Unicorn Overlord

It is with good reason that Vanillaware, developer of the beloved 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, and publisher Atlus describe their game with the most silly title of the year so far as "the rebirth of tactical RPGs". Unicorn Overlord is a declaration of love for the SRPG series Ogre Battle (especially Ogre Battle 64 and Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen), although there is also DNA from, for example, Final Fantasy 12, Final Fantasy Tactics and the Fire Emblem series. This is a tactical role-playing game where you, as the commander of the initially modest but later huge "Liberation Army", command units consisting of one to five fighters. You do this in real time in levels that, unlike the Fire Emblem series, are not grid-based, but offer total freedom of movement wherever the terrain allows.

Unicorn Overlord is fundamentally - like all good tactical games - about making a lot of well-considered decisions. Decisions about unit composition (which soldiers should be included in the same unit to make it most combat capable), positioning (which units should be sent where to make the best use of time and be limited as little as possible by difficult terrain and other obstacles), and which weapons, equipment and items each soldier should be equipped with (how can I constantly optimize my soldiers, both independently and interdependently).

Each unit consists of a grid of six squares: a row of three in front and a row of three behind. At the start of the game, your units only have room for two soldiers, so it's wise to put a tanky soldier at the front (e.g. a heavy knight or an evasive thief) and a more vulnerable but damaging or assisting soldier at the back (e.g. a healer, mage or archer). Each unit also has a leader, and different classes offer different leadership effects: for example, healers, mages and archers can assist other units from a distance, while the gladiator - a muscular axe warrior - can smash barricades on the map more easily.

You always deploy your units from a main base with the aim of defeating the enemy commander and laying siege to their headquarters. If you don't make it before time runs out, you lose, and you lose if an enemy unit lays siege to your main base. The game is all about balancing effective offense and defense, and while it's fairly straightforward at the beginning of the game, later courses can be mind-boggling (at least on the Expert difficulty level) as you're racing against reinforcements from every base on the map, while terrain, traps and barricades hamper your progress.

But smart positioning and resource utilization is only half of the gameplay; the other half is, of course, combat. And before I delve into the game's amazing and totally addictive combat system, I'd like to make a disclaimer: The battles in Unicorn Overlord are automatic, and the actual gameplay consists of setting up your soldiers and units' tactics beforehand. It's good to get that out of the way, because I've already read some people expressing their disappointment that the game is a so-called "auto-battler" after trying the demo. If you've played Fire Emblem and similar games, you'll know that this is not a problem, but that the focus is elsewhere in this type of game, and that it would actually just be a burden if you also had to actively manage battles after all the mentally draining preparation. Besides, you can always fast-forward through the otherwise great battle animations or skip them altogether.

So how exactly does combat work? Well, when two units collide on the map, a battle begins. A preview always shows the exact outcome of the battle, but you can manipulate the outcome by changing your unit's formation or using consumable items before the battle begins.

To do well in battle, it is important to optimize your soldiers. You can do this by equipping them with good weapons, armor and other useful gear, but the most important thing is to set up smart, well-thought-out tactics for each soldier. Every class has different active and passive abilities at their disposal, and the order in which they should prioritize these and under what circumstances they should activate them is crucial to creating effective units where soldiers reinforce each other and minimize weak links. For example, it's not a stupid decision to tell your archer to always prioritize griffins and thieves, your mage to prioritize enemies in heavy armour, your healer to prioritize the ally in your unit with the least HP, your knight on horseback to prioritize rows of enemies with his spear, and your mercenary to always attack the enemy with the least HP so she can take advantage of an ability that allows her to attack again after scoring a killing blow. But the skilled strategist knows how to optimize soldiers in relation to each other.

Let me highlight an example that will hopefully demonstrate the complexity of the system at least somewhat. My unit consists of three fighters: a heavy, tanky knight in the front row protecting an archer and a mage in the back. In itself, it's a pretty solid formation that, despite poor mobility and lack of healing, has advantages over many types of enemy soldiers: my archer can easily shoot griffins out of the sky, my mage kills knights in heavy armour with ease, and my own knight only gets scratches in his armour from infantry attacks. But with a few modifications to the unit's tactics, I can take it to a whole new level.

So I equip my mage with a staff that allows fire mages to jump from one to all enemies, my archer with a bow that shoots fire arrows, and my knight with a medallion that allows the first person in the unit to attack to do so with far greater power, albeit with a lower chance of hitting the enemy. Since my archer has the highest initiative (a stat that dictates who attacks first), he will receive the medallion's buff, and since he has the passive ability "Eagle Eye" that makes his next attack 100% certain to hit, I can ignore the medallion's side effect. So the knight gives him a guaranteed devastating attack that simultaneously sets the enemy on fire, and when it's the mage's turn, he can utilise the flame arrow's effect to spread fire on all enemies in the opponent's unit.

With a few modifications, I've made an already strong unit formidable - and with just three fighters. Now imagine that later in the game your units consist of FIVE soldiers - the enemy's as well - and that each character has up to TEN tactics to customise, and you can easily see that there are a staggering number of options to devise. Trust me: This game is like a drug for those of us who love to rack our brains to see how far we can push the envelope when it comes to devising creative and deadly builds.

The missions and their strategic gameplay aren't the only thing that makes this game so damn addictive. Between missions, you have a vast overworld to freeroam, harvesting resources and donating them to cities, completing side missions, strengthening bonds between characters, shopping for gear, recruiting new soldiers, expanding your units and testing them against each other, promoting your soldiers to cool advanced classes, and more. It all comes together in a deeply satisfying gameplay loop that supports the game's entire purpose of making the player feel like a commander who starts out small but later commands an unstoppable army. The game is also gigantic, and if I have one complaint, it's that the mission structure itself becomes a bit predictable and monotonous over time.

Well, I guess we'll have to get past the story as well. If you've played the demo, you'll know that the game follows the noble, blue-haired Prince Alain, who must free the kingdom from the tyrannical General Valmore, who through evil magic has brainwashed all the mighty houses of the kingdom and embedded them in his merciless Zenoiran Empire. Alain has inherited from his mother a powerful ring with the ability to break the mental chains of dark magic, and so one by one the brainwashed leaders must be freed so that they and their forces can join Alain's Liberation Army in the fight to overthrow Valmore. It's not the most original premise for a fantasy story, and while it does take some interesting turns along the way, the narrative is carried by a bunch of archetypes and the dialogue is consistently dry, predictable and delivered in an overused variation of Shakespearean Old English.

However, the game never gets boring to look at. True to Vanillaware tradition, it has excellent art direction, runs great on all consoles, and looks like what can best be described as a living illustration book with a medieval fantasy theme. It's a shame, then, that the game's visuals, like the story and dialogue, are overly influenced by genre stereotypes: Noble, infallible knights with hair in every colour of the rainbow, bandits with arms so bulky you'd think they'd injected them with paraffin oil, and last but not least, another Vanillaware tradition: sexist female character design. Here on the continent of Fevrith, women and teenage girls apparently show up ready for battle in bras and panties, and the game's female protagonist, despite her slight build and infantile voice, has enormous breasts that bounce and sway with every little movement she makes. It's so comical that it's hard to take seriously, and frankly, it's tiresome that Vanillaware and so many other developers don't care about realism and logic to appeal to a bunch of waifu-loving lechers.

Another sin the game commits, in my opinion, is being far too merciful in its approach to storytelling. Characters who have committed heinous deeds are not held properly accountable, as the developer is all too eager to excuse them so the player can recruit them into their army. So bandits and thieves who steal, murder and loot small villages were just brainwashed or just trying to put food on the table for their sick, bedridden sister! And so on and so forth. And even though the player is occasionally presented with the option to either pardon, imprison or even execute such characters, you as a player feel obliged to pardon them, as you don't want to miss the opportunity to recruit them into the army so you can do better on the battlefield. The more ruthless decisions are therefore left for a future replay, but the problem is that it's unclear if you'll ever replay a game of this magnitude.

If you can shrug off the many archetypes, dry dialogue and a handful of sexist character designs, then there are many, many hours of deeply engaging strategy to be had here. If you can't stand spending the majority of your time in menus and hate watching combat play out passively in front of your eyes, you can easily skip Unicorn Overlord. But for those of us who love to have full control over every little gameplay variable, and who get excited at the thought of a bottomless tactical system with endless possibilities to create your very own deadly army, this is a really, really dangerous game that can easily make you neglect your social life completely for a long period of time. Game of the year for me so far.