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.

I haven't been this hooked into mainline Pokemon battling in ages, it's amazing how well back-to-back PvE battles go with rogue-like elements. Having restrictions on healing item use and set battle rules, and not starting every battle able to fully heal in-between, you actually have to engage with the mechanics of the series that the mainline games have stubbornly refused to offer for ages.

I've always LOATHED "hard" difficulty romhacks since they basically just pit you against competitive team builds on normal trainers while you have some mid-level, shoddy pkmn with no held items available. Pokerogue, however, takes advantage of the vanilla formula and makes you feel like you're on a journey with only slight deviations, like being allowed to have multiple held items or even stack held items for boosted effects.

I've never once felt like the game was overtly unfair, even with the amount of RNG involved in a run (well, except for a certain trainer's ace Pokemon, there's a reason Smogon banned it from ubers). Most of the time, I could've just made better decisions on what I caught and which items I chose. Hell, if you're lucky and find your favorite Pokemon in the wild, you can probably take it to the endgame with how the game lets you build your teams over the course of your journey.

Overall, better than the actual games IMO and is MUST play for anyone who wants a Pokemon game that respects its combat, but dislikes online competitive.