Hello and welcome! This article is part of a bigger ongoing project organized by Yousef, their idea was to gather writers through the forums to write and discuss their Game of the Year pick for 2024. So please, after reading this article, may I ask you, the reader, to give the other articles in the project a read, I’m sure my peers have put in just as much, if not more, work and passion into this project. With that out of the way, onto the article!
My GOTY for 2024 was a game that did appear on the TGA, but won nothing, hell it only had a single nomination on the “Best strategy game” section. I’m of course talking about Vanillaware’s newest release, Unicorn Overlord.
What can be said about this VERY honorable mention of the TGA, this game lost to Frostpunk 2 on its nomination, now I won’t judge a game that I haven’t played and for the ones reading this that did play it, can hopefully vouch for the game’s quality as a worthy winner for the category. But allow me then to tell you why this relatively small game (small compared to the broader games industry) is my GOTY for this year. Mind you, this is not a full-scale review, only an overview of an overlooked release that deserved more love than it received during this year, so without further ado, let me explain why Unicorn Overlord is my GOTY of 2024.
The story is rather simple, but effective, so I’ll try to be brief. The game’s story is about a prince, Alain, that escapes from his kingdom since it’s going through a usurpation, the general of the queen's army wishes to unite all the nations under one flag, so he murders the queen (Alain’s mother) and takes her throne, succeeding in uniting all the nations under the name of “The Zenoiran Empire”, some time passes and our prince grows up as a knight, with the late queen’s advisor as his mentor, and with renewed determination he creates the “Liberation Army” to save his nation and the other nations that were dominated by the Empire, so will out blue haired noble save his home… from… waaaaaaait a minute
Oh I see… Hmm, I did feel like the story was kiiiinda similar. Yeah, this game is not winning any award for its story but that’s ok, the game gives you enough to motivate you to play, but other than that it’s a pretty chill story… Well as chill as rebelling against an all-encompassing empire can be.
Small addendum to the story section, while the main story itself is nothing to write about (I mean I did write about it but shh) the character stories are pretty good, they are more personal and detail the reasons why the characters join the liberation effort, some join after seeing the prince’s effort and got inspired by him, or they got their asses kicked by him and “convinced” to join the army, well you know what they say “If you can beat them, make them join you!” yeah, that’s what the saying goes… Don’t fact check me.
Alright let’s get into the meat and potatoes of the game (for me at least) this part will be very lengthy, so I hope you have your pair of glasses for the next section.
The game is a strategy game with light elements of RTS, that being all the actions take place while the game is still running, only being able to pause to choose your characters actions before unpausing to allow the game to run again. It offers a unique approach for strategy, since each mission has an enemy base and a player base, it becomes a race to see who conquers who first, spreading your units through the map to cover as much ground while taking minor structures placed in the map, such as small villages, reinforced bridges, small stone bastions and many other structures that gives you bonuses if a unit resides in there, either giving them more defense or a strategic position, like in the case of bridges making it into an enemy choke point.
Unit deployment can be done at the player base or at any other location that allows deployment, so if you wish to store your best units only later for the fight, then it’s recommended to find the nearest point of deployment adjacent to the enemy base.
And since we were talking about units, let me talk about them! The units of this game work very much like Tactics Ogre, where each unit is more like a company, that is units are composed of groups of different characters that fit different roles in the company, giving the player many options for gameplay and unit customization.
During unit building you should be very mindful of your character placement, since putting the characters on the back or front row can change their behavior in battle, and also be mindful of your enemy’s position since a front lancer can stab your front AND back characters since, you know, lances are pretty good at piercing things, so if an enemy infantry has lancer on their front row, maybe it’s best not to put anyone behind your Tank character, or else they’ll get the sting of the lance the Tank tried to protect them from.
Like mentioned before, some story related characters join the MC and his cause, and each character brings along a different class that gets unlocked so later if you so wish you can train faceless soldiers that same class and make more characters of that class to organize them on your different units, allowing you to mold your army to your desire.
Another point I wanted to touch based on character units is that many units break the stereotypical mold of their archetypes, like the Thief class, in many other games the Thief would be classified as a sneaky backstabber that swiftly disposed of enemy units from behind, in this game they are swift but are not the attacker, rather they function more like a evasion tank, yes you read it right, the swift and nimble Thief acts like a tank thanks to its ability to dodge attacks, effectively making them untouchable… as long as they have passive skill actions.
And speaking of skills, every battle in this game is automated, meaning battles are less about spur of the moment decision making, and rather a delicate construction of units designed to play into each other’s strengths and covering their weakness. The battles still play out in “turn base” where the unit with the highest speed strikes first, but both still strike during contact, but the difference previously mentioned is that once a battle starts the units all do their thing automatically, meaning you must set their skills before each mission begins, since you can’t change their skill on the fly.
Each character has an “Active Skill” and a “Passive Skill” and each respective skill consumes a different skill point, so in combat all units, both player and enemy units, have a set “Action” and “Passive” point numbers that can increase with character equipment, which sadly is a point of contingency for the fact that the better units will be the ones that expand their number of moves they can make for battle, meaning that the equipment that give more movements per turn are objectively better than the ones that give different effects for the characters or plain stat boosts, but I would argue that you can play around a unit that doesn’t use that many moves but disposes of the enemies swiftly, but I digress.
Going back to the skills that each character has, many of the action skills are, well, “attack the enemy”, simple stuff, no? Well many of the Action Skills can be changed depending of the character class or the weapon they are using, so our aforementioned Thief can have a simple dagger slash, or if they are equipped with a poison dagger, an attack that debilitates the enemy unit and leaves them poisoned, and while we are still talking about our elusive Thief it’s worth mentioning their status as a “Tank” is thanks to their passive skill “Dodge” that makes them… Dodge the enemy attack, shocking I know, but you should be wary of this skill because each dodge uses a Passive Point, so if you run out of Passive Points during an onslaught of enemy attacks, then yeah they’re dead meat.
It’s worth mentioning that this game does have an in-game arena that both acts as a multiplayer hub and a side content for fighting… It’s awful. Yeah, when you strip the strategic gameplay for numbers based combat, the battle system is very boring, borderline annoying, some team comps are exclusively busted compared to others, I never really engaged with the multiplayer but I have seen videos of it, and oh God, it’s a hell hole… Look if you intend to play the arena, do the offline story arena, by the end of it you will unlock the game’s strongest character, you are welcome.
Oof, we are done with the gameplay. Said it was lengthy, and if you made it this far… Thank you, I guess? Ok, let’s go to the most striking part of this game, the art! It’s pretty… Yeah, that’s it, pack it up, I’m no artist but I can say it’s good looking… Ok fine I’ll elaborate.
The artist, George Kamitani, is a legend. Every single game he makes is astonishing, I’m sure many of you have at least seen one of his designs. (examples bellow from other games and media)
George’s art is immediately recognizable, and this game is no exception. Most if not all the game’s art is hand drawn with character models having hand-scripted animation, making the movements very bouncy and snappy.
And the many characters of this game all have intricate and smart designs that reflect their character and weirdly historically accurate (the non-fantasy characters) why not take a look at my favorite character in the game: Berenice.
The pictures above are of Berenice and a bodyguard in the medieval eras, both sellswords. Sellswords of old wore light armor not because they couldn’t afford plate armor, but because it offered greater mobility in battle, it’s a common misconception that larger weapons needed to be accompanied with heavy armor for compensation, but it was more optimal to wear light padded clothes to maintain mobility during combat to not leave yourself open. Now going back to Berenice, see how much she mirrors the clothing and style of these old warriors, the representation of this archetype is masterfully replicated in her overall design, very nice!
Aight, hear me out… The studio is famous for its hyper realistic food. All their games, in some form or another, have AMAZING plates of food, from the presentation of the food, to the animation of the characters eating it, it’s all immaculate and completely unnecessary, but hey, the devil’s in the details.
I talked about many different aspects of the game in this article (some aspects more than others), some of which I didn’t even scratched the surface to begin with, but I don’t want to prolong what was originally just a small part in a larger project, so I’ll end this article with a definite recommendation of this absolute gem of a game… Which sadly goes without saying that the game didn’t sell all that well, only selling… 1 MILLION UNITS!? And George said in an interview that the numbers exceeded Sega’s expectations?
Look, the studio never makes sequels of any kind, they always want to make new and different experiences for the player, but I’ll be the first one to say that I want this game to have a sequel, as a fan of the studio this is not their best work let me tell you, but I think it’s exactly why I think it deserves a sequel. They made this game as a throw away idea after finishing 13 Sentinels, they really didn’t have a high budget to make this game, and it still sold a million copies worldwide, hell it took 13 Sentinels to sell 1 million in 3 YEARS! So why not make a second more refined game? I’m sure George is at least interested in the idea of doing a do over.
I’ll end this loooooooong article with this:
These comments were made in reference to 13 Sentinels, but I think it still applies to this game, the two opposites of game designers, the two sides of the same coin, both agree that Vanillaware is fucking AWESOME! So please, if you have a chance of buying this game, do so, and if you don’t have the money, well… The Repo has recently added the holy trifecta of their works: Odin Sphere Leifthrasir, Dragon’s Crown and Muramasa Rebirth, so give these games at least a try.
This has been Hikari.exe, thank you for reading my first article. Expect to see more!
List of project members articles:
- https://retrogametalk.com/threads/my-game-of-the-year-2024-astro-bot-why-it-deserves-g-o-t-y.2197/
My apologies for the varying image quality, some of these I had to screenshot to get them in the article.
My GOTY for 2024 was a game that did appear on the TGA, but won nothing, hell it only had a single nomination on the “Best strategy game” section. I’m of course talking about Vanillaware’s newest release, Unicorn Overlord.
What can be said about this VERY honorable mention of the TGA, this game lost to Frostpunk 2 on its nomination, now I won’t judge a game that I haven’t played and for the ones reading this that did play it, can hopefully vouch for the game’s quality as a worthy winner for the category. But allow me then to tell you why this relatively small game (small compared to the broader games industry) is my GOTY for this year. Mind you, this is not a full-scale review, only an overview of an overlooked release that deserved more love than it received during this year, so without further ado, let me explain why Unicorn Overlord is my GOTY of 2024.
Story
The story is rather simple, but effective, so I’ll try to be brief. The game’s story is about a prince, Alain, that escapes from his kingdom since it’s going through a usurpation, the general of the queen's army wishes to unite all the nations under one flag, so he murders the queen (Alain’s mother) and takes her throne, succeeding in uniting all the nations under the name of “The Zenoiran Empire”, some time passes and our prince grows up as a knight, with the late queen’s advisor as his mentor, and with renewed determination he creates the “Liberation Army” to save his nation and the other nations that were dominated by the Empire, so will out blue haired noble save his home… from… waaaaaaait a minute
Oh I see… Hmm, I did feel like the story was kiiiinda similar. Yeah, this game is not winning any award for its story but that’s ok, the game gives you enough to motivate you to play, but other than that it’s a pretty chill story… Well as chill as rebelling against an all-encompassing empire can be.
Side stories
Small addendum to the story section, while the main story itself is nothing to write about (I mean I did write about it but shh) the character stories are pretty good, they are more personal and detail the reasons why the characters join the liberation effort, some join after seeing the prince’s effort and got inspired by him, or they got their asses kicked by him and “convinced” to join the army, well you know what they say “If you can beat them, make them join you!” yeah, that’s what the saying goes… Don’t fact check me.
Gameplay
Alright let’s get into the meat and potatoes of the game (for me at least) this part will be very lengthy, so I hope you have your pair of glasses for the next section.
The game is a strategy game with light elements of RTS, that being all the actions take place while the game is still running, only being able to pause to choose your characters actions before unpausing to allow the game to run again. It offers a unique approach for strategy, since each mission has an enemy base and a player base, it becomes a race to see who conquers who first, spreading your units through the map to cover as much ground while taking minor structures placed in the map, such as small villages, reinforced bridges, small stone bastions and many other structures that gives you bonuses if a unit resides in there, either giving them more defense or a strategic position, like in the case of bridges making it into an enemy choke point.
Unit deployment can be done at the player base or at any other location that allows deployment, so if you wish to store your best units only later for the fight, then it’s recommended to find the nearest point of deployment adjacent to the enemy base.
Units
And since we were talking about units, let me talk about them! The units of this game work very much like Tactics Ogre, where each unit is more like a company, that is units are composed of groups of different characters that fit different roles in the company, giving the player many options for gameplay and unit customization.
During unit building you should be very mindful of your character placement, since putting the characters on the back or front row can change their behavior in battle, and also be mindful of your enemy’s position since a front lancer can stab your front AND back characters since, you know, lances are pretty good at piercing things, so if an enemy infantry has lancer on their front row, maybe it’s best not to put anyone behind your Tank character, or else they’ll get the sting of the lance the Tank tried to protect them from.
Like mentioned before, some story related characters join the MC and his cause, and each character brings along a different class that gets unlocked so later if you so wish you can train faceless soldiers that same class and make more characters of that class to organize them on your different units, allowing you to mold your army to your desire.
Archetypes
Another point I wanted to touch based on character units is that many units break the stereotypical mold of their archetypes, like the Thief class, in many other games the Thief would be classified as a sneaky backstabber that swiftly disposed of enemy units from behind, in this game they are swift but are not the attacker, rather they function more like a evasion tank, yes you read it right, the swift and nimble Thief acts like a tank thanks to its ability to dodge attacks, effectively making them untouchable… as long as they have passive skill actions.
Battle Systems
And speaking of skills, every battle in this game is automated, meaning battles are less about spur of the moment decision making, and rather a delicate construction of units designed to play into each other’s strengths and covering their weakness. The battles still play out in “turn base” where the unit with the highest speed strikes first, but both still strike during contact, but the difference previously mentioned is that once a battle starts the units all do their thing automatically, meaning you must set their skills before each mission begins, since you can’t change their skill on the fly.
Skills
Each character has an “Active Skill” and a “Passive Skill” and each respective skill consumes a different skill point, so in combat all units, both player and enemy units, have a set “Action” and “Passive” point numbers that can increase with character equipment, which sadly is a point of contingency for the fact that the better units will be the ones that expand their number of moves they can make for battle, meaning that the equipment that give more movements per turn are objectively better than the ones that give different effects for the characters or plain stat boosts, but I would argue that you can play around a unit that doesn’t use that many moves but disposes of the enemies swiftly, but I digress.
Going back to the skills that each character has, many of the action skills are, well, “attack the enemy”, simple stuff, no? Well many of the Action Skills can be changed depending of the character class or the weapon they are using, so our aforementioned Thief can have a simple dagger slash, or if they are equipped with a poison dagger, an attack that debilitates the enemy unit and leaves them poisoned, and while we are still talking about our elusive Thief it’s worth mentioning their status as a “Tank” is thanks to their passive skill “Dodge” that makes them… Dodge the enemy attack, shocking I know, but you should be wary of this skill because each dodge uses a Passive Point, so if you run out of Passive Points during an onslaught of enemy attacks, then yeah they’re dead meat.
Side Content
It’s worth mentioning that this game does have an in-game arena that both acts as a multiplayer hub and a side content for fighting… It’s awful. Yeah, when you strip the strategic gameplay for numbers based combat, the battle system is very boring, borderline annoying, some team comps are exclusively busted compared to others, I never really engaged with the multiplayer but I have seen videos of it, and oh God, it’s a hell hole… Look if you intend to play the arena, do the offline story arena, by the end of it you will unlock the game’s strongest character, you are welcome.
Art
Oof, we are done with the gameplay. Said it was lengthy, and if you made it this far… Thank you, I guess? Ok, let’s go to the most striking part of this game, the art! It’s pretty… Yeah, that’s it, pack it up, I’m no artist but I can say it’s good looking… Ok fine I’ll elaborate.
Art style
The artist, George Kamitani, is a legend. Every single game he makes is astonishing, I’m sure many of you have at least seen one of his designs. (examples bellow from other games and media)
George’s art is immediately recognizable, and this game is no exception. Most if not all the game’s art is hand drawn with character models having hand-scripted animation, making the movements very bouncy and snappy.
Character Desing
And the many characters of this game all have intricate and smart designs that reflect their character and weirdly historically accurate (the non-fantasy characters) why not take a look at my favorite character in the game: Berenice.
The pictures above are of Berenice and a bodyguard in the medieval eras, both sellswords. Sellswords of old wore light armor not because they couldn’t afford plate armor, but because it offered greater mobility in battle, it’s a common misconception that larger weapons needed to be accompanied with heavy armor for compensation, but it was more optimal to wear light padded clothes to maintain mobility during combat to not leave yourself open. Now going back to Berenice, see how much she mirrors the clothing and style of these old warriors, the representation of this archetype is masterfully replicated in her overall design, very nice!
The… Food?
Aight, hear me out… The studio is famous for its hyper realistic food. All their games, in some form or another, have AMAZING plates of food, from the presentation of the food, to the animation of the characters eating it, it’s all immaculate and completely unnecessary, but hey, the devil’s in the details.
Conclusion
I talked about many different aspects of the game in this article (some aspects more than others), some of which I didn’t even scratched the surface to begin with, but I don’t want to prolong what was originally just a small part in a larger project, so I’ll end this article with a definite recommendation of this absolute gem of a game… Which sadly goes without saying that the game didn’t sell all that well, only selling… 1 MILLION UNITS!? And George said in an interview that the numbers exceeded Sega’s expectations?
Look, the studio never makes sequels of any kind, they always want to make new and different experiences for the player, but I’ll be the first one to say that I want this game to have a sequel, as a fan of the studio this is not their best work let me tell you, but I think it’s exactly why I think it deserves a sequel. They made this game as a throw away idea after finishing 13 Sentinels, they really didn’t have a high budget to make this game, and it still sold a million copies worldwide, hell it took 13 Sentinels to sell 1 million in 3 YEARS! So why not make a second more refined game? I’m sure George is at least interested in the idea of doing a do over.
I’ll end this loooooooong article with this:
These comments were made in reference to 13 Sentinels, but I think it still applies to this game, the two opposites of game designers, the two sides of the same coin, both agree that Vanillaware is fucking AWESOME! So please, if you have a chance of buying this game, do so, and if you don’t have the money, well… The Repo has recently added the holy trifecta of their works: Odin Sphere Leifthrasir, Dragon’s Crown and Muramasa Rebirth, so give these games at least a try.
This has been Hikari.exe, thank you for reading my first article. Expect to see more!
List of project members articles:
- https://retrogametalk.com/threads/my-game-of-the-year-2024-astro-bot-why-it-deserves-g-o-t-y.2197/
Post automatically merged:
My apologies for the varying image quality, some of these I had to screenshot to get them in the article.
