one day apparently decided to change his name to Galerius de Zenoira and rebel against the royal family of Cornia. Queen Ilenia, betrayed by her trusted general, hands over her only son Alain de ella to her bodyguard Josef de ella, knowing that soon she herself will fall to Galerius and there will be no one left to fight for the kingdom. . Ten years later: All of Fevrith is controlled by Zenoira's empire. Alain, having trained all this time under Josef's wing, is finally ready to face them. But his strength will not be enough to stop Galerius until he manages to harness the true power of the Unicorn Ring, the royal symbol of Cornia, and the last gift from his mother. Accompanied by his childhood friends, Scarlett and Lex, Alain must save each nation from Fevrith and add people to his cause, becoming stronger with each victory.
If the above sounded like a generic soup of proper nouns to you, I don't blame you one bit. It's hard to explain what exactly makes it so good. Unicorn Overlord without trying it in person… At first glance it seems like another ordinary tactical RPG, taking away of course that each frame of the game could be a wallpaper thanks to the incredible visual style characteristic of the studio. It's definitely not his story, which is a pretty standard mix of medieval fantasy platitudes with very bad bad guys, very good good guys, and the occasional morally gray character (who actually turned out to be good too).
What Vanillaware achieved here is create a gameplay loop so refined and addictive that it's hard to put down. You are going to explore an area and meet characters and participate in battles to recruit these characters and liberate cities and forts to be able to improve your units, which allows you to win more difficult battles and get better characters and when you realized it, four hours passed and on and on. You all say “well, one more and that's it.” A big part of what makes this loop so addictive is the amount of control and granularity we have over virtually every aspect of the gameplay.
The combat in Unicorn Overlord It is automatic, and the battles simply show us in real time a result that the game has already calculated for us based on various factors such as the classes of our characters, their total life points and their location. The actions that each character will execute depend on their total AP and PP, represented in-game by orange and blue crystals respectively. Each action consumes a fixed amount of AP or PP, and as we improve our characters or give them better equipment, the available amount increases.
Pressing ZR serves to accelerate the speed at which the game runs both in the overworld and during combat. Since all battles show us the final result before starting them, we can skip them directly if we want to get rid of them quickly, which we will want to do a lot, especially with the less important ones.
The classes of course work like a giant rock-paper-scissors: magic and piercing damage is best against armed enemies, archers are effective against flying classes, etc. Each of our units allows us to place our characters on a grid with six places, three in front and three in the back, and sometimes winning a battle or not will be decided by something as simple as relocating them on the grid without modifying their strategy or equipment. . We can also edit each character individually to choose which skills they are going to use or not, in what order, or even under what conditions they are going to be activated with tons of different options, in a mechanic that reminded me a lot of the Gambits system from Final Fantasy XII. The possibility of making these changes just before the fight is really a great goal. Seeing how the result bar now shows a victory feels like turning it around in the 90th minute.
Winning battles and liberating towns rewards us with two important resources: Renown and honors. The first decides the maximum size of our units and allows us to upgrade our classes to their advanced versions, while the second is basically the currency that we will use to do all this.
Liberating forts also allows us to hire mercenaries, basically generic versions of each class that we can use if we want a copy of one in a unit and that character is already occupied, or even if we don't recruit that class yet. These mercenaries can be completely customized, choosing from their clothing and hair colors to their name and stats.
As if this were not enough, there are places in the world with which we can only interact once we have a specific character to help us repair bridges, obtain weapons in hidden temples or obtain special materials. The map of this game is one of the most satisfying to clean that I have seen so far, because although there is not much variety when it comes to interacting with it, the speed at which we can complete objectives and the possibility of traveling at any time At any point they make it feel like something fun and never like a chore.
Being a Vanillaware game, Unicorn Overlord It is of course an audiovisual marvel. Everything has the studio's signature “hand-drawn” look, and here they took it a step further with huge, detailed sprites for all the characters and enemies. There are even little things that I have no idea how they achieved with 2D graphics, like realistic metallic lighting effects or asymmetrical details in the designs that respect the direction the model is facing. The settings are crazy too, with a huge variety of not only castles and forts but also landscapes with incredible biomes, climates and lighting effects that I'm not sure how they managed to implement. I put it above but it's worth repeating: every screenshot of this game could be a wallpaper.
The soundtrack by Mitsuhiro Kaneda is also excellent and the perfect complement to the exploration and combat.
At least on an audiovisual level, Unicorn Overlord It really feels like the culmination of everything Vanillaware did as a studio.
As generic as the story is, it doesn't mean they haven't given it a tremendous amount of care as well. The game has a quantity obscene of spoken dialogue and tons more in text. Although the main narrative is nothing out of this world, it is in the interactions between characters where you can see that they put the most vibe into it. With a few exceptions (mostly in the second half), each character who joins us has a well-developed introduction where we get to know them well as people and their motivations for joining our cause become more than clear. Almost all of them have well-defined personalities that help make them feel like real characters, and not just extra numbers to inflate our units. There are tons of optional scenes too, which only appear when two characters form a connection after spending enough time together. All cinematics are in-game so the current look of our characters will always be reflected.
Perhaps the weak point in all this I just wrote is Alain himself, who never does anything to break his role as a standard fantasy hero. His authority is never questioned, he must never break his own rules, and he is always morally right since the enemy is an evil caricature. Even when the game wants to test us by making a decision (which almost always consists of choosing whether to recruit or execute some miscreant), the decision is always made by Alain and any choice will be accepted without resistance by the others. In any case, it never seemed like such a negative point to me as to affect the narrative, but it made me noise.
A lot of attention went to worldbuilding as well. In each new region of the world we will not only meet more people but also new races that expand the mythology of the world and range from the expected elves to entire villages of beast people with huge werewolf warriors and bunnies who sell. We can at any time access a glossary to read the history of Fevrith, all the nations that make it up, and each faction and character relevant to the story, ally or enemy. There is a lot of lore hidden in the glossary. So much, in fact, that it ends up being overwhelming because the game is only scratching its surface. It is not required reading but it almost gives the feeling that they wrote an encyclopedia first and then built a game around it.
I have very few negative points to the point that it was difficult for me to remember them. I would have liked to be able to choose the order of my units, or the option to save specific character combinations. There are times in the story that certain characters cut themselves off or we lose them momentarily, so trying to remember how we had set up each unit when we're balancing 5-6 with four or five characters each can be a bit much. Then the second half of the game relies too much on having multiple flying units at the same time to avoid obstacles on the terrain. But they are really cool.
Unicorn Overlord It really feels like the game Vanillaware wanted to make all along. Apparently they have been developing the concept since 2014 and were giving it shape while working on other projects. And the truth is, it shows. Everything in this game screams quality, attention and love. From its simple combat at first glance but full of depth, its enormous number of characters with unique stories and great designs, to its perfectly executed audiovisual section. It's not going to win any award for narrative of the year, sure, but it doesn't matter either. Whether you are a fan of the genre or not, Unicorn Overlord It is simply a work of art.
THE BEST
- Addictive gameplay loop, with engaging combat and satisfying exploration
- Lots and lots of characters with excellent designs and unique personalities (although some are a bit questionable)
- Customization of every aspect of the game to adjust the experience the way we like best
- Incredible art direction, the best executed version of Vanillaware to date