Vanillaware take a shot at the strategy genre with Unicorn Overlord, a game boasting the “rebirth of the tactical fantasy genre”. A bold claim to make but after managing to get me to enjoy tower defence gameplay with 13 Sentinels, could Vanillaware cook up something that captured my imagination again?
Well on the gameplay front this is a fantastically well put together game. The bulk of the gameplay sees you take on real time strategy battles where you command your units on a map to capture locations and defeat enemies in combat along the way. Each of your units are made up of multiple characters (starting at around 1 or 2 and able to be increased to a maximum of 5) and battles see two units clash going through a set of initiatives and objectives you can set (like what kind of attack to prioritise, when to heal, etc) and whichever unit loses more HP is knocked back and stunned for a set amount of time, allowing you to capitalise or be put in grave danger depending on if you win or lose. Setting up each of your units is immensely satisfying as you unlock more and more characters giving you more and more options to play about with. Which character is your leader can make a huge difference too, with flying units able to fly over terrain and mounted units moving much faster than other units.
Map set ups tend to be quite small and simple for side chapters but the main ones are much larger, seeing you require to take multiple different points and split up your units to effectively progress through each battle. There’s a time limit on each map too, so managing and using your units effectively is a key part of battles. There’s a lot to consider as more mechanics get added to the fold like ballista and catapults, barricades, and even spiked traps to navigate round. The bigger maps are a lot of fun to play through and remind me a lot of how Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War plays with how you need to manage your units effectively on massive sprawling maps, only your units are all moving at the same time in Unicorn Overlord, offering a much more fluid experience.
Another aspect to battles are Valor Points, earned through winning combat and capturing locations. These can be spent to summon more units to battle from your maximum of 10, but their main use is special abilities you can use. For example you can use Arrow Rain to rain arrows on your enemies causing massive damage without engaging in combat or Gravity to slow enemies down. You can only hold up to 10 Valor Points at a time and each action can cost between 1-3 points so you have to manage your use of them effectively and on top of that, enemies can use these moves too so there’s a lot to be aware of.
So yeah, on the battle side of things Unicorn Overlord delivers an immensely satisfying experience that can be a lot to take in and understand but once you’ve wrapped your head around it, Vanillware’s earlier claim starts to make a bit more sense.
The game is structured in a very open way, where you are free to traverse the world map that is the continent of Fevrith and its many nations, taking part in liberating areas as you go. The only thing really preventing you from fully going anywhere is the enemies being much higher levels than you in areas but you can totally stumble upon the final battle very early on if you so choose. Traversing the overworld has a few side quests to take part in like mending bridges or visiting resting areas and each town requires deliveries to fix them up. Doing these and battles will grant you Honors which can be used to unlock more Units, more spaces in your Units and promoting characters. You’re limited on how far you can expand your Units and stuff by your renown which also goes up as you do these tasks. It’s a nice break from the battles but it is mostly busywork. What is cool though is that every battle takes place on this world map which helps make everything feel interconnected and as you explore the map, you’ll uncover it in your map screen which really tickles my brain in a way that made me explore 100% of the map because I wanted to uncover the whole thing.
Surprisingly for me, the weakest aspect of the game was the story and characters which I wasn’t expecting when that was the strongest aspect of 13 Sentinels. What we have here is a very generic fantasy tale where Zenoira has conquered all of Fevrith and now it’s up to our blue-haired lord Alain to build an army and rebel against Zenoiran rule to free the people of Fevrith. There’s clearly an inspiration from Fire Emblem with some of the character archetypes, like Josef being our early pre promote Jagen or Hilda being our red haired Dracoknight Minerva style character. There are a lot of cool unique races too here, with angels, elves, and beasts which is really nice. Ultimately though, the story didn’t really hook me, the characters didn’t do much for me, and everything felt like it was lacking depth, like very little was explored beyond the surface level. Each nation has a few important characters but outside of their relationship with Alain’s nation of Cornia, they don’t really have much of a relationship with each other. So many of the enemies and characters you meet along the way are mind controlled and so don’t really have much motivation for why they’re fighting against you and after the early portion where our main villain Galerius captures Scarlett, he doesn’t really show up again until the finale. I think a large problem with the narrative is the open ended structure of the game as it doesn’t allow for a natural flowing story and instead all you get is a little set up for each battle and a little conclusion and everything feels a bit too loose and disjointed. The localisation does a great job at trying to liven things up with colourful dialogue but ultimately they were given so little to work with and even the supports between the characters couldn’t hook me in enough. My favourite characters tended to be the ones that did well for me in battle like Fran and her group. I will say there’s an interesting reveal towards the end for Galerius’ motivations which was actually pretty good stuff but yeah, aside from that, there’s little here that I can say was memorable for me.
The big problem with the generic story is that the incredible gameplay can only carry the game for so long before it starts to run out of steam and feel a little repetitive. Towards the 25-30 hour mark, after clearing through Elheim and starting Bastorias, the game started to lose its charm for me. My character set ups were pretty much set in stone, I had seen basically every gimmick the maps were using and the story had long since lost my interest. It results in the game feeling like it’s longer than it needs to be. Like 20-30 hours, I think is a good runtime for a game like this, where even if the story isn’t that appealing, the gameplay is generally enough to carry a strategy game like this throughout a 20-30 hour experience. Unicorn Overlord took me around 50 hours to beat. Almost doubling the time where I had felt fatigued with the games loop. Now it did pull me back in towards the end, reaching Albion and getting a bit more interesting story stuff with Scarlett being back home was cool but I still think the game is a bit too long for its own good.
Getting back into the positives, Vanillware really does know how to deliver a beautiful looking game. The 2D artwork is similar to their previous games and everything is well detailed and animated, running well on the Switch (the platform I played it on) with no issues. Some of the female characters are unfortunately a little over animated in some areas which is a shame but outside of that the game looks and runs beautifully. The music is also well done, crafting excellent battle tunes and atmospheric exploration music.
Unicorn Overlord is a fantastic strategy experience held back by a generic story which makes the game feel like it drags on at points. Getting to grips with its in depth gameplay, experimenting with the many different possible unit set ups and engaging in the hour plus long story maps offers a brilliant experience that few games in the genre can match. While it does run out of steam around halfway through, I think if you can push through that then there’s still plenty to enjoy with this one.
Well on the gameplay front this is a fantastically well put together game. The bulk of the gameplay sees you take on real time strategy battles where you command your units on a map to capture locations and defeat enemies in combat along the way. Each of your units are made up of multiple characters (starting at around 1 or 2 and able to be increased to a maximum of 5) and battles see two units clash going through a set of initiatives and objectives you can set (like what kind of attack to prioritise, when to heal, etc) and whichever unit loses more HP is knocked back and stunned for a set amount of time, allowing you to capitalise or be put in grave danger depending on if you win or lose. Setting up each of your units is immensely satisfying as you unlock more and more characters giving you more and more options to play about with. Which character is your leader can make a huge difference too, with flying units able to fly over terrain and mounted units moving much faster than other units.
Map set ups tend to be quite small and simple for side chapters but the main ones are much larger, seeing you require to take multiple different points and split up your units to effectively progress through each battle. There’s a time limit on each map too, so managing and using your units effectively is a key part of battles. There’s a lot to consider as more mechanics get added to the fold like ballista and catapults, barricades, and even spiked traps to navigate round. The bigger maps are a lot of fun to play through and remind me a lot of how Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War plays with how you need to manage your units effectively on massive sprawling maps, only your units are all moving at the same time in Unicorn Overlord, offering a much more fluid experience.
Another aspect to battles are Valor Points, earned through winning combat and capturing locations. These can be spent to summon more units to battle from your maximum of 10, but their main use is special abilities you can use. For example you can use Arrow Rain to rain arrows on your enemies causing massive damage without engaging in combat or Gravity to slow enemies down. You can only hold up to 10 Valor Points at a time and each action can cost between 1-3 points so you have to manage your use of them effectively and on top of that, enemies can use these moves too so there’s a lot to be aware of.
So yeah, on the battle side of things Unicorn Overlord delivers an immensely satisfying experience that can be a lot to take in and understand but once you’ve wrapped your head around it, Vanillware’s earlier claim starts to make a bit more sense.
The game is structured in a very open way, where you are free to traverse the world map that is the continent of Fevrith and its many nations, taking part in liberating areas as you go. The only thing really preventing you from fully going anywhere is the enemies being much higher levels than you in areas but you can totally stumble upon the final battle very early on if you so choose. Traversing the overworld has a few side quests to take part in like mending bridges or visiting resting areas and each town requires deliveries to fix them up. Doing these and battles will grant you Honors which can be used to unlock more Units, more spaces in your Units and promoting characters. You’re limited on how far you can expand your Units and stuff by your renown which also goes up as you do these tasks. It’s a nice break from the battles but it is mostly busywork. What is cool though is that every battle takes place on this world map which helps make everything feel interconnected and as you explore the map, you’ll uncover it in your map screen which really tickles my brain in a way that made me explore 100% of the map because I wanted to uncover the whole thing.
Surprisingly for me, the weakest aspect of the game was the story and characters which I wasn’t expecting when that was the strongest aspect of 13 Sentinels. What we have here is a very generic fantasy tale where Zenoira has conquered all of Fevrith and now it’s up to our blue-haired lord Alain to build an army and rebel against Zenoiran rule to free the people of Fevrith. There’s clearly an inspiration from Fire Emblem with some of the character archetypes, like Josef being our early pre promote Jagen or Hilda being our red haired Dracoknight Minerva style character. There are a lot of cool unique races too here, with angels, elves, and beasts which is really nice. Ultimately though, the story didn’t really hook me, the characters didn’t do much for me, and everything felt like it was lacking depth, like very little was explored beyond the surface level. Each nation has a few important characters but outside of their relationship with Alain’s nation of Cornia, they don’t really have much of a relationship with each other. So many of the enemies and characters you meet along the way are mind controlled and so don’t really have much motivation for why they’re fighting against you and after the early portion where our main villain Galerius captures Scarlett, he doesn’t really show up again until the finale. I think a large problem with the narrative is the open ended structure of the game as it doesn’t allow for a natural flowing story and instead all you get is a little set up for each battle and a little conclusion and everything feels a bit too loose and disjointed. The localisation does a great job at trying to liven things up with colourful dialogue but ultimately they were given so little to work with and even the supports between the characters couldn’t hook me in enough. My favourite characters tended to be the ones that did well for me in battle like Fran and her group. I will say there’s an interesting reveal towards the end for Galerius’ motivations which was actually pretty good stuff but yeah, aside from that, there’s little here that I can say was memorable for me.
The big problem with the generic story is that the incredible gameplay can only carry the game for so long before it starts to run out of steam and feel a little repetitive. Towards the 25-30 hour mark, after clearing through Elheim and starting Bastorias, the game started to lose its charm for me. My character set ups were pretty much set in stone, I had seen basically every gimmick the maps were using and the story had long since lost my interest. It results in the game feeling like it’s longer than it needs to be. Like 20-30 hours, I think is a good runtime for a game like this, where even if the story isn’t that appealing, the gameplay is generally enough to carry a strategy game like this throughout a 20-30 hour experience. Unicorn Overlord took me around 50 hours to beat. Almost doubling the time where I had felt fatigued with the games loop. Now it did pull me back in towards the end, reaching Albion and getting a bit more interesting story stuff with Scarlett being back home was cool but I still think the game is a bit too long for its own good.
Getting back into the positives, Vanillware really does know how to deliver a beautiful looking game. The 2D artwork is similar to their previous games and everything is well detailed and animated, running well on the Switch (the platform I played it on) with no issues. Some of the female characters are unfortunately a little over animated in some areas which is a shame but outside of that the game looks and runs beautifully. The music is also well done, crafting excellent battle tunes and atmospheric exploration music.
Unicorn Overlord is a fantastic strategy experience held back by a generic story which makes the game feel like it drags on at points. Getting to grips with its in depth gameplay, experimenting with the many different possible unit set ups and engaging in the hour plus long story maps offers a brilliant experience that few games in the genre can match. While it does run out of steam around halfway through, I think if you can push through that then there’s still plenty to enjoy with this one.