If you've been reading here for a while, you know that I sooner, or later, I will always come back to talking about Ogre Battle 64. You'll also know that while I think it has a lot of flaws, I love it deeply. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how, if I were to get serious making video games, I'd love to make Ogre Battle 65. (You know, Ogre Battle 64, but one better...)
I was neither surprised nor excited when I first saw Unicorn Overlord in a Nintendo Direct. I wasn't paying that much attention and the name is dumb. So it was only later when I saw someone call it an Ogre-Battle-alike that I actually went to take a look.
It turns out, it's a modern Ogre Battle. It sands off most of the things I think make Ogre Battle flawed and plays up the things I really liked. It has some flaws of its own, but I am very happy when I'm playing it.
I have a few things I've thought about Unicorn Overlord (and some of them aren't even about how like Ogre Battle it is) and I've written them up below. Beware spoilers for the whole of Unicorn Overlord, and Ogre Battle too — really a warning about Ogre Battle spoilers should just be part of the header of the blog.
Things I Liked
The first thing I like about Unicorn Overlord, is that it *is* Ogre Battle and it works really well. One of my complaints about Ogre Battle is that it involves a lot of the computer walking while you sit around. You give a unit an order and then check Twitter and then a while later they show up where you wanted and a fight starts, and then if you set things up right, you win and go on to the next thing, which is maybe fighting the same unit again.
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Clive and friends are going to kick ass.
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In Unicorn Overlord, they've fixed that. Mostly through the magic of making the maps smaller and the units faster. I just started a second play through and they told me about the fast forward button, which is great, but I almost never wanted to speed up because I was already making decisions as fast as I could. If you're looking for Sid Meier's rule that "a game is made up of interesting decisions", having the game go faster means more interesting decisions.
The stamina system they chosen also works quite nicely with the smaller maps. A stronger unit might light out in front of everyone, but after five or six good fights, they'll need a rest and if someone isn't there to cover for them they'll get their buts kicked. It makes the system from Ogre Battle more discrete, less chaotic and once you understand it, easier to plan around. Also when you get tired you can eat hot cross buns and get 3 stamina back, and that's got to be better than eating energy fruit.
Unicorn Overlord also has a streamlined unit set up compared to Ogre Battle. You still put together soldiers into units, but the positioning matters much less. For one thing, your front always faces the enemy, as opposed to all of the side and back attacks that you had in Ogre Battle. This does reduce a bit of the fun of catching someone from behind and routing them, but it also makes the game much easier to understand. Units are organized into just a front row and a back row and there are a few benefits to each, but the overall complication is very low, while still being satisfying.
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The Knights of the Rose are also going to kick ass.
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The difficulty is still refined through solider placement. One of the first things the tutorial tells you is never to place a back-line unit directly behind a front-line unit because of the attacks that go straight through the front-line unit and hit whatever's behind them. Then they give you a spear that gives you that exact ability, and all of the enemy units line up in nice attack-throughable columns.
There is also a difficulty slider, and I'm not that sure what it does. I played on a lower difficulty to get started, and now I'm playing on a higher one and the difficulty has always felt good. As I often mention here, I'm not nearly as good at strategy games as my love of them would suggest, and I've been right in my happy place all along.
One other delightful thing I really appreciate is that you don't have to keep your hero alive. Prince Alain is welcome to be on the front lines and if you oops, that's great he can get resurrected just like every other solider in the game. That opens up your options and gives you more interesting ways to play.
All that being said, the best thing the Unicorn Overlord developers have done, is look at other strategy games and find the cruft they can remove. One example of this is in levelling. If you've played any Fire Emblem, you know that there are often promoted units hanging out with you low level units and stealing their experience points. If you're really familiar with the mechanics you can see that because they're so much stronger, they're taking the XP that lower level units need, but the first time out you often end up with a harder time later because you couldn't level up your units.
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Clive and friends win their fight.
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Here, all the soldiers in a unit share XP and if a soldier is above a threshold it just doesn't get XP (which is clearly marked in red) and the other soldiers get their regular allotment. Often, it's beneficial to send along a higher level unit to lift up lower level ones. There's still a bit of a problem, but over all as long as all the units are more or less in the right range, other mechanics determine if a unit will be good or bad in a fight rather than just the level. There's also enough XP sitting around that you can (more or less) level up any unit you think would be interesting.
The other thing that's great is that there are no tricks. Again in Fire Emblem or a lot of other games, they'll give you a special item to promote your soldier and make them super great, except that if you use the item it turns out they'll miss out on the thing that will actually make them powerful in the late game. Here, promotion just makes your solider better, more stats, more actions. Promote as soon as you can, at the many helpful forts scattered around the map.
They've also done a great job of organizing the types of units and basically, they're all bangers (if you'll forgive me for saying that as a person who played Ogre Battle when it came out). As you liberate more and more places, more types of soldiers join you and there's always an interesting niche you can use them in.
There's also a lot of fun in having units fit together. So having a fighter and a gryphon rider work together can make a fun unit because the fighter can stop all of the arrows which would kill the gryphon rider and then the rider can quickly wipe out the enemy. I veered a little conservative, with a lot of healing in my first playthrough, but now that I'm on my second I'm having a lot of fun figuring out ways just to avoid damage. Again, both are fun and that's why I wrote 1300 words on how much I like this game!
Managing your army in Ogre Battle was also a lot of fun -- at least fun for me. Again, Unicorn Overlord is more fun out of battle too. For one thing you rip around the world, with an easy fast travel system and with a very fast moving hero. This makes it easy to explore, which nets you a lot of good items and equipment, and also lets you see the quests which are good for the world building and also are fun.
You also get to rebuild all of the towns in the world. They'll ask for deliveries (can we have some of your stuff) and once you give them the stuff they need, and station a guard there, they'll pump out the stuff you'll need for deliveries for other towns. This is a simple satisfying system, that gives you something different to do in between the main combat parts of the game.
They also have optional "Liberation" quests where you reclaim a part of the map, and fairly often get a new recruit for your army. I think they're optional, but I did all of them because they were fun and often a nice place to try out a new unit or new set up.
There's an economy of "Honour" which you get for completing quests which you can use to make your army stronger, add more units, or increase their size or promote units. You can also use honour to add mercenaries to you army, which is great because then you can set them to guard towns and get more honour. It's a nice way to organize and rate limit the game and make you make choices that are more interesting throughout.
I really enjoyed Unicorn Overlord in just about every way and found it to fill both the "I want something to do with my hands" itch you feel some times as well as the "I'd like to play a serious RPG" itch as well.
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Prince Alain marches on the Capitol
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Things I Didn't Like
The biggest thing I did not like is that I'm reading glasses old. More generally, the user interface on the game is not great and it's hard to read thing. Not impossible, just squinty. So it's hard to tell units apart on the map, and it's hard to see what a weapon does, and just generally I felt a little bit like I couldn't figure out what I was doing for a lot of my first play through.
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The primary force is large, kinda grey and teeny tiny, to my old eyes.
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The menus are also not lined up the way my brain wants them so every time I wanted to use a item on a unit, I opened the wrong menu first and then every time I wanted to change a soldiers equipment I made them unit commander. These were things that just never really clicked in a way where I felt competent, even after 80 hours of playing.
The maps were generally hard to navigate and it was often difficult to see what types of units you were fighting. It all felt a bit like a mass of grey running around. I ended up relying a lot on the game's "here's how the fight will work" mechanic rather than really carefully choosing which of my units fought which enemy units. A little extra zoom in on the map would have been nice.
The last thing I did not like was the unit design. Too many chainmail bikinis, or just bikinis. The female characters are over sexualized, not universally, but enough that I found it frustrating. It's one of the things I really appreciated about Ogre Battle was that it was fairly egalitarian when it came to gender and while Unicorn Overlord isn't awful, quite a few characters did decide to put on their frilliest bikini and go to the battle field.
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The archery, healing and distraction unit did well.
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Also the main female character's legs are animated in a very inhuman way. They shouldn't point at each other like that. It's weird.
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Scarlett and Alain, confess. Mostly to strange anatomy.
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Things I Noticed
I think the story in Unicorn Overlord is interesting from the perspective that it's the minimum viable story. It's exactly as much story as the game needs to make the mechanics flow together and then not much more. You, the prince, need to fight back at the amazingly persuasive bad guy who dethroned your Mother the Queen. Every fight you win gets you a little bit of land back and also maybe helps someone out. There are a few decisions, but they're pretty limited.
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Renault, solves problems by being mind controlled and then contrite.
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There's almost no twist. Lex, your best friend since you fled the capitol with your mentor, is by your side. The whole way. The first time I saw Lex, I went he's going to betray you, but he doesn't, he's just cheerful and climbs tall things to bring you treasure. Your mentor, the aged knight who raises you, lives. He's a viable character throughout the game. There's just nothing in the story that takes you out of the game play.
I like that, I think there's a tendency in a lot of games to use the mystery box and surprise twist to keep you engaged, but here it's just here to make a nice smooth path between story elements. I like the characters, they're written to be likeable. I like the world, it's written to be likeable. If you were looking for something deep or cutting edge, that's not here, but there's nothing to dislike.
Romance is here, barely. At one point you need to activate the power ring that matches your's as the Unicorn Overlord and you have to do that with the person who's most important to you. I did that with Prince Alain's in text beloved (the one who's legs point the wrong ways) and my other option was the plucky girl who keeps the Prince organized. As it turns out looking online you can "romance" with practically anyone, including Lex and your mentor. I don't know how it all works, but with the textual relationship between the prince and the childhood friend / heir to the Pope, they find someone to take on her role as Pope and she comes to hang out with you in your shiny white castle.
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Scarlett chooses Queen over Pope.
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The game has a good system for explaining how the combat is going to work. When you point one of your units at the enemy it will show how much of each unit's HP is going to get lost (or gained). The game's fairly deterministic so these estimates are right, how ever the game is also very sensitive to conditions, so it's easy to send a unit off for what seems like a route only to have them completely smashed. The mechanism is good, and since you can swap with another unit near by it's usually fine, but especially when I was playing fast it was sometimes a little frustrating.
As an extension of this and of the issue with the UI -- and of my own over expansion in my first play through -- it would be nice to have a system of Quarter Masters. There are a lot of items in the game at a lot of characters and if you aren't paying good attention then it's easy to hit a wall in the game because people aren't using the gear that you already have, let alone the gear you could go and buy at one of the hundred towns you've fixed up.
In my second play through, I've kept my army much smaller and I've been more careful with equipment and it's working out fine. There is a lot of fun in figuring out how to set Lex up to be the bad ass he deserves to be, but I think having a system where I *could* let the game do it form me if I wanted would make this a little easier to take on.
The game is very good about explaining all the bits too, but it has a lot of bits. There's a whole Unicornipedia (it's not called that, but you know) about every person in the world, every country, the last ten thousand years of history, every type of unit, every game mechanic and all of the tips and tricks you need to succeed. It's a lot, so much that I totally ignored it. The story stuff isn't terribly necessary, and I picked up most of the combat things on my own eventually. Now on my second play through, I'm finding things that I struggled with are much easier.
One thing I think the game could have used is some kind of unit rater. The enemy units are usually not great models for your units (since you need to be better than them). The enemy can give you hints about what might be helpful, but they're not great. Having an optional in game tool that goes "This unit is going to lose a lot because it doesn't have anyone doing direct damage" or "This unit is going to get wrecked by anyone with a horse", would have been a nice addition. Maybe coupled into the estimate systems, "Lex should be excellent in that fight, but there are a lot of horses around who are going to trample him."
Things I'd Include In a Game
I've though making an Ogre Battle clone would be fun. Now I don't have to because this game exists and it's great. Having spent a long time looking at all of the issues with Ogre Battle, I can say that Unicorn Overlord solves practically all of them in wonderful was, is a great game in it's own right and just makes a ton of sense.
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Alain kicks ass in a nice friendly swamp.
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If I were still going to make my own Ogre Battle, I think the attention to the interactions between classes in units would be the best thing to take from Unicorn Overlord. It's a lot of fun to put units together that either solve a specific problem or are just really nice wrecking balls.
Last Things
I'm delighted that Unicorn Overlord exists. It's fun, and fast, and light and gets rid of so much cruft that slows games down or makes them not be fun. I don't know that it would be everyone's cup of tea, but it is mine and I think that it's really likeable in a lot of ways.
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