Unicorn Overlord

2026-03-08
Alain leaves a trail of tears and crumbs in his wake. His cavernous mouth inhaling staggering amounts of Smoked Nuts and Hot Cross Buns to fuel him with the infinite stamina required to steamroll any enemy in his path. Unicorn Overlord has approximately one million different classes all with different abilities meant to slot into cleverly devised and precise team combinations to counter the infinite permutations found on the battlefield. I only need one class: Smoked Nuts Boy aka Alain. Every enemy provides me with more gold to buy more Smoked Nuts and more Experience to continue his ascent to godhood.

In the game he is forever enshrined as a pretty anime prince but in my mind he is a corpulent, flatulent monster, his fatty mass hanging off the sides of his monstrous mount as he swings a sword cleaving men in twain with one hand while the other hand shovels nut after nut into his royal maw.

I can tell at times the designers have made levels where they've carefully laid challenges at my feet. A level where you can choose to side with Bear Man Army or Wolf Man Army OR fight BOTH armies because that's the challenging but morally good path. Despite the decadence inherent to his character Smoked Nuts Boy fancies himself moral so he takes on the tag-team. The prompt at the start explains that I really need to play smart because I can't possibly just kill off two entire armies. I select Alain and then select the boss. The juggernaut has launched and nothing will stop it. There is no strategy, there is no challenge, there is only summoning the beast via the flashing red "Deploy" button, and unleashing the beast at the already doomed enemy. The fact that there are two armies just means I do this twice.

And really that's the main complaint I'd levy at Unicorn Overlord: it gives you a ton of tools you'll never really need. Sixty classes to choose from each with strengths and weaknesses versus the other sixty classes, a hundred items to customize units' stats and movesets, an infinite number of 5-unit groups you can put all these units into, and then on top of it all the absurd min-maxing of a whole FFXII programming feature where you can define the logic your characters use in combat. But you don't really need any of it. I quickly found a decent team comp, realized making all my leaders knights was enough so they can finish levels as quickly as possible, and then spent the next twenty hours slamming the Skip button to auto-resolve every battle.

In fact, for initially presenting as a complicated strategy RPG it pretty much turned into a map clearing, brain-turn-off game. In the best way possible. The way you slowly expand across the map capturing towns, upgrading them, doing side quests to get better gear, painting the map in the blue hues of Freedom, feels like this wonderful mixture of Advance Wars--in how your beautifully rendered sprites do battle--and Civilization--in how you slowly paint the map in your chosen color. It might not be challenging but it is fun.

My other complaint is that the story is generic fantasy doggerel. Which is wild, considering Vanillaware's last game, 13 Sentinels, had an incredibly fun and complex time-traveling narrative, chock full of endearing and interesting characters. Here it's just another fantasy tale of Good Prince must defeat Evil Emperor replete with elves and wizards and knights. And then there's the fact that there are like 50 recruitable characters. And each one needs to have their little origin story and resolution. The result is that you're basically being strobe-lighted with INTRO-CONFRONTATION-RESOLUTION, INTRO-CONFRONTATION-RESOLUTION over and over and over. I might have been interested the first couple of times but after the tenth one I think I just started having petit mal seizures because I don't remember any of them.

And yet for all my myriad whingings, I still scoured Unicorn Overlord for a platinum in 36 hours. It's the mixture of the still excellent (but decidedly less horny) Vanillaware art and admittedly over-complicated but still quite fun loop of clearing the map with your merry band of heroes. What's here isn't pushing the boundary in gameplay or story-telling, but sometimes it's nice to sit down, inhale a gallon of Smoked Nuts, and send Alain the Masticator to smother evil anime baddies with his massive ass.