I write about games for a living (lucky me, right?) and as much of a dream as that is, it has some downsides. If you can believe it. One of them is that I often don’t find games very stimulating or motivating. When you need to play something that’s not exactly to your taste as often as once a week to ensure you’re covering it correctly, you often find yourself engaging ‘work’ brain, rather than ‘fun’ brain. Pumping 50 hours into CoD in a week can be rough when you also need to spend a lot of the 9-to-5 editing, running meetings, generating reports, or yelling to colleagues about Google’s baffling new Core Update.
Unicorn Overlord, which launched back in March this year, felt like a balm. It is perhaps the most motivating game I have played in years. Once I picked it up to preview, and got my review copy shortly after, I easily dumped 100 hours into it within two weeks. I played it in bed, I played it on my travels, I played it whilst waiting in line for a gig. It broke the curse of ‘the so-so work game’ I had gotten into my head, and it made my life better as a result.
So, how to sum up Unicorn Overlord? It’s like a premium meal at a fancy restaurant you can only afford to eat at once a year; it’s glossy, it’s rich, it’s sumptuous. It’s a bit off-beat, maybe not the sort of thing you’d find yourself making at home or eating in other, lesser-renowned places. But it does what it does well; a fusion dish, somehow combining cosy elements with unusual flavours that just sing on the palette.
It’s a tactical RPG that can sorta ‘play itself’. It makes you feel like a proper commander of a small army; the onus is more on recruitment, management, and deployment, rather than actual battling. It takes the best bits of the Final Fantasy 12 Gambit System, and smushes it together with the best bits of the Tactics Ogre series, whilst liberally nicking ideas from Fire Emblem.
In fact, it’s all very 1990s. It even summons whispers of Langrisser and Shining Force. But Vanillaware, in its now-trademark way, remixes the tropes and expectations you have for the genre and spits out something altogether unique. I’ve never played a game that feels like Unicorn Overlord, really, and therein lies the charm
Take the combat flow, for example. If you want, you can skip every single battle. The stats and the moment-to-moment gameplay is worked out in a spreadsheet, concealed from view. You can spend hours min/maxing your characters, selecting your squads, and sending your allied units into battle, knowing that they can trample any fool that dares come underfoot. But that’s not really the point of the game, is it?
Instead, like in Fire Emblem, there’s a degree of player-directed storytelling in making characters team up and fight. Seeing their interactions and monitoring how their skills compliment or undercut each other is RPG catnip. It’s compelling. Nigh-addictive, even. Playing Unicorn Overlord on Switch, and trying to ‘perfect’ certain maps, I missed my stop on the Tube maybe eight times in a week. It’s consuming, really.
The joy – and the unique draw, for my money – of Unicorn Overlord is the way it makes you think about even the easiest engagements like they’re life or death. Play it on harder difficulties, and you will need to summon an intimate understanding of your whole army (you know, just like a real commander) if you want to have any chance of chiselling your way through the game.
You know it’s a good RPG, because you’ll find yourself mouthing ‘yes!’ to yourself if you manage to up your flying squad’s damage output by a paltry 5%. You’ll find yourself muttering ‘bastard’ if a 95% accuracy attack fails and you need to rethink, literally, your whole battle strategy for a given skirmish. Vanillaware deftly treads the line between challenge and reward, and if you choose to engage with the minutiae of the mechanics, you’ll find it’s one of the most dense and mechanically responsive RPG sandboxes in years. Seriously.
In a year packed to the gills with noteworthy RPGs, Unicorn Overlord has been Unicorn Over-looked (sorry). If you’re looking for something really special, and really unique, to get your teeth into this festive break, I’d recommend this even over my actual GOTY suggestion. It’s a perfect game to reset your brain ahead of the year to come.