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.

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.