Vanillaware must live on.

Unicorn Overlord is a complete game where one can feel the ambition at every turn. So much ambition in fact, that there are some aspects that needed to be cut as the game was well documented as going over budget like most Vanillaware games. While these parts are things that I wish I could have seen as I was quite gripped by this game, I also understand why they needed to be cut and the game is still worth its price tag either way.

While the story is not as complicated or in depth as 13 Sentinels, there is still a bare bones enough story to lead the characters from start to finish, the characters themselves being quite enjoyable and a few of the twists getting me. I would compare it to some Fire Emblem games, where it is mostly a story around conquering set from a sympathetic angle that just rarely brings up the consequences of war. Despite what some crazy people online will say, the localization was actually quite excellent as well.

The rapports in the game are what serve as ways to see character interaction, and after viewing all of them, I can say that while there are a fair amount of good ones that range from very funny, cute, to tragic with some great prose, some typos do come up in the script and they could be stronger. Part of this I find is particularly since the game can struggle to explore other relationships with characters beyond Alain. There are still a few good standouts such as Sharon and Ochlys and Aramis and Primm, it often feels like a lot of it is afraid to let characters get too close due to the Ring of the Maiden system.

As a part of this game, the player can marry another party member, and this is where I see a lot of the flaws with the character writing in the game. While you can marry anyone, all the male characters you can choose do not get treated in the same way as the intended women characters. And even amongst the women characters only a handful are taken very seriously which can be indicated by completing a character's rapport after Alain is already engaged with the ring and seeing if he says, "Twas but a dream, it didn't happen. I wouldn't think of cheating." or not. If he does, it shows the rapport was intended to be romantic, and if it doesn't, then it wasn't meant to be taken romantically. I found around ten women units where the line came up, but it never came up once for men which is a shame.

The game has a lot of variance however in that system though, along with others. There are many points where the player can challenge the final encounter early on, and similar to Chrono Trigger, if done at different times it will result in the ending sequence changing, but ultimately resulting in a bad ending due to the mechanics related to the ring of the maiden and ring of the unicorn as I mentioned before. Hence I do understand why they let you marry men despite not taking it seriously, because it is more of a gameplay mechanic than anything, since who you marry determines the ending sequence's final battle since the ring of the maiden and ring of the unicorn impart special skills when fully unlocked required to see the true good ending. They allow this since you have to use the two characters in the same unit, so this affords a player to pick someone for Alain purely for gameplay factors and having them be in the same unit as Alain which is understandable, but I wish they treated gay sexuality with more respect. Especially considering the implied sapphic characters in the game that are treated better.

Speaking of gameplay mechanics, I had found the option to spare or execute characters to feel contrived and meaningless. There is no risk of a character stabbing Alain in the back or being a mistake to spare, it ultimately just decides whether you get a unit or resources, and a unit will always be more valuable than resources. Even for characters you would think do not deserve to be spared, it is ultimately the right decision, which makes each of those decisions feeling hollow. For what it is worth though, the characters you do choose to spare do typically have pretty good rapports.

Which finally gets us into the heart of the gameplay, the battle system. Connecting to the rapport system, is the general battle system which is clearly where everything connects and becomes a beautiful interconnected web. Every character in the game has a set of unique skills based on their classes, which can be programmed with an in game decision tree to determine what a character does on their action. This works similarly to the Gambit system from FFXII, but in this case there are more limited options per character, but so many more different interactions to make it easy enough for a new player to make something passable, to a professional player properly taking advantage of this tree. Decisions are made using if statements which can be programmed with statements that are true or false and will only activate under certain conditions, such as only using a ranged attack if it is against a flying enemy, in which case if its not it will move to the next decision, to setting priorities like using magical attacks on armored units first. There is a large selection of conditions, and each move can receive two conditions each, making a rather large ability for a player to create specific AI for each of their units in the same way a programmer would. What makes this work beautifully and come together is how you can build units of up to 5 characters that battle an enemy set of 5 characters, with ten deployable armies you can control at once. This takes the strategy to a new level, and can be modified on the spot where you can see yourself the results of each change in AI, and see how it plays out in the gorgeous art style that had made Vanillaware famous. With well balanced weapons, shields and items with unique abilities to slowly upgrade your army and add complication to the strategies you employ, and improving rapport between your units so that they give each other better statistical upgrades, an overworld conquest system where you can get continuous rewards from stationing guards while having an expansive overworld to explore with side quests, it all comes together to make an addicting battle system for anyone interested in the SRPG genre.

As said, the art style is beautiful, and I lament on the team running out of budget, as once credits start to roll, you can see how many backgrounds that were never used in the story or rapports come up to show where each character has gone similar to other SRPGs. However, these backgrounds clearly were intended to be used with all the rapports which are unfortunately all on the overworld using the tiny sprites instead of the larger battle sprites. Which is a shame, and clearly a mark of the budget running out, as some of these backgrounds were nice, and it would have added a lot to many of these rapports if we could see the character models interacting instead of the overworld sprites.

The audio luckily did not suffer at all, with a number of beautiful tracks, great voice acting, and gripping sound effects that fit the game perfectly.

Ultimately there is so much good about this game that it has me longing for more, which is a shame since there are hints at what could have been if Vanillaware didn't run out of budget for this title. The lore entries in the journal make mention of things that barely come up in the final product and likely had to be cut, there are the rapports that could have taken place on the beautiful backdrops with all the unique character models they had, and more. Yet, what is here is undeniably a complete and wonderful SRPG. I only hope that Vanillaware is able to rightfully get rewarded for this, so their next project gets a larger budget.