Unicorn Overlord

I randomly found out about this game yesterday, and I'm hooked in a way I haven't been hooked by a video game for many years, it's a Japanese RPG / Strategy game with gorgeous Octopath Traveller style 2d / fake 3d type graphics, amazing voice acting and very nice music. It's being released by Atlus games, for all consoles (not pc for some reason). I played it on PS5.



The way I would describe it is it's a cross between Octopath Traveler, Final Fatasy 1-3 and maybe Civilization (except you don't control armies, but champions and battle takes place in a different viewpoint). There are probably better ways to describe it, but I have little experience in the JP rpg/strategy type genre. It has a great story, a vast array of races (including wolf people, literal angels, owl people, elves and many more) and lots of great characters. Although it's a strategy / rpg game it's not overly complicated and has an amazingly good tutorial system that teaches you how to play it in the first hour or so.

It's a story based game, where the objective is to take back the lands of your people from a warlord that has taken over and uses mind control over many of the worlds great champions to do so. The story starts as the Queen (your mother) is asking her bodyguard to take her son and escape with him, as the warlord is about to overrun her castle. You fight as the Queen and her champions against them as a distraction and ultimately fall, the story then shifts 10 years into the future and you are Alain the prince with a handful of allies.



The world is divided into sections, and you battle in each section to take control and build your strength as a fighting force. When you attempt to take back a section, the game swaps to pure strategy with movement points, attack phases, objectives etc. When you win a section, you can free roam them all in a relaxing way and do quests, do supply runs, talk to characters, buy things from shops etc. This swap between strategy and free roam breaks the gameplay up, so it doesn't become tedious. In the strategy sections, when you engage a unit with one of your groups (each group has a set number of characters in it and numerous teams), it swaps to a side view battle and your champions can be of numerous job types including healers, casters, tanks, mounted champions, ranger, evasion thieves etc



It has character leveling, you can equip and buy gear for your champions (and yourself), you can recruit more champions in various ways, you can break the mind control over champions and bring them to your side. It also has numerous choice systems, where you can make decisions that impact characters and the story.



When I downloaded the demo it was purely because the art style looked so good, I thought it was originally an RPG or something and was initially disappointed. However I very quickly got sucked in and was playing it till 5am last night, it's a great game and the demo is very generous (5 hours play of the full game).

It's literally an evolution of Ogre Battle's gameplay from the 90s. Which is awesome. Very glad this type of gameplay is seeing a renaissance.

The story's pretty boilerplate so far, carried hard by the exceptional localization. Some of the female character designs are ultra sexualized garbage, typical of Vanillaware, which is unfortunate.

Overall I'm very excited for it. The Switch demo is 2-3 hours longer than the PS one, FYI, and is still 60 FPS.

This sound track is awesome, there are many others too.

I think I saw this during one of those console expositions last year and it looked really cool. I don't think it's on PC though, so I might have to wait for a while.

Vanillaware doesn't put their games on PC unfortunately.

You have to think why devs add female characters like this to their games.

They do it because it works to sell a game (or a car, or a aftershave or whatever) and makes people like the game more (due to association), men like looking at pretty and sexy women. Not only do we like it but we are hard wired to like looking at it (it's not a failing for a man to look at / head turn to a pretty / sexy woman, we are coded to be this way through evolution), as in our brains release dopamine when we do it. Which is why it's so hard to not look at a girls *** if she bends over infront of you or walks past you with a nice rack and she has them on display with a low cut top, even expert trained non lookers are level 99 peripheral vision masters in this situation.

As such it makes sense to do this in your video game and is actually stupid and self defeating to not do it, not only does it undoubtedly get the game more attention initially but men like to look at it. Why would you not do something that works and makes the vast majority of your customers happy? Even the majority of women have no real problem with this, and at worst they will laugh at fan service.

An argument could be made that "modern men" don't like it, however what that usually means is a) men in western nations in very specific places who use social media and want to virtue signal how they don't fit the norm of what men naturally are (look ladies, I'm different! *^-^*), men who have a daughter and get super weird and feel the need to now virtue signal to the world they don't like sexuality at all anymore, men who have a girlfriend who is annoyed by it cause she is insecure and they pander to them and pretend to hate it too, streamers who want content to put family friendly adverts on it and an even smaller number of actual puritans that are offended by a titty and want women to not be able to wear a bathing suit on a beach.

So not adding pretty / sexy women to a video game is a win towards a tiny fraction of vocal men in specific locations (basically twitter where a tiny fraction of people appear much larger, that does not represent reality), at the cost of hurting sales to the silent majority worldwide.

There is obviously a scale where something moves from fan-service to porn, and this isn't that to the vast majority of normal people. Also with skillful manipulation you can even turn porn into acceptable, see baldurs gate.

The actual argument here is that game companies should not do something that will provably make the game sell better and make the game more loved by the target audience (if dopamine is released when a man is looking at a character in your game, that dopamine release will now be linked to the game, duh) purely to pander to the ideology that "men looking at women is bad" or "unrealistic standards". Even though there is no proof that this is does anything negative to society and is just purely natural male behavior (men like to look at it and most women like to show it off, cause that's how our brains are wired and release dopamine for doing both of these things), and that most women will sexualize themselves happily anyway if they have the goods to show (just goto any gym and you'll see far tiddy and *** than in any game in about 5 mins), so all men will still see it everywhere you will see women anyway (irl and on twitch, youtube).

Expecting game devs to not do something their audience will like is as stupid as telling a store to not put sugar on a doughnut, cause everyone knows they want sugar on it. Ultimately this only works in places where you can shame the developers to not do it on because they use social media too much, and since this is not really a thing in Japan at the same level (outside of super progressive companies like Square Enix with their ethics dept where it is top down enforced) it's not going to work. Cause they know it works and they know their fans want it and they know the people who complain are a tiny minority, which is why it's called fan service in the first place.

Ultimately the crusade many progressive (and religious) men have against fan service is utterly stupid. It kind of reeks of back in the day when aggressively straight men would get outraged if they saw a man with his shirt off in a video game or movie, and we all know why they got so mad about that.



The game itself says it best.

I am not touching that incel rant with a ten foot pole, bro. lmao

oh, *** yeah, new Vanillaware game

If you haven't played 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, and you like sci-fi at all, you should. Don't look anything up about it, go in as blind as you possibly can

SOOOON, THE UNICORN COMETH


This, so much. Extra emphasis on looking up NOTHING about the game.

I'm a seriously jaded in regards modern games and I love this game so much, I'm not a fan of Vanillaware (this is the first game I've played of theirs) or these kinds of games (ogre battle and final fantasy tactics?) and went into the demo not even knowing what kind of game it was but just being enamored by the art style after seeing an ad for it on youtube.

I quickly got hooked into it to a ridiculous degree, the demo is so good and I love it and would encourage anyone to try it even if you don't like strategy games (the tutorial is so good it can teach anyone to play it easily). The demo is a free download on all the console stores and it's coming out in a few days.

I haven't felt this way about a game since Nier Automata.

Excellent. I missed it on accident and am perfectly setup to enjoy it based on recommendations.

I wish they would bring this out for PC, the game is doing very well in Japan but not as well in the west because it's a better fit for PC. It's a shame because it's such a wonderful game, and many are missing out on it.

I'm still playing it, I love it. I have over 100 hours into it and I'm about 2/3 through the game. Utterly addicted to the game.

Love all the characters, the romance / rapport system, the unit building aspect where you put characters in units and find the best builds, the min maxing of gear for each unit, the exploration, the graphics, the music.

looks nice

beat this game twice already on expert and super difficult, great game. didn't pay attention to the story tbh, just enjoyed the gameplay

To he honest nothing will ever beat tactics ogre

I hated the idea of the gameplay at first but the gambit system and how you can build your characters to perform how you want is really addicting once you get into it tho.





I love the story and setting personally, it's my main drive to play the game.


Try the demo maybe.

Finally finished it after 150+ hours, amazing game. Love everything about it, they even did the endings in a really nice way.

One of the best games I've played for a long time, nice to play a game that the developers were so obviously passionate about and wasn't just a cash grab like most things we play these days.

the art is kinda ***very basic big eye circle head nice hair

One problem these days is mobile gaming has flooded the world with 2d art style games and that has devalued them, I felt it myself when I first tried it on the battle screen but it quickly grew on me since the put a huge amount of effort into them.

this is like tactics ogre / FFT?