Vanillaware is a developer that constantly puts out amazing games but somehow always manages to fly under the radar everywhere outside of Japan. While most of their games get rave reviews they never seem to break into the mainstream. Save for Dragon’s Crown which only got its time in the lime light because one character happened to have a massive chest which seemed to upset a lot of people despite the fact that her look and proportions fit with the overall art style of the game, but that’s a can of worms to open in another post!

I bring this all up mainly because I’m worried that their newest game, Unicorn Overlord, is going to follow the same path as their other games like 13 Sentinels and Muramasa. Critically acclaimed games that so few people ever actually play or hear of outside of Japan. So, I want to do my part and talk about Unicorn Overlord to help spread awareness for this awesome game! And hopefully get more people to try it. Especially if you’re a fan of other tactical RPGs like Fire Emblem!

So yeah, Unicorn Overlord is a tactical RPG and very much in the style of something like Fire Emblem. In fact, it actually borrows a lot from Fire Emblem! Especially when it comes to the story of the game. Unicorn Overlord‘s story is… Kind of generic if I’m being honest. You play as Alain, the royal heir to the kingdom of Cornea, a once prosperous kingdom before a massive rebellion happened and it was taken over by the rebels in the name of the Zenorian Empire. On the night his kingdom fell, Alain escaped with his caretaker and was brought to a remote island where he spent the next 10 years growing up and learning how to one day lead both a kingdom and an army as he would need to not only free his own kingdom but all others as Zenoria managed to completely conquer the entire land known as Fevrith and it’s five kingdoms including his own. And all this starts when Zenorian soldiers show up on the island seemingly looking for Alain. Having been found out, it’s up to Alain and his friends to form an army and battle across all of Fevrith, freeing all the other kingdoms and finally putting an end to Zenoria’s rule!

It’s a story you’ve probably heard told many times before in movies, books, and other games but that doesn’t make it bad! While there weren’t many twists or turns that caught me off guard, the story never managed to put me off or bore me. Let’s compare this to Fire Emblem Engage, the most recent Fire Emblem game, that also had a pretty bland and generic story but due to having more of a focus on said story with so many cutscenes and so much dialog, it ended up hurting the experience overall and is why I would honestly recommend people check out Fire Emblem Three Houses over Engage despite the fact that I think Engage‘s combat is more fun in the end.

I never felt this way with Unicorn Overlord. While the story never really gripped me in any major way, it never got in the way of the rest of the game either, and because of that I ended up enjoying it overall despite how basic it truly was! So yeah, if you are wanting a tactical RPG with a super good story, you might have to look elsewhere. But if you’re looking for a tactical RPG where everything else is amazing, you can’t go wrong with Unicorn Overlord!

Despite me ragging on the story just now, I can’t deny it does one thing really well for the game and that is provide a really good pace. The game is basically broken up into six parts. Starting with the opening where you first come back to the Zenoria ruled Cornea, you spend the rest of the game going to the other four nations freeing them from the Empire while building up your army before returning to Cornea once again for the final battle. This structure of going from one kingdom to the next, each with very different lands and characters, is perfect for making sure the game doesn’t ever get stale at any points. By the time you might be getting bored with one section you are always on to the next. And this isn’t just a change of scenery either! Going to a new kingdom generally includes new mechanics, terrains, enemies, strategies, and most importantly new characters to recruit! This constant flow of ‘new’ not only helps make these kingdoms feel their own, it does a perfect job keeping the variety up without ever overwhelming the player too much by throwing in too many new things. And all of this feeds into the game’s best aspect.

The combat!

If there is one thing Unicorn Overlord does best, even better than most Fire Emblems I’ve played, it’s the combat! Comparing the combat to Fire Emblem, Unicorn Overlord is more of a real time strategy game than a turn based one. Units are constantly moving and each level has a timer so you can’t just sit back and wait too long for the enemy to come to you. Almost every combat situation is about taking over one particular command post that usually has a powerful enemy waiting for you while you have to protect your own command post at the same time. So each combat situation really boils down to you trying to get through the field of combat as best you can, taking bases along the way, to reach the main base of command. However, that’s not all! When your units bump into enemy units, they don’t just simply take damage as they wear each other down, instead the combat shifts to something similar to Fire Emblem with the two units fighting it out in a little battle that you don’t have any direct control over. You are given a prediction on how said fight will go, like the way Fire Emblem does, and can shift the odds with some items and what not, but when your unit touches an enemy unit, it all comes down to how you set up said unit. And this… This is where Unicorn Overlord truly shows why it’s one of the most fun tactical RPGs I’ve played!

While you don’t have any control over your units in combat, you have an insane amount of control when it comes to setting up your units for that combat! Unlike with Fire Emblem, units aren’t a single character but instead are a group of characters! You can have ten units set up with their sizes ranging from two characters up to five. Said characters are set up on grid with six spaces, three in the front and three in the back making up a front and back row. Which characters you put together and where with what abilities they have is what this game is all about. Your goal is basically to make units for every situation you find yourself in or being ready to completely change up your units when looking over which enemy units you’ll be fighting against. This set up and customization for each unit is how I fell in love with the game! Originally I was going to simply try and brute force every thing, I didn’t like the idea of making new units so frequently and instead wanted to just make a handful of stupid powerful units that I could steam roll enemies with. And while that is very much possible, especially on the lower difficulties, I was shocked to find that I didn’t end up doing this and instead focused way more on making units and making them work exactly how I wanted to. Because as the game continued to add new characters and classes for those characters at every turn, I didn’t simply brush them off and continue using what was working, instead I found myself thinking, “Okay, how am I going to get this character to work?” Or “What kind of unit could I make with these characters?”

Like I said, Unicorn Overlord is constantly giving you new things to play with and the best of these new things were new characters and classes. The longer the game went on, the more I wanted to simply stop and tinker with my units, trying to see who worked where or how to make certain characters work at all! Very rarely were there times when they introduced a new character and that character was simply better than the characters I already had. This tends to happen a lot in Fire Emblem games when you recruit people later in the game. A lot of times they are simply better than some of the other characters you were leveling up from early on. While I wasn’t using all of the early game characters by the end, there are honestly just too many characters for that, I was still using quite a few! And not only that, I knew that the characters I wasn’t using anymore were still good characters! I simply just hadn’t thought about how to make them work with other characters. This all very much came to a head for me late in the game when I was in the second to last area. There is one particular character that the game basically teases you with by not only showing her rad design but also showing just how powerful she is by letting you use her for a mission. After said mission though, this character can only be recruited if you beat the Coliseum, which is basically a series of battles testing your ability to set up units by pitting them against very specific enemy units. This character is named Amalia and, again, despite recruiting her right towards the end of the game, I basically held off beating the game and spent hours trying to figure out the best kind of unit to put her in!

I tried so many different set ups with so many different characters. I originally wanted to just focus on her, having her be in the front line and basically trying to get her to survive the enemies attacks until it was finally her turn to attack as she is a very powerful but very slow character. This ended up not working because not only would the enemy eventually knock her out, she doesn’t have many moves that attack multiple characters and if she can’t survive the first wave of attacks she isn’t surviving the next one. So instead I shifted around the characters, eventually settling on this set up.

What I ended up doing was placing a Legionnaire with her in the front row. Their role is to focus on protecting her from enemy attacks to make sure she isn’t knocked out before it’s her turn to strike. The Legionnaire can also keep the back row protected if the enemy has any attacks that can go over the front row. The back row is also very important to the unit because, just like with the Legionnaire, they are mostly there to support Amalia rather than doing any actual damage. Because of that, I have a Shieldshooter, positioned right behind Amalia, that can keep the back row protected when the Legionnaire in the front has either been knocked out or has run out of passive points for protecting, more on that later though. Characters with ranged attacks, like the Shieldshooter, are also great for attacking flying units which ground based melee attackers, like Amalia, have a hard time hitting which is another reason I included them in this unit so they can hopefully either kill or weaken any flying enemies this unit runs into so Amalia doesn’t have to waste any attacks trying to hit them! Now, with the Shieldshooter I also have a Featherstaff and a Landsknecht. The Featherstaff is the healer of the group and is there to keep the front row alive and making sure the Legionnaire isn’t hit by too many status affects. This role could be filled by a Cleric or any healing class but I had just recently got a Featherstaff and wanted to try using them. The Landsknecht plays both a defensive and offensive role. Landsknecht’s have this cool ability that allows them to attack an enemy whenever said enemy attack anyone in the Landsknecht’s unit, so for such a defense focused unit, she is able to deal some damage throughout the enemies attacks weakening them for when it’s Amalia’s turn so she can really clean up! And typically by the time Amalia can attack, most of the characters in the enemy unit have run out of resources meaning that Amalia’s second attack will come much sooner! Combine all this with the fact that the Featherstaff and Shieldshooter have abilities that give a bit of healing at the end of fights means that this unit will generally be pretty healed up and ready to go for another battle, making them really hard to wear down!

Sounds pretty complex right? Well buckle up then because we haven’t even started talking about skills, and Active and Passive Points!

So! Each character, depending on their class, has different kinds of skills that you can see in this list above. Some of these skills can come from what equipment the character has as well, but let’s not focus on that for now. The ones in orange use Active Points and the ones in blue use Passive Points. Each character always starts with one of each until you promote their class and then they naturally have two of each. Future characters will generally have two of each as well as promoting units really isn’t much of a thing when you get to the half way point of the game. In total though, a character can have four of each. Having a character have four Active Points and four Passive Points is pretty rare though! Namely because you’ll need certain items to achieve that and items that give you simply one extra point for either Active or Passive can be kind of rare. Amalia here does have four of both points because of the two Pendants she has on. Normally I wouldn’t give a single until both pendants like that, as very few units would really need all four points, but Amalia is all about using lots of Passive Points to enhance her attacks which use Active Points so it makes sense for her to have them. Depending on the action, a skill can use one or even four points to activate depending on how powerful it is. Now I really do not have time to go into all the different kinds of skills characters can preform, that would make this post insanely long, but you really have to think about what kinds of actions you want your characters making. For example let’s look at the Legionnaire I have in the front with Amalia.

While Legionnaires do very much have the ability to attack, I have made it so this particular one will not focus on attacking at all. I want them to use all their resources to simply focus on keeping the rest of the unit alive, I don’t want them ever attacking unless something very odd has happened and they are the only one left to attack. I did this by moving around their abilities and placing them in the order of importance. With each turn the Legionnaire has it will basically go down this list and hopefully the battle will be won before they ever have to use any of these attacks like Sting. Now for some skills, namely Passive ones, a character won’t always need to wait for it to be their turn to activate them. Looking at the Legionnaire still, the Passive skill Guardian activates after the Legionnaire has been hit by an attack and will keep activating each time they are hit until they run out of Passive Points. Now, that might be a problem for the set up you want! You might want the Legionnaire to always be ready to use Row Cover which needs at least two Passive Points to use. So how do you make sure that happens? Well that brings us perfectly to another super important part for building units…

The Conditions!

While the game does a decent job at setting up characters and their skills, you are quickly going to realize that there are times when you don’t want a character using a specific skill until the time is just right. Let’s look at Nina, a Breaker, I have set up here for a good example.

The way I have her set up is so that she will mainly be using the attack Assaulting Blow, an attack that gives her the Active Point she spend on said attack back if she manages to kill the enemy with it. Now to make sure she has the best chance of killing an enemy with this attack, I gave her the condition to go for the enemy with the lowest health thus giving her a better chance of killing them! However, there is one skill I’d prefer her to use before Assaulting Blow but only sometimes. That skill being Row Smash. As you probably guessed, it’s an attack that will hit all enemies in a single row. However! There’s a problem with this. Without any conditions and with the skills set in this order with Row Smash being above Assaulting Blow, Nina will use Row Smash even if there is just one enemy left in that row. In that instance I would rather her use Assaulting Blow. To make sure she does, I have given Row Smash the condition that it should only be used if the enemy row has two or more enemies in it. So when it comes to Nina’s turn to attack, she’ll now do Assaulting Blow over Row Smash when there is just one enemy left in the row. This can be super useful for helping her save her Active Points, since Row Smash uses two, for if the enemy’s back row still has plenty of people in it.

This truly became one of my favorite parts of the game. I spent hours happily testing units and setting up conditions to make them work just right. And while that might sound really annoying, and it can be when things don’t work right, it was always extremely rewarding when I finally got a unit to work perfectly! It actually reminded me a lot of coding, something I haven’t done much of beyond taking a couple of beginner classes on it but still! The trouble shooting puzzle solving aspect of it gave me very similar feelings and that’s a good thing. While I didn’t enjoy coding enough to keep learning it, I will always remember that joy of getting a code to work how it should and that is the exact feeling Unicorn Overlord gives me with this!

Now while this might all sound super overwhelming, it’s really not. As I was saying before, Unicorn Overlord is great at constantly introducing new things to the player at a steady pace and this includes the deeper mechanics like adding conditions to certain skills. You’re not going to be expected to learn this stuff right from the get go, you’ll learn plenty before then so that this stuff isn’t at all scary. Trust me, I am someone who would have totally turned away from this kind of system if it was just thrown at me but I ended up falling in love with it! I actually would stop using some of my more over powered units because I much preferred making new ones to see what I could come up with. And while I don’t think I made any perfect units, even with all the time I put in Amalia’s unit I’m sure there are better options for her, I felt so much satisfaction when I made them work!

And that’s why I want people to play this game and give it a try! It is such a satisfying experience wrapped up in a down right beautiful game. You probably noticed with the screen shots I’ve been showing that Unicorn Overlord is gorgeous! These kinds of hand drawn visuals is what Vanillaware is known for and they are here in full force. That and the absurdly delicious looking food they make…

I should also mention that despite all I talked about, I really just scratched the surface when it came to the combat. I didn’t talk about the Valor Points you can use to help your units between battles, all the crazy stuff that can happen on the battle fields themselves, and the insane number of different character classes! I mainly wanted to focus on what I found to be the most fun aspects of the game and focus on those since that’s what I felt passionate about. Hopefully that passion showed and got some of you interested in checking out the game for yourself! Speaking of which, if you are at all interested there is a demo available on every system Unicorn Overlord is playable on and it’s great! It literally lets you play the full game for like 5 hours and then you can carry your progress over to the main game. Highly recommend it if you are at all curious about checking it out.

And once again, I hope some of you are curious about it! I don’t want this fantastic game to be another Vanillaware game to fly under the radar, because as of right now, this is easily my favorite game of 2024 and I just want more people to experience the same joy and satisfaction that I did.

But those are just my thoughts, what are some of yours? Are you into tactical RPGs? Are you interested in checking out Unicorn Overlord after this? I’d love to hear your thoughts so don’t be shy!

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