Didn't think we would get a spiritual successor to Ogre Battle, but you won't hear me complaining after I played this game and ended loving this game greatly. Came in high hopes and came out with pretty much most either achieved or surpassed with only some minor nitpicks.
To start off with the best of what makes UO so great is the gameplay. As stated before, this game is pretty much a spiritual successor to the Ogre Battle games in how it plays; I.e a RTS with RPG elements where you make squads of units that fight in auto battles and is more so about positing these squads in the right fights to win each battle rather than commanding each unit's exact action. And for the most part, UO makes MANY improvements to the combat and unit variety. In Ogre Battle 64, while I had a bunch of different units, it felt like I was usually just trying to optimize each team to be their own little death ball to carve through the map in most cases (with maybe one or two specialized teams for very specific enemies). In this game however, while some overpowered teams that decimate through everything can exist, there's so many more ways to build each team now. You can factor in stuff like passive effects/actions, buffs, debuffs, status effects, special moves, and other fun stuff to screw around with. Each character doesn't feel like a replaceable cog in a death ball machine, but rather a specific piece for a team to function that still has many ways to be utilized in. There's a great deal of synergy to be found with many different units in this game. I'm still learning about funny team combinations or learning how to better utilize certain characters/unit that I overlooked. Even if you're not the most apt team builder, I'm willing to bet there's still some fun and enjoyable team set ups that you can make. While the goal of each team is still defeat the foes before you, how to do so feels more varied and inspired compared to the fights in Ogre Battle.
That alone would make the combat and team building aspect of this game amazing, however, we haven't mentioned the Tactics system yet. For those who played FF12 ZA, this is basically the gambit system (i.e control how each character's AI works), which feels so natural with the auto-battle aspect of the game. If you know how to program your unit's actions correctly, it enables a lot of creativity and creates a great deal of fun through fine-tuning each team before they're sent off to battle. Now admittedly, this aspect of the game can be overwhelming, it certainly took me a bit to properly learn and how to make efficient teams (hell, even still have a lot to learn still now), but for some, that too is part of the fun for this game through trial and error before you find your favorite team set ups. Then once you see those set ups in action and see them work splendidly, it creates a nice rewarding feeling that never gets old.
Making this better is the game having plenty of great battles/maps to release these teams onto. In general, a lot of the map design for Unicorn Overlord is quite fun. Sure there's some stinkers I'll rant about if you give me the chance to if asked, but in general, the map design for this game is great. There's many rememberable battles in this one with some fun twists, cool stage gimmicks, and includes one of my new favorite maps in the form of "The Two Princes" in ANY SRPG. In addition to the teams you can deploy, there are Valor skills you can use tied to each class that opens up MANY ways to engage with each fight. Some are kind of broken and utterly cheese some maps, but it's fun figuring out how best to use the Valor skills to your advantage. Like-wise with the items you can use mid-battle as this game greatly encourages using your items rather than hoarding them away, which helps to open up another avenue of strategy for you (though they are kind of broken if you're playing below Expert as you don't have an item limit there). All of this, plus the unit variety, flexible team building, AND tactics system make for one hell of an amazing gameplay loop.
That said, there's another aspect of the loop that helps UO really stand out; The (mostly) open world nature of the game. Besides needing to beat the first main story mission to explore the other nations of Fevrith, this game is open world and you can move around in any order. In a lesser game, I could see this bothering me, especially since I'm not exactly a fan of the open world formula, but Unicorn Overlord handles its open world aspect extremely well. Rather than having large open areas with some bits of stuff to do scattered about, this game is tightly designed to find stuff wherever you go. Usually it comes in the form of another battle/mission, but that's what makes it work so well; You rarely go without the combat for a long time/denying you of stuff to do for the sake of being "open." Once you do one fight and maybe screwed around in the area you liberated for a bit or adjusted your teams after getting a new character, it's onto the next one. Besides the finding new fights, each victory usually liberates a town on the world map, giving you more stuff to buy, maybe some extra quests to check out, and the ability to rebuild these towns after the oppression they endured. Not to mention there's items to find on the map and if you want to certainly places, you can run past enemies too. There's rarely a shortage of things to do in Unicorn Overlord, making it one of the few open world that I actively enjoy.
For those who do enjoy open world stuff and worried they might be too restrained with Unicorn Overlord, don't worry; If you know how to win certain battles/best make used of you teams, you can easily sequence break into the higher leveled areas and mess around there. You can even do the final battle incredibly early if you know what you're doing. The open ended nature of this game makes it even more suitable for repeat runs on top of the team building and combat (which in themselves opens up so many ways to mess around with the game).
While I have glowing praise for this game, I do have some complaints/nitpicks for the gameplay. First is how, while generally being content rich, how much the game runs out of some gas in the later areas. There's still enough to do, but Bastoria and the Orthodoxy have a lot less fights and story in them sadly. On one hand, this does open up to some bigger scale battles since I think there are maybe a bit too many shorter fights in this game, but on the other it does suck there's less fights at certain points of the game where the player really gets to make some very fun teams. I'm also kind of agree with the crowd that wished there was some more post game content/NG+ since there's a lot given to you at the end you also don't get enough time to enjoy.
Another issue I have is also for those more end game areas, there are two VERY annoying enemy types that can really ruin your time without specific checks; Featherbows and Quick Cast Sorceresses. The former has a passive that blinds all your units in a row if one of them tries to attack, which can really draw out fights. As for the latter, they basically get a free chance to freeze an entire row of your units, which can be absolutely devastating. I don't mind the specific challenge against these enemies, but you see them a lot in the end, which in turn becomes very grating and sometimes screws over some fun teams that you've built.
Also while I love the unit variety in this game, I do kind of wished we got monster units like Ogre Battle/Tactics (stuff like Dragons, Hellhounds, the Undead, Fairies, Octopuses, etc. That kind of more unusual units).
My last issue with the game is that it kind of starts off slow. I get them not wanting to overwhelm the player like the Ogre Battle games, especially with team building stuff (Ex. OB 64 throws five teams of roughly 15-20ish units total for you organize ASAP, even more once you throw in the soldier groups you need to throw in to get more generic units, which in itself is another story of complexity), but sometimes UO feels slow at first with 2-3 sized units with only one Action Point (i.e one move per fight basically). At least combat gets fast quickly and some early teams do offer a lot of variety, but I wished we got to use larger squads a bit faster. Even with these flaws, the gameplay is just fantastic and is overall amazing provided you like screwing around with stuff and finding new exciting things to try out.
Next up is the story. The story itself isn't going to be winning any rewards as it's fairly basic as you've might of heard, but this game is very much a "case of simple doesn't mean bad." It's a standard tale of a Prince reclaiming his fallen kingdom while freeing other nations, a common story especially for those that have played Fire Emblem, but I think generally it's told, or rather executed well enough. The game doesn't try to be too goofy or overly serious with its tone or how it portrays this narrative, which is honestly very refreshing. It's pretty much hearing a classical story once again, it might not be the most revolutionary thing, but it's going to be a fun enough story to enjoy. Plus given the open ended nature of the game, it feels fine to have a more basic story to prevent things from getting overly complicated (especially given all the scene variations depending on your order of play; More on that later). And in spite of its more simple nature, I do think the story still has some nice highs in certain spots and it does throw some curveballs for some of the more easily predictable stuff that I will give the game credit for.
Helping it to be a simple but effective are the characters. Again, you aren't going to be getting some ground breaking characters, but I feel the cast isn't as bare bones as many claim. Though it's in an odd spot; It feels like they're in a middle of triple circle Venn diagram where it has aspects of FE1 characters (a lot who don't get many lines, but still many characters who still stand out), the early GBA FE characters/supports (actually get more characterization, albeit kind of limited), and FE Tellius where characters get scenes beyond their join map/supports (i.e getting to see non-main characters get some extra screen time, including some main story scenes, even if it's just a minuscule bit). Hope that kind weird explanation made sense, but basically despite the seeming shallow or basic at first, there is some surprising depth. I do wish more was done (we'll get to that soon enough), but I ended up endeared to a good number of characters as well as found a few scenes and rapports that legitimately impressed me.
Also one other thing that impressed me was the variance in some scenes and story bits depending on the order you play the game. Thanks to the open world nature, there's some neat details if you do certain things in order. For example in Drakenhold, if you complete the main story quest in it without recruiting a certain character, when you do recruit them their recruitment scene changes slightly to adjust to a possible story reveal if you did it. Or how early if you reach the midway point with another minor character recruited, they are better addressed in a story scene. But some of the more interesting stuff is if you rush to the final boss super early on and see some very dark, but morbidly interesting changes that happen that kind of deconstruct the idea of the hero rushing to the end early that people typically have. The fact there's so much variance in an overall simple plot is honestly really cool and shows there was a lot of care placed into the writing for a seemingly basic tale.
While not strictly story related, I do also want to give a shoutout to the Archives in this game. It's basically this game's version of the Hugo's/Warren's Reports in the Ogre Battle/Tactics games. Granted not as in depth as those glossaries, but it gives a lot of fun extra material to read into for those who care about the lore of the game. Not only that, but it basically has something akin to Golden Sun Dark Dawn's Red Word system where if there's another important term (and you found it), it actually takes you there so you can read up on it. More games with a decent amount of lore need to do that more often.
Now for the story negatives. Besides the story being more basic (which I don't find a problem), I have two main gripes. The first is that while I like the story and find it good, it does feel like a multiple points where it's obviously missing something to go from "just good" to better (and perhaps to something great). There's a few villains, namely two arc villains for certain nations, who I'd feel like would be a lot more interesting if they just had one or two more elements better explained/explored about them. As is, they're fine enough, but you can plainly see how they're close to being something a lot better and were missing one final push to make them truly standout. My other issue is how near the end of the game, there's a lot of honestly really cool lore dumps about the world and exact nature of the villains, but I REALLY wished we got more hints/build up to it. Thankfully we weren't completely without some hints and most of these lore dumps do feel like a natural continuation, but there's some information that would have been very nice to learn BEFORE you're that late into the game.
I do have one issue with the characters as well; So this game has rapports, or basically FE supports, and they're some of the best source of characterization for a lot of characters and get to give the cast more life. The problem is that there's A LOT of rapport chains, instead of having the usual three talks, only have two or even one. Now, I fully understand writing for a playable cast of like 60ish characters is a lot and I'm thankfully for what we have (again, these rapports are great and show why this cast isn't flat as many claim), but there's so many cases where some rapports should have gotten the full three talks. It feels like it's sort of the opposite problem of FE6 where instead of it taking forever to unlock really good supports, it's easy to unlock rapports and find some you'll love to only then find out it was the only one between certain characters.
That all said and done, while the story and characters won't be the greatest amongst SRPGs, I think it gets at least a respectable and enjoyable place among them, even if more could have been done.
For some remaining areas before we close off...
The music for this game is excellent. I do think that it does start off more tame, but once you get deeper into the game, it REALLY picks up. Especially for the boss battle themes as they're easily the highlights of this game's OST.
The presentation for this game is also fantastic and another highlight for this game. The art is great, especially for the character designs and the numerous backgrounds they created, making this one of the nicest looking games I've seen in a bit. Battles also flow nice enough (though I wish the speed up was the default speed for some animations to give them some extra oomph). The voice acting is also pretty great and some VA have some AMAZING line reads for certain spots. Also the food looks absurdly good, which seems to be a Vanillaware Staple that was fun to learn about.
In conclusion, Unicorn Overlord is a fantastic game. Granted, I do feel like it requires the right mindset given how different it is to other SRPGs most are used to, but it's truly a worthy game to check out. If you're unsure, on the game, there's a decently large demo that you can check out that I highly recommend. Unless something drastic happens with the games I play this year, this might be my favorite game in 2024.