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“Unicorn Overlord combines the timeless tactical RPG genre with overworld exploration and innovative battle system for a unique epic fantasy experience in the iconic Vanillaware style.”

Unicorn Overlord Atlus Website

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Unicorn Overlord released on March 8, 2024 made by Vanillaware and Atlus for the Nintendo Switch and is a great tactics game with incredibly engaging gameplay and beautiful graphics. To me, Unicorn Overlord feels like a very unique game with super deep gameplay that lets you customize nearly everything about a character and create any builds you want. If you are a fan of Final Fantasy Tactics, or Tactics Ogre, I highly recommend giving this game a shot. 

Vanillaware’s art style always stands out to me in their games and it is just as amazing here. Every character has a fun, cool or cute design and every animation is just perfect. Vanillaware being able to design delicious looking food shows here too, with taverns showing meals I wish I could taste myself. The world map is also very diverse and colorful, with every region having its unique palette so every part of the world is memorable. The game features multiple races as well like elves and angels, allowing the designers to make unique and fun characters. Unicorn Overlord feels like one big painting that you can play on and I think that makes the game even better. 

The real meat of Unicorn Overlord is the gameplay. As levels play in real time (unless you pause), most planning for your builds happen before battle, leading me to spend up to an hour messing around with my characters to set up a powerful or fast or defensive build for my squads. When I first saw that there was a time limit for levels, I was worried that I would be rushed all the time and I wasn’t a big fan. However, after playing the entire game on the maximum difficulty, I can confirm that the timer almost never posed a problem and is truly only a soft restriction to prevent you from almost never moving. Being able to place traps or use skills on the field is also something I truly love, as it adds a whole extra aspect of strategy to the game. Possibly a problem for some however, is even though the gameplay can be very deep and you can do some very fun things, the game is very easy and complicated strategies are rarely required. I highly recommend playing on a high difficulty if you are looking for at least some thought when playing! However, not everything in the game is so easy. Some side content like the Arena can be very challenging sometimes and I found it very fun creating a team just to face a specific challenge. Unicorn Overlord is likely my favorite strategy game gameplaywise just because of how fun it is to mess around with its mechanics.

Unicorn Overlord is an amazing modern strategy game that I believe deserves a try. While the game doesn’t have the deepest, most emotional story, I believe the art and gameplay are much more important here and make the game extremely memorable and one I’m excited to replay in the future.