Unicorn Overlord Is A Wholly Fresh Take On Tactical RPGs
If someone told me there’s an upcoming tactics RPG full of anime-inspired characters, I would immediately respond, “Hell yeah, give it to me” and fully expect it to be a new Fire Emblem. Or I’d hope for another Valkyria Chronicles. Instead, what’s filling that void is Unicorn Overlord, the next joint from Japanese developer Vanillaware. While it’s best known for the cult side-scrolling action-RPGs Odin Sphere and Dragon’s Crown, and most recently the mind-bending story-driven 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, it touched on the strategy genre with GrimGrimoire. However, Unicorn Overlord is breaking ground for the studio with a newfound emphasis on tactics within an extensive RPG foundation.
After playing through a four-hour preview demo, I came away impressed with its deep, interconnected systems and challenging battles, but also because it’s different. It’s a fairly fresh take on a tactics RPG, blending real-time strategy elements with the mechanics of a turn-based auto battler. On the battlefield, you control singular units that consist of up to six party members within and direct multiple units in real time. And when they encounter an enemy unit, they engage in a predetermined combat sequence that plays out based on each individual’s class, skills, and tactical presets. At the heart of the strategy is how you construct these units and how they match up against enemies they encounter. It seems simple enough at the start, but even just in the opening hours, the tactical layers continuously revealed themselves, giving me so much to chew on.
With a mix of knights, cavalry, heavy defenders, mages, Pegasus-riding warriors, and almost any other fantasy-based combatant you can think of, there’s much more than a rock-paper-scissors weapon triangle to consider. Support units with heavy shields on the frontline can jump in front of enemy attacks to soak damage, clerics in the back can restore HP to keep an ally alive mid-sequence, and nimble thieves can draw enemy attention to then dodge their hard-hitting attacks. Some classes and weapon types are of course effective against certain others, but you must also consider factors like positioning within the unit or the specific abilities equipped on individual soldiers since it all affects how they behave in battle. Coming out victorious in an encounter depends on who takes the most damage, so fights are just as much about killing enemy units as they are about winning the war of attrition, leaving them immobile on the field for a brief moment and vulnerable to follow-up encounters.