Unicorn Overlord is Great

Possibly the best game of 2024

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I recently finished Vanillaware’s Unicorn Overlord, and it was a great experience with a unique and genre-defying game. If you are wondering why I held off on playing it, I didn’t buy it at launch because of controversy regarding its translation (or localization) and the poor voice acting in the demo. Those criticisms are valid, but the core Japanese product is good enough to make up for it. Eventually, it became a “wait for a gift” kind of game, and I got it from my kids for Christmas, though the experience was good enough that I do wish I had bought it earlier.

Let’s go through my usual categories, starting with production.

Production

The strength of every Vanillaware game is in aesthetic rather than graphical power, and Unicorn Overlord is no exception. The game, with its rich painted backgrounds and fluidly animated anime-style drawn characters, is the best game of 2024 in terms of pure visual artistry. Its aesthetic qualities beat out my number 2, Final Fantasy Rebirth, on a fraction of the budget by avoiding flashy engines with flashy lighting effects for real art, and the result is a game that will look great in another 20 years the way “photorealistic” games likely won’t.

The character designs are beautiful and, while stylized, are far more natural than something like Dragon’s Crown or Odin Sphere. Their battle animations are fun to watch, and both design and motion capture the class fantasy of each character type. There are many unique classes with their own visuals that are linked to the various races (including best races), so the visual variety builds as you progress through the campaign. Both male and female types are designed to be beautiful to watch, with a wide variety of palettes and a few unique heads (for named characters) that end up giving the game a baroque effect by the final chapters when all your battle units are packed.

The characters move across richly detailed maps and backgrounds designed to represent the ideal of medieval fantasy in a way that a photorealistic approach could never match. Castles are huge, spanning the horizon with tier after tier of walls and towers. Forests are dense and dark. Interiors are filled with a multitude of details and constructed with excellent artistic valuation. Each area has its own unified theme that goes along with its race, and this includes use of carefully selected palettes: brown for mountainous Drakengard, green and purples for elves, blue and white for the snowy land of the beast people, and subtle autumn colors for the land of the angels, while the central area, serving as both beginning and end of the campaign, has a standard green-and-stone fantasy art approach. All of this is achieved while keeping the art direction in total very unified.

The music (composed by four composers), like the other aspects of the production, was top-notch, a great mix of classical-inspired fantasy RPG orchestral music recorded with good detail and with varieties to match each section of the sprawling overworld map. I found my son singing and humming a lot of the tunes, which is a good indication to me that the melodies were well-constructed.

One feature that I am glad they included was a fast-forward button. While the animations are great, at the end of the game battles can take quite a long time at regular speed as each unit will have five characters that are each capable of performing five or more actions per battle. All that motion really adds up, especially in the longer end-game maps.

Gameplay

It’s easy to classify Unicorn Overlord as an RPG, but even so, it doesn’t fit neatly into our usual arrangement of sub-genres. It has elements of JRPGs, strategy, and tactics games.

The player doesn’t manage combat but rather manages the battlefield while the characters within each unit are programmed in a manner similar to Final Fantasy XII’s gambit system or Dragon Age Origin’s tactics system. They perform their actions in response to various conditions that the player determines (or can be set to a quick default). Some actions are gained as the character levels up, adopts an advanced class, or equips certain items. As the player moves units across the battlefield, he is given some basic forecasts for how a unit will fare in battle with an enemy, and during battle, certain units can support the combat unit with ranged, magic attacks, or healing, determined by the leader of the unit. Once combat begins, the characters all battle automatically.

All this means that the emphasis for gameplay is on setting up the characters and units (groups) to have the best impact when they go into battle. Different weapons have different abilities with different uses, and certain classes are better against others, so optimal play is geared toward rock-paper-scissors style optimization for at least some of your units, though I found generalized groups to also be very potent when the characters are chosen correctly. Since I usually find the macro elements of RPG games (that is, optimizing character stats and equipment) more interesting than the micro (the actual battles), Unicorn Overlord was right up my alley.

In terms of difficulty, the game is quite easy on the default difficulty, but it can be adjusted as you go to give you more challenge or ease up if you encounter a difficulty spike. The hardest difficulty is only available after beating the campaign once. The game also gives you an opportunity to level up characters with items and with repeatable maps if you run into a section that feels too difficult. Gold for equipment upgrades is abundant, and as the game goes on, honors (used to expand your battle units and unlock advanced classes as well as upgrade weapons at end game) become easy to farm by delivering gatherable resources to towns. In general, the game is manageable for any player, whether you want to really dig into unit management or just want to see the great art, hear the great music, and experience the story.

My one and only complaint about the production is the idle animations of the characters, which, while standard for Vanillaware, look a bit odd. This is especially true of the breathing animation for heavily armored characters, but it doesn’t sufficiently disrupt the overall effect, and it’s my only real nitpick.

The Story

The story of Unicorn Overlord is its weak point, but I would not consider it weak per se. In fact, I think it performs the core function of a game story, which is to move the player smoothly through the various set pieces and increasing challenges and to give the player a reason to win. The characters are generally likable, if not always deep, and each area of the map has its own conflict and plot that helps the game feel like an epic experience.

The protagonist is Allain, a prince of the kingdom of Cornia who was saved as a child from the ruin of the land by a loyal knight while his warrior-queen mother stayed behind to fight the emperor of a long-dead race newly resurrected. Gallerius, the villain, accomplishes his total conquest of the lands of Fevrith in a ten-year gap after the prologue. Allain, now grown, assembles an army to take back his homeland and free the other people of the world. It’s a classic setup, and it functions well to frame everything the player does in the game. Added to this is the villain’s power to mind-control or (as it’s revealed) allow body possession of various characters who can be “freed” by Allain’s royal unicorn ring (and then be recruited).

Within this large conflict, there are many small stories, usually one for each large town Allain comes across. One or more unique characters have problems to be solved, which Allain helps with, and is rewarded with an opportunity to recruit them after clearing a battle map. Each country has its own larger conflict, like missing or mind-controlled monarchs, that link the smaller stories together. The result is a slow increase in the player’s army and the size of the units within it, along with steadily advancing classes that open up new gameplay possibilities. The story approach works excellently in its function of facilitating gameplay.

Like the Fire Emblem games, characters will gain rapport (or relationship status) by battling next to or dining with each other. This unlocks small unvoiced cutscenes (using only small battlefield sprites for some reason) where the characters talk to each other, revealing something of their backstory, motivations, or feelings. Allain, toward the end of the game, can choose one of the characters that he has maximum relationship with to marry him, which provides some unique items and events for the final battle. Unlike Fire Emblem, you can’t “pair up” your other units for child units or anything like that. Even the epilogue is fairly light on that.

I personally did not find the rapport conversations interesting and only bothered to go through them quickly, but, to be fair, I’m not crazy about them in Fire Emblem either. This might be because I am a fantasy author myself, and conversations between characters abstracted from the conflict that brings them together to be filler in a novel. Undoubtedly, some people will like the cut scenes in Universe Overlord, and it may depend on how interesting you find the individual characters or how much you want to know about their situation or homeland. I found the vast majority of the conversations to be vapid and boring, but there were a few interesting ones. How the characters acted in the main cut scenes (with their full-size sprites) were much more compelling and informative.

There is also a codex system in the game for any lore heads that want to explore that, again, like Dragon Age Origins or certain Final Fantasy games, but I didn’t bother reading much of it. The information there is simply not necessary to understand the conflict or the plot events of the game. As an aside for authors, this sort of approach—doing your infodumps in optional appendices—is much preferable to halting the progress of your narrative to tell the reader about the details of your imaginary world. The necessary info ought to be available in the narrative itself, and Unicorn Overlord succeeds in this way.

I should also mention the voice acting at this point since it does affect the story’s effect. There are some good performances, but in general, I was not a fan of the acting. Others have tackled the problems of the script relative to the Japanese original. I will just say that the approach to the English script, relative to the all-American cast and their skills, was a severe directional mismatch. The script is in pseudo 19^th-century fantasy-speak, a manneristic approach to writing like Tolkien or Dunsany. It could have been sold by expert British actors, like the cast of Final Fantasy XIV, which sells their own fantasy-speak quite well, but the American cast was not up to the task. They could have used a more direct translation script with plain English. Not to hammer the point home, but the names of the cast are familiar to me insomuch as I see (and hear) them in various anime localizations and contribute to my policy of “always sub, never dub.” Delivery is either flat or melodramatic, with odd cadences and pitch choices that never sound natural to my (still American) ears and also lack any classical dramatic flavor.

The game feels like a work of high art overdubbed by high school drama kids.

So why didn’t I play in Japanese? Because I played a lot with my son watching, and while he could read the subtitles fine, he preferred the voices.

My son also really enjoyed the story with its grand conflict, dark lords and evil sorcerers, diverse races, and ancient lore. It’s a good classic fantasy story.

Conclusions.

Unicorn Overlord gets a high recommendation from me because of its superb aesthetics, music, and compelling “macro only” approach to RPG gameplay. Its few weak points are easily ignored, and the game will suit many different gamers.

Scorecard:

Aesthetics/graphics: 9.9/10

Music: 9/10

Gameplay: 9/10

Story: 8/10

Total: 9.5/10Grade: A

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