Unicorn Overlord Is A Frustrating Let-Down 

Always enjoy your vids. Also thanks for making me cringe remembering the Tidus/Yuna laughing scene

When I was playing the game one of my friends came over and saw me playing and said “this game definitely starts off with a ‘kingdom of blahblahblah’ gets invaded by a bad guy and you play as a prince or something to stop the bad guy” and I laughed and told him he was pretty much 100% correct. I liked the game quite a bit and appreciated and enjoyed the clear inspirations behind it but it definitely is about as bland as they come in a story front I have a soft spot for really simple stories, and I really appreciated the non linearity presented in virtually every aspect of the game- but it’s definitely far from one I’ll be thinking about too often. I think my biggest issue is Alain is just boring. My *favorite* Fire Emblem lord is Marth, who shares a very similar experience to Alain as you and I both noticed, but Marth feels like a real guy where Alain feels like an ideology of noble righteousness. He just isn’t compelling aside from being a player avatar and it makes the game in the entirely a lot less compelling When the game worked for me it was when I was tackling continents out of order, fine tuning teams to beat the arena early, exploring the towns and finding side missions, and seeing my army expand. There are high highs, incredibly middling middles, and unfortunately also very sluggish and dull lows. It gets a solid “yeah it’s pretty good” from me and embodies the type of “yeah you might like this game you can borrow my copy if you want” style recommendation I’d give to those who ask me about it- but when I think of this genre it’s not even in the same ballpark as something like Fire Emblem 4 or Final Fantasy Tactics

I very much agree, I tried the demo but could not connect with the game. Too slow, lacking in story drive, I got bored quickly while reviews were praising it. I thought sth was wrong with me :). Still, I saluate the attempt and creativity.

The point that you make onscreen at 9:40 is a pretty good one worth talking about as well. I loved Soul Nomad, but there was something lost when I realized the game had gotten so easy that I had switched the game to simplified quick battle mode. I knew I would win and just wanted XP grinding, and hardly ever needed to watch individual battles closely ever again. Fights I was meant to enjoy were just too long and I didn't want my time wasted. This game seems to really want you to enjoy the art, so a slow system that makes you sick of looking at it alarms me. Feeling that it's necessary to swap to 2x battle speed just to get it over with is a bad sign, and reminds me of P2W gacha games where you can pay money to unlock amazing speed boosts... like 4x battle speed! Woo! In the back of my mind, I keep remembering my experience with Epic 7, when battles just got too tedious to watch. It was even worse because one of your first mainstay characters had an attack bark that was basically "UGH, THIS IS SO BORING!" and you just couldn't help but agree with her. But the art was gorgeous...

a video to help me put a game firmly in the middle of my backlog

Great video brother! Keep it up!

Agreed! also the difficulty on TZ was so easy, what a waste.

Oh boy a new Ianbits video about a game I liked. *sees title* Oh no... One thing I disliked a lot was how you need to hire a bunch of mercenaries just to have a guard stationed at each town so you could harvest materials and get passive gold. I felt like I was wasting honors that could go towards a squad upgrade. It was easy enough toward the end to grind out honors if you have to though. I really liked the combat system. I found it fun trying to reorganize the squad in order to optimize damage or turn a loss into a win. Also, like you said, the game is pretty easy. I found the more challenging fights were ones I went into underleveled like when I ended up going to Elheim first instead of Drakengard. I have been debating starting the game again on True Zenoiran difficulty to see if it actually gets tough. Also, the balance for some units seemed off during my playthrough, the angels just seemed like straight up the best as squad leaders for example. I find that the gameplay makes up for the at best mediocre story but as an isekai enjoyer I am used to bad storylines and plot so my bar there is very low. I found that the better aspects of the story were the small backgrounds given to each character that you get from the rapport cutscenes. I think the problem, like you said, is that most of them are tropes and not fleshed out at all. I think they could have benefitted from having fewer characters and maybe relied on the mercenary system more for building out your squads. Also, Alain is the most broken unit. It is insane how much better he is than every other option.

I guess it's time to play Ogre Battle 64 again instead lol

This video pretty much exactly mirrors my experience with unicorn overlord. I was really excited for something to scratch that same itch that fire emblem does, but very quickly I realized this game, while made with passion, lacks any sort of narrative or writing substance. It's grindy, it's dull, and the gameplay, while very novel, isn't strong enough to carry the rest of it

nice discussion, thanks!

The strategy part does look like a ton of fun. I'm betting mods will come out to fix the difficulty issues and it could be a gem. I agree the story would hurt it, but its worth keeping an eye on IMO.

This video is exactly one of the reasons I've subscribed to it in the first place. Everyone has been praising the hell out of this game, but this review feels actually genuine and not fanboyish cause it's Vanillaware. I can actually trust what you say when you comment on games, which is becoming increasingly harder to do nowadays.

Finally someone constructively criticizing this game ! I really don't understand how this game got so many positive reviews, the game is flawed on so many aspects. I totally agree with everything you say. For me this game is a huge disappointment, I liked the demo, but as the game introduced new mechanics, more units, more everything, it became a giant mess of mechanics to me. Way too many elements to take into account to be able to create a really optimized strat. But given how numingly easy the game is, I was constantly crushing the enemy, so why bother trying to optimize more. I really believe that units should have had a maximum of 3 characters in them. This would have forced players to create very different units tailored to the enermy you're going to engage. Here because you have so many character in a unit, the best thing to do is to create polyvalent unit which can tackle 95% of enemy unit. In the end you're just crushing all enemy unit with more or less any unit you have. You add in top of that all the ridiculously broken and OP valor skills you can activate and all the ridiculously broken and OP object you can use and the game just becomes completely boring and uninteresting. It's a huge disappointment for me and I'm quite angry because I read so many very positive reviews about this game before purchasing it and nobody raised any of those issues.

I love this game, however i feel a lot of it is wasted potential. Graphics, customization and variety is awesome. Voice acting is great, but the story is boring as hell. Also scenarios waste potential to make more interesting mechanics included. I hope they make part 2 and improve the weak parts!

Ianbits videos on JRPGs are weird. They hold much more importance then in other videos but at the same time they can be too amazing even against the same types of videos. Ianbits best videos on JRPGs have zero flaws and are always a banger. But it's tough to manage a perfect comment on each video because there are too many strong moments in the videos. Also, I always repeat the beginning of what is said in the beginning of the video, so I'm constantly pausing and rewinding. Idk where I'm going with this but like the damn video.

I thought the plot was going to pick up when we got to the racist forest elves, but nope, it’s just casual racism. Casual slavery. Casual killing. “Isn’t war fun guys when you’re a blue haired himbo?” What nimrod pushed this as an Ogre Battle tribute in the early reviews, seriously?