♫ Music: Elheim Overworld (Day) ♫
~Winner of the "Best Eggs Benedict" Award~
Now you're telling me one of my favorite active developers went and made a wholesale ripoff of one of my favorite series, and they knocked it out of the park? Ripoff isn't quite the right word, though. While Vanillaware did basically make their own Ogre Battle, that poor series has lain dormant for twenty-five years now and some of its mechanisms are admittedly a bit old-fashioned. So I imagine the developers of Unicorn Overlord asked themselves, if Ogre Battle the RTS RPG series had continued instead of getting bogged down by remakes of its SRPG cousin every so often, what would it look like today? Their answers to this question resulted in a game that almost feels pulled from a parallel universe where my favorite games continue to get sequels forever. Maps play out with more active player input, with incentives to move quickly. Unit building has been considerably fleshed out thanks to the implementation of a complex gambit system (a la FF XII) that lets you customize your soldiers' individual actions and reactions to a ludicrous degree, and you can take your perfect squads online to duke it out with other players. The support mechanic from Fire Emblem is here as well, allowing your various unique characters actual personalities beyond a cool portrait and maybe a line or two in the ending. And you primarily build supports over dinner, where Vanillaware's trademark spreads of stunning food come into play.
I actually played the first Ogre Battle, March of the Black Queen, all the way through for the first time this year, inspired by how much I enjoyed Unicorn Overlord. Previous attempts had always fizzled out due to how dang slow it is; maps are enormous, movement is slow, and the best strategy by far in almost every battle is to simply set up a pincer trap outside your headquarters and wait for the majority of enemy forces, who are programmed to blindly charge towards you until they're too hurt and then blindly skedaddle home, to wear themselves out. March of the Black Queen is an enthralling, ambitious game and I had good time with it, but it really put into perspective how many improvements Unicorn Overlord brought to the formula. Not that UO is perfect of course, cavalry in general is grossly overpowered, the plotting isn't Vanillaware's best, and you can kinda tell when they started to run out of production time, but it was even better than I'd dared to hope when it was first announced. Vanillaware as a studio doesn't do sequels, but they do continue to iterate on their own ideas. Every game they've made is either an action RPG or some kind of RTS, and that throughline between GrimGrimoire, 13 Sentinels, and Unicorn Overlord is easy to see. So while I would dearly love to see a Unicorn Overlord 2, I think I'll be just as impressed by whatever they come up with next.
Platform: Switch
