Unicorn Overlord’s Story is Hampered by its Simplicity | Bytesized
Added 2024-04-17 17:35:54 +0000 UTCA new episode of Bytesized is now available from Elise Avery!
Comments
Totally agree with this. I just couldn't keep playing, felt like I had no motivation. The story is just so bland and the characters are so disposable. Once they join your team you almost never hear from them again.
Drew McParlan
2024-04-19 01:36:33 +0000 UTCI don't mind a simple story. As long as its executed well and the gameplay is fun it's only a minor nitpick. The only real qualm I've had with my time in the game is just how excessively flowery the language can be at times. For some characters (Alain, Josef, Clive, etc) it makes sense to have some flowery language as they're royalty or at the very least nobles but mercs like Aubin and thieves like Gemmel really don't need to be using so much of it. I don't know, it didn't ruin the the game for me but there were numerous occasions where I actively looked at the screen and went "okay man settle down. Just tell them we're gunna win the war, there's no need to go full on philosophical over a yes or no question"
MrDark086
2024-04-18 10:55:16 +0000 UTCA dependency on overendowed women to get attention is SOOO 1994. For some of us, it's a dealbreaker.
Caerdwyn
2024-04-18 01:44:05 +0000 UTCFor Kez: I feel the opposite and feel its too complicated. There's so much to tinker with I just leave the optimized skills do the job for me. As for me, I divide them into "anti" stuff. Anti air, anti cav, anti infantry, anti scouts. My anti air unit was the archers, anti cav was the gryphons, anti infantry was my cavaliers, anti scouts... also archer, anti armor were my mages.
icarue
2024-04-17 23:25:07 +0000 UTCI feel 13 Sentinels being so good is what drags Unicorn Overlord down. The story is servisable, heck, probably way better than FE Engage's (every character make sense there's few to 0 plotholes (I call the only one I found a mistranslation), and the characters that are not mind control have a good, if repeated, rational). But compared to 13 sentinels... well... I expected a deconstruction of the normal Fire Emblem story, but just got... another (good) FE story. I hate having expectations.
icarue
2024-04-17 21:15:58 +0000 UTCShe enjoyed the game overall, so not exactly sure how you view it as punching down. She was comparing the game to the past narratives of their other games, which she loved.
Nick Calandra
2024-04-17 19:13:57 +0000 UTCI don't know if I enjoyed the tactical depth quite as much (feel over-reliant on cavalry and aerial cavalry, and infantry just gets left in the dust often) but I really just like the atmosphere. The art style sells the albeit simplistic world to me, and so I want to see how it ends.
Kez'ral
2024-04-17 18:45:32 +0000 UTCMany such cases. Coldtake equally sometimes feels like he has very little to say and has to make something up. That's the kind of schtick that killed VICE.
Kez'ral
2024-04-17 18:43:14 +0000 UTCYea, power was going in and out for me not long after it went up, so I just shut down for the day. Sorry for delay!
Nick Calandra
2024-04-17 18:39:53 +0000 UTCWasn't this released yesterday? I comment on YT and everything.
icarue
2024-04-17 18:34:31 +0000 UTCMan, I’m nervous about trying to give a fair shake to something I suspect from the title I’m going to disagree with, but I do want to be fair so…
SpectralTime
2024-04-17 18:25:01 +0000 UTCAlso many Fire Emblems
icarue
2024-04-17 18:24:14 +0000 UTCWell said!
Rebecca Young
2024-04-17 18:13:01 +0000 UTCI had to stop watching this one halfway through. It didn’t seem like you were saying anything new at minute three that you hadn’t said by minute one, and it felt like punching down.
Max Goldstein
2024-04-17 18:04:30 +0000 UTCEvery single Ogre Battle-esque game has the same storyline: Rebellion against evil empire. It's in Ogre Battle 64, it's in March of the Black Queen, it's in Symphony of War, and now it's in Unicorn Overlord. To me it's just like how Star Fox always involves leapfrogging planets and shooting a giant head in the face repeatedly until dead. You learn to live with it.
Kez'ral
2024-04-17 17:49:08 +0000 UTCI think the story's simplicity is ultimately *fine.* It could've been a lot better but it hasn't been actively detrimental to my experience 75+ hours in. It's basically classic Fire Emblem, back before Awakening. Blue haired prince wants his kingdom back and gathers people from across the world to get it back and overthrow the evil emperor. I've found the tactical depth to be more than enough to carry my interest though, I haven't found a game this engrossing on a mechanical level in a very long time. Granted this is on Expert difficulty so I can't speak to the easier difficulties but I've spent hours just testing unit composition in the Colosseum, trying to find new synergies and whatnot. EDIT: That's of course not to say that games like 13 Sentinels haven't raised the bar for Vanillware writing, that game is phenomenally written. (I'm sure GrimGrimoire was well written too but I found playing that game to be an absolutely miserable experience on the gameplay side) But I would argue that, if you realize that a story isn't doing it for you after hour 6, you shouldn't expect more out of it. Granted, ideally the game *would* pull you in with the story and you shouldn't have to more or less ignore it to enjoy the game, but I don't think there's anything wrong with observing the story and not really taking it as more than compulsion to go from point A to point B. I've played plenty of TRPGs that I had to basically uninvest myself in the story in order to enjoy and found a great deal of fun to be had engaging with the mechanics instead. Vanillaware isn't a stranger to this either, Dragon's Crown had a barebones story at best and simply served to justify why you went from dungeon to dungeon killing monsters. Again, ideally it's both, but that isn't the case a lot of the time either.
Ryallen
2024-04-17 17:44:35 +0000 UTC
