Musings from Lythos

Unicorn Overlord

First things first: if you want a more general overview of the game and my thoughts on the first part of it, you can check that out here. I'm going to do my best to avoid repeating the stuff I've talked about there, so instead I've organized my thoughts for each Act of the game instead. It's like a living review, where you can see my feelings on the game evolve in real-time as I play it. Sound good? Let's do it.

Act 2

After the completion of Act 1, the game offers you a choice. The plot wants you to go to Elheim, but Josef wants to make a pit stop in Drakenhold to pick up Alain's cousin, Virginia. The game is pretty clear that Drakenhold is intended to be tackled first, but I scouted out the first mission in both just to see what the level curve looked like. Elheim is a bit higher (15/16 compared to 10), but just walking in the front door of Elheim gets you Rosalinde, a promoted elf mage that does split physical/magic damage and comes with a quick heal on top of it. Suffice to say, this did not help the game's already low-difficulty woes. The other, secret third option is that you also now have access to the northern parts of Cornia and can liberate those as well - and they're roughly on par with Drakenhold's missions, so I did them in tandem.

If Act 1 is the tutorial, then Act 2 is the "fuck around and figure it out" part of the game - while there is a small difficulty increase (longer maps, more gimmicks like fog of war, etc), there won't be any more major mechanics introduced until you hit Army Rank B and unlock promotions, so this is your opportunity to just build stuff and see how it goes. To that end, the game starts to throw a lot of "sidegrade" characters and classes at you: swordsmen (myrmidons, in FE parlance) compared to your existing sellswords (mercenaries), wyvern riders to griffons, arbalists to hunters, etc. Some of these classes are more useful than others, and some require a very specific niche before their value becomes apparent; I had no idea what to do with a shaman (who can hex enemies to lower their stats or steal AP/PP) until I got a staff that inflicts Burn on an entire row of enemies. I immediately paired that with my mage who had a staff that does magic damage to an entire team if anyone is burned at the end of the battle and suddenly we were cooking. By the end of Act 2, I had built out seven distinct teams, each with a general purpose - an anti-cavalry unit, an anti-flier unit, an anti-armor unit, etc, and filled them with as many supporting units as possible.

Despite my best efforts though, unlocking rapport conversations is slow and annoying. In FE, while it can also be slow and annoying to unlock them, the units at least stand on their own; if you really want to see the support between Rebecca and Lowen, you can do that by just deploying them together and having them murder dudes in the same general area. In UO, however, units need to synergize as a team first and foremost - if an archer has a rapport with a mage that you want to see, you need to figure out how to make a squad work with both of them. Archers are generally good for shooting down fliers and picking off squishy units in the back row, while mages are primarily useful for knocking out enemy armors. Can you make it work? Sure, the most obvious use-case here would be an anti-wyvern squad, but that's a lot more limited than most of the options that are available to you.

Progress: 22 hours, 47% map completion

Act 3

After clearing out Drakenhold, Alain and the gang make their way down to Elheim. There's a little bit of a level reset here, as we step down from the L17-18 maps at the end of Act 2, but honestly? That's fine. It picks up again pretty quickly, and it's nice to get a quick breather after the end of Act 2. That said, while the plot isn't terrible by any means, by this point it's pretty obvious where things are going (and not in a good way). I compared it to FE1 in my initial post, but the vibe I'm picking up as I get further in is actually closer to FE6 (that's Binding Blade, Roy's game). This makes a degree of sense - FE6 itself is a pseudo-remake of FE1, and it was the first time that IntSys rolled out the full support system. While there are a handful interesting pairings, most of the conversations in that game are short and barely tell you anything about a character beyond a surface reading of their one or two character traits - and this, too, is something that UO has taken on. Not only are rapport conversations hard to come by, when you do get one, odds are pretty good that it's going to be 10 lines of:

"Lex are you training at night?"
"Yep, sure am."
"You'd better not do that, Alain's going to worry about you."
"Yeah, you're right."

C rank achieved!

This is also around the point that you start promoting your units: I hit Army Rank B at the penultimate mission of Act 2, but that was only with the help of having cleaned out all the Cornia missions on top of Drakenhold's. The game follows the FE model here - at the cost of 30-50 honor (depending on the class), you get an assortment of stat boosts and new skills, a permanent increase to 2/2 AP, and a spiffy new outfit. A handful of units get some special benefit (Alain gets a horse, Sellswords and Arbalists get shields, etc), but for the most part, you now do the same thing you were already doing, but slight better. Frankly, the real prize is the extra AP - whatever benefit you might get from the other changes, just getting to act twice instead of once basically doubles your damage output.

In the grand scheme of things though, the real gameplay twist of Act 3 is the predominance of elven enemies, the vast majority of which use either magic attacks or split physical/magic damage. This has a couple big knock-on effects: first and foremost, Radiant Knights become massively more useful, primarily for defensive purposes (their main passive nullifies magic damage) but they also do extra damage to ground-based infantry since they're cavalry units. It also puts most of the traditional tanks on the back foot; Knights/Legionnaires take the worst of it (as magic damage is explicitly their weakness), but most of the guys who have been workhorses start to falter here unless they explicitly nullify damage rather than just block it. Hodrick will happily jump in front of a magic arrow that he would normally block with no issue (only to lose half of his health instead), whereas Fighters like Lex can make use of Arrow Guard to safely absorb those hits.

Progress: 31 hours, 62% map completion

Act 4

Act 4 - or at least the boundary between Act 3 and 4 - feels like the point at which the non-sicko players are going to throw in the towel. There's still plenty of game to go (as evidenced by that mid-60's completion percentage) but nothing about the game has fundamentally changed across late Act 2 and Act 3. Enemy levels have gone up, sure. They've got more AP with which to throw weirder strategies at you (especially the bosses), but once you figure out the general tendencies of handling a specific unit type, there's very little the game can give you that will stand up to even moderately thought-out squads and matchups. The maps are longer and demand slightly more work at managing your squads' stamina, but that's...not really a good thing. Take the end of Act 3, the maps with all the thorns. What's really different about them from any other map in the game? You have to be slightly careful to guide your units along the roads so they don't take contact damage and...otherwise, you just fly over them like any other hazard (something that you've probably been constantly doing to enemy traps and barricades). Beyond that, it's simply a matter of size - there are more enemies and they're further away, which IS a valid form of difficulty, but not one that THIS game scales with. If your tactics worked for the first squad of enemy archers, it's probably gonna work on the next three unless the RNG decides to fuck you.

Anyway, before we move on to Bastorias, the plot takes a quick detour to tell us about the ritual required to recharge the power in Alain's Ring of the Unicorn. Long story short, we need to pair it with the Ring of the Maiden and do a ritual with a chosen companion that we have an unbreakable bond of trust with - which, to the game's credit, does not NEED to be a female unit, but this is very blatantly the game's marriage mechanic. Unfortunately, unless you've been sticking Alain with the same squad for most (if not all) of the game - AND your chosen waifu/husbando is a part of that squad - you're gonna have do some rapport grinding to max out that meter. Thankfully this is pretty easy between the Tavern (which functions like meals in Engage and Three Houses) and the billion gifts that are probably lying around your inventory, but the plot will demand you pick someone before it's all said and done. Honestly, I just ignored it and moved on instead.

And speaking of Bastorias, Act 4 has Alain travelling to the nation of beastmen in the snowy north to prevent Zenoira from stealing a gem representative of their royal authority. We get two main gameplay additions here, neither of which are particularly interesting - first and foremost, you're probably at Army Rank A now, which means for the low, low cost of 200 honor per squad, you can now add a fifth member to your combat teams. For comparison, outfitting a squad with four units costs 70-80 honor, and promoting is 30-50 per unit, so this is a VERY large expenditure; doubly so since you probably dumped most (if not all) of your honor from Acts 2 and 3 into getting your units promoted, so you're probably starting from scratch, or close to it. While the game does throw you a bone by increasing your score multiplier with each army rank-up (and by extension, how much honor you earn from any given stage), it's still a huge grind and I only had four squads up to full size by the end of Act 4, even with having reached Rank A and starting to save up around the 2/3 mark of Act 3.

Second are the bestrals themselves: another attempt to freshen up the unit landscape, this time by combining aspects of your initial slate of classes. The Fox units, for example, are based off the evasion and debuff skills of the thief class, but use the soldier's lance moveset instead. Owls function like shamans with more of a focus on buffing and can fly, etc. Like the Act 2 variety classes, these are mostly sidegrades that don't fundamentally change how you handle a fight, and in that respect the elven units of Act 3 were a much bigger curveball. That said, the unifying gimmick here is that all beastmen get a power boost at night - the first time that the time of day has mattered at all in the entire game. I don't think the idea is a bad one, per se? But dealing with the elves and their magic damage was something that you could proactively strategize around, once you knew it was coming. Here? Time just passes, enemies get stronger (or weaker), and you basically just have to deal with it; there's very little you can do aside from "Just kill them before it becomes night." Sick strategy, Lex! Can't believe I didn't think of that one myself.

That said, the final two maps take place mostly at night and have a ton of bestral enemies. While not hard hard, it is by far the most difficult that the game has gotten so far. I've been playing on Tactician(?) difficulty (whatever the middle one was) and these maps lead me to believe that playing this game on the highest difficulty is probably the best way to experience it.

Progress: 38 hours, 83% map completion

Act 5

The last stop on our world tour is the Holy Land of Albion, an island nation to the west of Cornia. Here, the game finally remembers that Scarlett is ostensibly supposed to be an important character (the daughter of the Pope), something that's easy to forget because her primary character trait up to this point - or only, depending on how charitable you want to be - has been "Alain's semi-canon love interest." Now, this is not a fate that is unique to Scarlett by any means; Melisandre's entire deal is that she wants to be the Royal Side Piece and it happens to both of the elf princesses once you finish Elheim, but:

I actually have to give them a little bit of credit, because Fire Emblem (especially the era of Fire Emblem that this game is aping) is notoriously bad about introducing a character and then having them fall off the face of the earth, so the fact that an early-game unit like Scarlett gets plot relevance later (without just being an NPC until she becomes important like Elincia or Guinevere) is nice! But Fire Emblem does it for a reason: the threat of permadeath means that you can't guarantee a unit's survival once the player actually gets their hands on them. Unicorn Overlord has no such writing restrictions, so instead the explanation becomes...they just simply could not think of a single situation in which the Pope's daughter would be able to meaningfully contribute for 30 hours of game time? It's like that one meme reaction: That's worse, though. You understand how that's worse, right?

Now, all that said, the Albion plotline is far and away the best of any country's - not a high bar to clear, admittedly, but I did enjoy my time there. The villain does things for understandable reasons and actually has like, conflict! And a motive! Can you imagine having these luxuries instead of "we mind controlled a local leader lol"? I'd nearly forgotten what it looked like. It certainly wasn't for any gameplay reasons; the primary new foe here are angels, whose main gimmick is "They're another class, except they fly" which means they can be dealt with via any of your existing anti-flier strategies.

I also haven't mentioned any of the overworld sidequests up to this point, but that's because they're pretty inconsequential, all things considered. Lex and Chloe can investigate ruins to find battle items, Selvie opens up grinding maps, etc, and most of them provide little direct reward. Really, the only ones that matter open up at the end of the game: Alain can pick up his personal superweapon once you hit Army Rank S, and you can get a collection of lesser ones for the rest of the army by defeating overworld guardians. While these encounters are not easy by any means (they're all L40 and armed to the teeth), level isn't really something that matters in this game; a good squad matchup is far more important, and casualties don't matter since nothing carries over from overworld fights.

Progress: 43 hours, 97% Map Completion

Odds, Ends, and Final Thoughts

With all five continents saved, we've got one last bit of homework to take care of before wrapping things up. Assuming you haven't picked Alain's partner, now's the time to do that, after which you visit the five shrines scattered around the world before heading back to Gran Corrine. This both powers up the Rings of the Unicorn and Maiden and gets you a bunch of new equipment to top off before the final battle - and you're going to want them, because it's a pretty rough one.

The finale itself, oddly, can be tackled at any time. There's a L38 mission in front of it should you decide to go in guns blazing, or you can repair one of two bridges that will let you bypass said liberation and go straight to the final battle. You probably shouldn't, though, because in addition to an extremely long and grueling map, both final bosses are L45 and home to some real bullshit if you let them. Phase 1 is far more difficult, with instant kill gimmicks, a shield that blocks the first five attacks that he takes per combat encounter, and a flat 140 HP recovery after each fight on top of passive HP recovery from being on a gate. Should you manage to whittle down his 650 HP (in a game where 120 HP is a big number, even at endgame), you shift to Phase 2 with a new, shorter map and a second fight. Notably, the game does NOT reset the stage timer, nor does it heal your units in between phases, something that is really rude given how much punishment Phase 1 Galerius can dish out.

Anyway, to deliver the final blow in Phase 2, you'll need the Rings equipped on Alain and his wife, something you probably could have guessed given the plot importance of doing the whole ritual. And you're probably using them because, you know, they're good accessories! But what the game doesn't tell you is that it unequipped them between phases, regardless of whether you already had them equipped - presumably so that you have an opportunity to equip them if you weren't already using them, but if you were? Guess you can get fucked, buddy! It's obvious something is wrong because the final boss won't die, but good luck figuring out why! Is it a skill he has? Does it have to be Alain? Do you need to kill all his minions first? Survive a few waves of enemies? Nope! The game just DIDN'T TELL YOU that it removed the key to winning the fight. I wasn't dangerously close to running out of time when I realized what had happened, but close enough that if I hadn't and failed the mission, I 100% would have turned the game off and just youtube'd the ending.

With Galerius now down for the count, Alain is crowned king, marries whoever you gave the Ring of the Maiden to, and everyone gets their happily ever after as the character endings scroll by. ...The character endings? Yeah, you know; all those guys you've gotten to know and love across this saga. Let's just pull up the support log and look back on all this great characteriza-- oh.

Look, while writing a full set of supports for all 60-ish unique units is an understandably daunting task, the degree to which they cut corners here really shows. One of the best aspects of FE's support system is being able to see two units who have nothing in common and be like "huh, I wonder what they'll talk about?" Instead, the vast majority of UO's rapport relationships have only a C conversation (or a C/A if you're lucky), with the full C/B/A being reserved for Alain's support list and a handful of units that are directly related (brother/sister pairs, etc). And this is a huge miss! The plot generally only focuses on Alain, Josef, and then 2-3 additional units that are directly related to whichever country you're in, so for everyone else, this is all they get. This is their only opportunity to make me give a shit about them outside of their gameplay utility, and the game massively fumbles it. If you're going to go this route, to include all these support conversations, you cannot half-ass it, and if that means you give each character 5-10 full chains instead of 10-20 C or C/A chains, I'd make that trade every single time.

As the double whammy to the above, the game's squad-based system makes it basically impossible to get too attached to any given unit for gameplay reasons. I don't think I watched a single full round of combat play out after the end of Act 2, so I had no idea who my top performers in combat even WERE - but even if I had, there's nothing special about, say, Melisandre anyway! Most units are interchangeable with generics if you so choose; I could replace her with any random swordmaster using the exact same equipment and get just as good results. So with the character writing being underbaked and being unable to point to any specific unit as a real workhorse that's carrying you, all you're left with are numbers and skills. I can count the number of individual units I actually gave a shit about on a single hand, and I had all of them before the end of Act 2.

Some other stuff that we should briefly mention:

On the whole, the game is fine. It's very easy to see who this game is intended for, and I'm just not quite part of that group. I'm actually kind of amazed that I finished it, because if literally anything that I wanted to play had come out around the time I was wrapping up Act 3, I would have bailed and never looked back. But I did finish it, so I guess it must have been doing something right? It's hard for me to muster up more than "That sure was a game I played for 45 hours," which is not exactly a ringing endorsement, but I suppose I've dropped games I enjoyed more for lesser offenses so...take from that what you will.

I guess it's true, in the end. If you want people to talk about something and really dive into it, make something ALMOST good. And if the previous 4000 words are anything to go by, I sure ALMOST liked Unicorn Overlord.