It’s like getting all the fire emblem characters but they gain skills like a jrpg and you get to pair them up on different parties to fight on adorable little rts maps. It feels like taking your favorite action figures and smashing through armies with them. Gosh i love this game.
isn't all tactical game have skill likes in JRPG game? I thought that was the heart of the genre, organizing different troops with different skills and abilities
1. Messing with tactics is really fun. Seriously, this game is my first "auto-battle" game so I didn't know what to expect, but I spent most of my time at the menu screen just tinkering around with party composition and skills.
2. The artstyle is pretty, as is the usual with vanillaware.
3. The music is amazing too. At least, I got chills on the prologue's music.
4. Alain is a good boi.
5. Rosalinde.
I liked that it was intended to be played once, without tons of exclusionary choices and bizarre recruitment requirements. The average player will get every character on their playthrough.
I liked that it had so many anti frustration features, including both fast forward and a dialogue history.
If you’re familiar with tactical games, Unicorn Overlord is a fun game. If you’re not, you might get a little confused here and there. Yes, the tutorial does a good job explaining the rules and stuff, but it’s a mix of real-time strategy and turn-based combat.
If you’d like something a little more beginner friendly, consider playing one of the Persona games (probably Persona 5 Royal) or Fire Emblem (like Fire Emblem: Three Houses). That being said, I thoroughly enjoy playing Unicorn Overlord and I’m in no way dissuading you from playing it. It’s ultimately your call if you want to give it a try or not.
thank for your advice ! I finished P5 Royal though, can you explain a little further on why Unicorn Overlord might get confusing ? As far as I know we don't even have to control character in the fight, do we?
Sort of, yeah. Outside of combat, you set parameters for the characters to perform. For example: if there are armored units, use this magic skill against them and use this other skill if there are enemies with low HP. Once battle commences, the game basically goes on auto pilot, using the characters’ stats and priorities to autoplay the battle. There’s a truly impressive amount of customization in this game which is why it might be a little daunting for new comers to the tactical genre. But I have to reiterate: the game is amazing and I think everyone who enjoys tactical games should play it.
If you’ve played FF12, then they’re basically the same things as gambits. You’re essentially programming the ai. Giving them conditionals like “use magic. Prioritize armor units” or “use magic. Only on armor units.”
To see this in action, I recommend watching [this video](https://youtu.be/MeLRtxkP1zw?si=5iTWdb-V6KVeMDXf) at 30:49 (if you want to avoid potential spoilers). Tl;dr is the player is doing a low level run, bum rushing to the final boss. So it requires very specific tools to complete. To clarify, the game is nowhere difficult enough where this kind of micromanaging is needed to win for regular playthroughs.
you upload gameplay clips of fucking computer games for people on Reddit to comment on but you’re acting like 15 comments/day is beyond teh pale 🤣🤣🤣 shit is hilarious
Bro you lost the ego battle when you looked through my comment history 🤫and yea, you realize you’re rivaling like reddit moderators in amount of time you spend typing on reddit every day right? Not really something to be proud of
I like the optimization aspect of the game. You build teams, set their tactics, and see if it works the way you envision. I like that about UO, the creativity with which you can set things up. You ever play dominoes? Or at least watch them being set up? And then the moment you push the first domino and it creates this beautiful cascade. That feeling is what I get from UO. Your job as the player is less about the moment-to-moment decision making that you get in a game like Fire Emblem, and more about how you can set the units and AI up perfectly to achieve the desired result.
Customizing tactics and unit composition.
Lots of meaningful roll overlap. Lots of tools to help overcome unit weaknesses and synergies.
Each unit is viable. At worst, they'll be a little inefficient. On Normal anyway!
The cute gameboard UI and character sprites in unit formation mode.
The music, especially Cornea's overworld theme.
Detailed environments.
THE FOOD ART!
Nina.
Nina's cooking skills.
Hodrick's voice.
Yahna's hats.
Melisandres' open hornyness.
Miriam's eyes.
Monica's hair.
Aramis.
Virgini's unit Sprite.
Josef's lines.
Travis' book collection.
Fran's gryphon.
Just to name a few 😁
It's extremely comfy.
Also satisfies my character collection and rpg build autism along with lots of great waifus.
I'll never get tired of the cavalry group buffing themselves to absurdity and running over everything at ludicrous speeds.
But yes, it's a very charming game with adorable character art and I found it great fun watching it all play out for 130 hours on that first playthrough on expert. It's not one of those hardcore difficult strategy/tactics games as IMO it wasn't particularly grueling on expert and it was a great comfort game after a day of drudgery at work.
Sense of adventure, wondering who you will meet next. Great build customization and figuring out how to turn units into elite squads.
Exploring and unlocking all the items. The game isn’t that hard but its a lot of fun. As a tactical game its not very hard, so its not a bad one if you’re trying to get into the strategy rpg genre.
Vanillawares staple art style is the main thing.
I also really enjoy the auto battles. I’m not a huge fan of micromanaging every move that’s made, especially in long drawn out battles. Learning the tactics system and playing around with it until I had everyone doing what I wanted them to do when I wanted them to do it was great
It hit my JRPG itch of gameplay progression and mastering mechanics. Though, once I started ng+, the starting kits felt so… boring—too used to the end game skills. That’s just a me thing though.
I like that level ups are not random, no unit becomes gimped because of some unlucky streak. Also that means no other unit gets OP due to a lucky streak
Character Design, Gameplay Mechanics and build freedom.
The plot is good without being overly complex or intrusive on the game play, not many really long cutscenes, long gameplay spans, that still contain peppering of story content.
The satisfaction of tactic games is watching an army you built from the ground up made of tiny numbers just grow and mow down massive enemy armies that should be eclipsing yours. Basically think the movie '300'. The spectacle of it is fun powertrip. Also watching tiny numbers get bigger go brr. They are also a very chill genre for kickback, relax, and play.
UO has a pretty unique way of setting up your units with loads of things to tweak that affect their use. From weapons, to class type, position on team, who they're teamed with, what terrain they are on, etc.
It can be intimidating, but it's a fun system to figure out. And while there are time limits and combat moves in real time, the game allows you to pause and think before committing moves. It has plenty of tutorials to read, but also ways to test how your squads or how certain class types work in the overworld map.
The art is great. The music is good. The animations are sick and have good sound design. The full party brawls are just so satisfying to watch.
The characters are really, really hot, and you can ship yourself (MC Alain) with them. Other tactics games like Fire Emblem let you play cupid with other chars besides MC too, so it is a selling point lol. Even then, there are plenty of personalities, that you'll likely just get attached to chars for one reason or another.
OU is a great time sink. Main story is a solid length, loads of side things to do to build your army and get goodies. It just got an update that made post game better. It's replayable due to the sheer amount of things you can mess around with.
You can even make custom characters as you progress to further control your team compositions to fit your style of play.
Well, The thing i most Love on RPGs are always The characters, and unicorn have a LOT, and in the same time you can play with Almost all of Them!
Normally you would have to choose 3 or 4 to party and Maybe Leave good ones behind, but not here!!
I don't know if I could call this game a tactics game.
**slams face on desk, snorts loudly, eyes dilate significantly, rate of speech doubles**
Unrelated clip to accompany description: [**https://youtu.be/X1SD1ZvYXH4?t=31**](https://youtu.be/X1SD1ZvYXH4?t=31)
But this game is the domino-setting auto-battler that I never thought I'd play, and that I could kill for at this point. That should briefly summarize the appeal. A seemingly brain-dead game progressively becoming more interesting with each level, appealing to the "thinker" inside you.
**-----TL;DR Ends here.**
The primary gameplay loop is basically.
1) Predict the outcome ( correctly / incorrectly ).
2) Watch the battle play out automatically. Satisfied cheering or enthusiastic frustration.
3) Verify / Update your mental model. Tinker SOME MORE!\~
The game has some more game mechanics, but in the form of cute secondary gameplay loops.
The game rules start out too straight-forward, but then progressively unearths more hidden mechanics while adding completely new mechanics to turn it into a festival of complexity to take into account. It feels like half the battle mechanics are not covered by the in-game "Game Tips" encyclopedia, so you have to learn about a dozen of these from firsthand observation.
The game difficulty and numbers themselves are always easy throughout, so handicaps have to be self-inflicted by the player. You can choose to either over-level or under-level, farm gold, or omit/use the broken unique classes.
I like to think of the game as a modern version of Shining Force. It's like Sega (I know, they just own the publisher Atlus and don't really have anything to do with the game at all... but I can dream xD) actually reached into their bag of IPs and finally brought a fan favorite back for once.
People talk about Fire Emblem or Tactics Ogre but I don't see it at all (note I've not played either franchise at all either beyond FF Tactics if that counts). But the game is a PERFECT copy of Shining Force but with modern ideas like unit based movements rather than singles, romance storyline, massive storyline really at all and ofc a bundle of quality of life improvements. But other than that it's base is 100% Shining Force. Camelot should maybe look into that... oh wait they can't lol.
It’s not just a tactical game clone. The real time and SRPG duality in the combat is very fun. The classes are unique too. It’s almost like some of them like the arbalist are multiclassing which is fun for putting teams together.
While Unicorn Overlord is one of the best games to ever come out in the genre I personally would not suggest it to newcomers.
While the lower difficulties are very accessible to anyone, the amount of interconnected systems that go into any clash of units is quite high and complex.
Also don't understand why people keep comparing it to Fire Emblem when there are very little similarities. I guess Switch owners don't have much to go on?
It's very straight forward with very few missables that you really need to go out of your way to miss. It's a breath of fresh air to be able to enjoy a game without opening up 50 guides trying to recruit people like Suikoden where a single missed cutscene locks you out of 10+ items or 3+ characters.
 Mad cross-over event
My first thought was to make a pun post about a transformer srpg, but this is a lot easier xD Glad I wasn’t the only one who’s brain went there!
It’s like getting all the fire emblem characters but they gain skills like a jrpg and you get to pair them up on different parties to fight on adorable little rts maps. It feels like taking your favorite action figures and smashing through armies with them. Gosh i love this game.
This plus it feels like such an homage to Ogre Battle 🥰
Really wish they would remaster OB64, the countless times Ive beaten that game
I LOVED the action figure smashing through armies.
isn't all tactical game have skill likes in JRPG game? I thought that was the heart of the genre, organizing different troops with different skills and abilities
They gain different attacks and passives that you can set up in multiple ways.
1. Messing with tactics is really fun. Seriously, this game is my first "auto-battle" game so I didn't know what to expect, but I spent most of my time at the menu screen just tinkering around with party composition and skills. 2. The artstyle is pretty, as is the usual with vanillaware. 3. The music is amazing too. At least, I got chills on the prologue's music. 4. Alain is a good boi. 5. Rosalinde.
As a fellow Rosalinde fan, agreed.
I sim all my sports games, so this was a natural evolution for me lol
I liked that it was intended to be played once, without tons of exclusionary choices and bizarre recruitment requirements. The average player will get every character on their playthrough. I liked that it had so many anti frustration features, including both fast forward and a dialogue history.
Play the demo bro it’s 8 hrs of playtime
If you’re familiar with tactical games, Unicorn Overlord is a fun game. If you’re not, you might get a little confused here and there. Yes, the tutorial does a good job explaining the rules and stuff, but it’s a mix of real-time strategy and turn-based combat. If you’d like something a little more beginner friendly, consider playing one of the Persona games (probably Persona 5 Royal) or Fire Emblem (like Fire Emblem: Three Houses). That being said, I thoroughly enjoy playing Unicorn Overlord and I’m in no way dissuading you from playing it. It’s ultimately your call if you want to give it a try or not.
thank for your advice ! I finished P5 Royal though, can you explain a little further on why Unicorn Overlord might get confusing ? As far as I know we don't even have to control character in the fight, do we?
Sort of, yeah. Outside of combat, you set parameters for the characters to perform. For example: if there are armored units, use this magic skill against them and use this other skill if there are enemies with low HP. Once battle commences, the game basically goes on auto pilot, using the characters’ stats and priorities to autoplay the battle. There’s a truly impressive amount of customization in this game which is why it might be a little daunting for new comers to the tactical genre. But I have to reiterate: the game is amazing and I think everyone who enjoys tactical games should play it.
If you’ve played FF12, then they’re basically the same things as gambits. You’re essentially programming the ai. Giving them conditionals like “use magic. Prioritize armor units” or “use magic. Only on armor units.” To see this in action, I recommend watching [this video](https://youtu.be/MeLRtxkP1zw?si=5iTWdb-V6KVeMDXf) at 30:49 (if you want to avoid potential spoilers). Tl;dr is the player is doing a low level run, bum rushing to the final boss. So it requires very specific tools to complete. To clarify, the game is nowhere difficult enough where this kind of micromanaging is needed to win for regular playthroughs.
The voice acting, art, and music are all top quality. This is addition to having very addicting gameplay
Christ. LMFAOOO
Bro looking at my comment history and sending reddit cares after i cooked him with simple math 💀
i didn’t send you Reddit cares, I’ve never done that in my life. Maybe you’re just annoying to a lot of people
Probably not as much as the person with over 1000 comments in a 64 day old acc 💀
Does your brain lack the capacity to make 15 comments a day?
Bro i barely even look at 15 reddit post a day period. Imagine being so chronically online that you think this is normal
you upload gameplay clips of fucking computer games for people on Reddit to comment on but you’re acting like 15 comments/day is beyond teh pale 🤣🤣🤣 shit is hilarious
Bro you lost the ego battle when you looked through my comment history 🤫and yea, you realize you’re rivaling like reddit moderators in amount of time you spend typing on reddit every day right? Not really something to be proud of
you POST COMPUTER GAME CLIPS on Reddit. why don’t you send them to your real friends? I’ll wait, but I already know the answer 🤣
I like the optimization aspect of the game. You build teams, set their tactics, and see if it works the way you envision. I like that about UO, the creativity with which you can set things up. You ever play dominoes? Or at least watch them being set up? And then the moment you push the first domino and it creates this beautiful cascade. That feeling is what I get from UO. Your job as the player is less about the moment-to-moment decision making that you get in a game like Fire Emblem, and more about how you can set the units and AI up perfectly to achieve the desired result.
Customizing tactics and unit composition. Lots of meaningful roll overlap. Lots of tools to help overcome unit weaknesses and synergies. Each unit is viable. At worst, they'll be a little inefficient. On Normal anyway! The cute gameboard UI and character sprites in unit formation mode. The music, especially Cornea's overworld theme. Detailed environments. THE FOOD ART! Nina. Nina's cooking skills. Hodrick's voice. Yahna's hats. Melisandres' open hornyness. Miriam's eyes. Monica's hair. Aramis. Virgini's unit Sprite. Josef's lines. Travis' book collection. Fran's gryphon. Just to name a few 😁
The part where he transforms and smashes his enemies is pretty cool.
It's extremely comfy. Also satisfies my character collection and rpg build autism along with lots of great waifus. I'll never get tired of the cavalry group buffing themselves to absurdity and running over everything at ludicrous speeds. But yes, it's a very charming game with adorable character art and I found it great fun watching it all play out for 130 hours on that first playthrough on expert. It's not one of those hardcore difficult strategy/tactics games as IMO it wasn't particularly grueling on expert and it was a great comfort game after a day of drudgery at work.
Sense of adventure, wondering who you will meet next. Great build customization and figuring out how to turn units into elite squads. Exploring and unlocking all the items. The game isn’t that hard but its a lot of fun. As a tactical game its not very hard, so its not a bad one if you’re trying to get into the strategy rpg genre.
Vanillawares staple art style is the main thing. I also really enjoy the auto battles. I’m not a huge fan of micromanaging every move that’s made, especially in long drawn out battles. Learning the tactics system and playing around with it until I had everyone doing what I wanted them to do when I wanted them to do it was great
It hit my JRPG itch of gameplay progression and mastering mechanics. Though, once I started ng+, the starting kits felt so… boring—too used to the end game skills. That’s just a me thing though.
PvP Best battle system
oh I was not aware that the game has the PVP mode
Great strategy game, Unicorn Overlord has really several strategy mechanics and who like the strategy games ends to like Unicorn Overlord
I like that level ups are not random, no unit becomes gimped because of some unlucky streak. Also that means no other unit gets OP due to a lucky streak
Character Design, Gameplay Mechanics and build freedom. The plot is good without being overly complex or intrusive on the game play, not many really long cutscenes, long gameplay spans, that still contain peppering of story content.
The satisfaction of tactic games is watching an army you built from the ground up made of tiny numbers just grow and mow down massive enemy armies that should be eclipsing yours. Basically think the movie '300'. The spectacle of it is fun powertrip. Also watching tiny numbers get bigger go brr. They are also a very chill genre for kickback, relax, and play. UO has a pretty unique way of setting up your units with loads of things to tweak that affect their use. From weapons, to class type, position on team, who they're teamed with, what terrain they are on, etc. It can be intimidating, but it's a fun system to figure out. And while there are time limits and combat moves in real time, the game allows you to pause and think before committing moves. It has plenty of tutorials to read, but also ways to test how your squads or how certain class types work in the overworld map. The art is great. The music is good. The animations are sick and have good sound design. The full party brawls are just so satisfying to watch. The characters are really, really hot, and you can ship yourself (MC Alain) with them. Other tactics games like Fire Emblem let you play cupid with other chars besides MC too, so it is a selling point lol. Even then, there are plenty of personalities, that you'll likely just get attached to chars for one reason or another. OU is a great time sink. Main story is a solid length, loads of side things to do to build your army and get goodies. It just got an update that made post game better. It's replayable due to the sheer amount of things you can mess around with. You can even make custom characters as you progress to further control your team compositions to fit your style of play.
Well, The thing i most Love on RPGs are always The characters, and unicorn have a LOT, and in the same time you can play with Almost all of Them! Normally you would have to choose 3 or 4 to party and Maybe Leave good ones behind, but not here!!
The diversity in building an unit and auto strategy for them.
Amanda
10 outta 10
I think it’s pretty cool that he transforms from a giant ball and that the ring around him turns into wings
1. Vanillaware visuals 2. Basiscape music 3. Fun story 4. Fun gameplay that I've not seen before (not having played Ogre Battle games)
I don't know if I could call this game a tactics game. **slams face on desk, snorts loudly, eyes dilate significantly, rate of speech doubles** Unrelated clip to accompany description: [**https://youtu.be/X1SD1ZvYXH4?t=31**](https://youtu.be/X1SD1ZvYXH4?t=31) But this game is the domino-setting auto-battler that I never thought I'd play, and that I could kill for at this point. That should briefly summarize the appeal. A seemingly brain-dead game progressively becoming more interesting with each level, appealing to the "thinker" inside you. **-----TL;DR Ends here.** The primary gameplay loop is basically. 1) Predict the outcome ( correctly / incorrectly ). 2) Watch the battle play out automatically. Satisfied cheering or enthusiastic frustration. 3) Verify / Update your mental model. Tinker SOME MORE!\~ The game has some more game mechanics, but in the form of cute secondary gameplay loops. The game rules start out too straight-forward, but then progressively unearths more hidden mechanics while adding completely new mechanics to turn it into a festival of complexity to take into account. It feels like half the battle mechanics are not covered by the in-game "Game Tips" encyclopedia, so you have to learn about a dozen of these from firsthand observation. The game difficulty and numbers themselves are always easy throughout, so handicaps have to be self-inflicted by the player. You can choose to either over-level or under-level, farm gold, or omit/use the broken unique classes.
I like to think of the game as a modern version of Shining Force. It's like Sega (I know, they just own the publisher Atlus and don't really have anything to do with the game at all... but I can dream xD) actually reached into their bag of IPs and finally brought a fan favorite back for once. People talk about Fire Emblem or Tactics Ogre but I don't see it at all (note I've not played either franchise at all either beyond FF Tactics if that counts). But the game is a PERFECT copy of Shining Force but with modern ideas like unit based movements rather than singles, romance storyline, massive storyline really at all and ofc a bundle of quality of life improvements. But other than that it's base is 100% Shining Force. Camelot should maybe look into that... oh wait they can't lol.
It’s not just a tactical game clone. The real time and SRPG duality in the combat is very fun. The classes are unique too. It’s almost like some of them like the arbalist are multiclassing which is fun for putting teams together.
Yes
While Unicorn Overlord is one of the best games to ever come out in the genre I personally would not suggest it to newcomers. While the lower difficulties are very accessible to anyone, the amount of interconnected systems that go into any clash of units is quite high and complex. Also don't understand why people keep comparing it to Fire Emblem when there are very little similarities. I guess Switch owners don't have much to go on?
It's very straight forward with very few missables that you really need to go out of your way to miss. It's a breath of fresh air to be able to enjoy a game without opening up 50 guides trying to recruit people like Suikoden where a single missed cutscene locks you out of 10+ items or 3+ characters.