Now that I’ve finally cleared Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, I’ve returned to playing through Unicorn Overlord in whatever spare gaming hours I’ve got that aren’t dedicated to playing through the Dragon Age franchise (which have been a lot, lately, since I’ve been too tired to engage with Dragon Age). In fact, I just cleared one of the two major plot beats introduced after the initial setup–forming the rebellion that would make up the core of the game and rescuing the childhood friend who got kidnapped the instant they got off the boat in one of the most infuriating cases of “don’t just stand there, jackass. Do something!” I’ve ever seen–and unlocked a massive slew of support conversations that I’d been sitting on since I realized I could just spend the ample money I earned in the game to increase everyone’s support levels. While the plot doesn’t reflect the writing chops brought to bear on giving voice to the characters, it’s impossible to deny that this game knew what it wanted to provide and provided it: excellent character writing (and voice acting!). As I worked through this bevy of unlocked conversations, I was reminded anew of how much I enjoyed the incredibly unique depictions of each character via their writing and the interesting mix of subtext and text sprinkled into the conversations between all of them. I’m fond of saying that the writer can only bring half of the work to any storytelling and it is up to the reader to provide the other half, but that’s not exactly true. Readers can bring much more, overwhelming the writer’s work, and writers can work in such a way that leaves the reader with little room to interpret. Unicorn Overlord has a bunch of interesting examples of both explicit and implicit information, as some character relationships are defined in fairly clear terms, some are left ambiguous enough for the reader to interpret, and some give so little information that it is almost entirely on the reader to see more than what is shown.

Perhaps the best example of this, and perhaps the most well-known version of it given the popularity of the relationship during the first month or two after the game came out, is one of the early characters you can recruit, a priest named Sharon. She is often remarked on as being attractive and having a lot of romantic pursuers, but most of her support conversations set this idea aside as the men she can grow close to largely avoid an expression of romantic interest. Even the conversation with the lead, Alain, who is the only character that seems to be able to have some kind of player-chosen romance through a mid-game plot development (I haven’t actually made my choice yet, but the game seems to be signaling what this choice means pretty clearly), seems to reflect more of a friendly companionship than anything romantically inclined, even if it is possible to interpret the subtext of their final support conversation as being romantic. Still, when you get an actually romantic support conversation between Sharon and her angelic guardian, Ochlys, even the subtext seems to go from being subtext to overt text, doing a great job of establishing a relationship without needing to exult in its existence. It reads like a long-standing relationship that is growing and shifting as the people in it grow and shift, rather than some wild coming-together of two people that have always secretly harbored feelings for each other. It is expressed as factual and obvious without needing to name it in plain terms, the way that two people who have been together for a long time might actually appear to people just meeting them. The writers don’t spell it out, but it is still clear enough that it is difficult to interpret the conversations in any other way unless you’re deliberately avoiding it.

Most of the other examples I have involve Alain, the protagonist of the game. In one of his support conversations, it is very clear that the other character, an Elven woman and a ruler from the land of the Elves, and Alain are in some kind of relationship. The text spells out their mutual attraction, their desire for intimacy (non-sexual, of course, since this isn’t that kind of game), and how strongly they feel for each other by the end of the third conversation, even dipping into how it would be difficult for them, as rulers, to handle such a relationship even though their counties are neighbors and, at this point, allied. Then there’s another example, with that Elven woman’s sister, actually, where there is much more room for interpretation. This other Elven woman makes her interest and desire clear (in other support conversations, even), but Alain remains non-committal, even if he does show that he cares for her. He never comes out and says how he feels, though his actions could certainly be interpreted as being romantically interested. It would be incredibly easy to read their interactions as romantic, just as it would be the same for many other characters (largely female, but not always). Then, at the far end of the spectrum, the conversations seem to stand parallel to the characters’ relationships, such as the final support conversation between Alain and Lex, his childhood friend and up-and-coming retainer. Seeing that as anything other than a moment shared about their past and a basic pledge of Lex’s loyalty would take a lot of work on the readers’ part and it would be a pretty long stretch to describe it as romantic.

Compared to other games with similar support and romance mechanics, Unicorn Overlord stands out because it actually does the work to more explicitly define some of these relationships before getting to the final tier (which, in some of these games, such as Fire Emblem: Three Houses, only allow one character to get that far with the protagonist/player stand-in). This means that Unicorn Overlord can depict a mix of platonic and romantic intimacy, relying on the somewhat natural ambiguity of some relationships as seen from the outside to bridge the gaps between the two or three support conversations you can have with those characters and whatever relationship you want to see between them as the reader/player. That said, some of those relationships are more heavily defined than others, as you learn about characters with past connections, familial connections, or bitter enmity, but that allows them to explore some of these dynamics a bit more broadly by having a framework to work within. Fire Emblem: Three Houses is probably the closest game to compare since it also invests heavily in the relationships of the NPCs with each other, including written-out endings for the characters who are close to each other and what their futures together look like (including everything from marriage to hints of love during a life of adventure to platonic friendship as they raise their separate families near each other). Since all of the relationships in FE:3H need to have the door left open for their attachment to the player character, via romance or close friendship as NPC’s situation allows, there’s a level of definition required in each relationship that leaves you with little ambiguity to consider. If the gender and sexual orientation of the characters allows for it, every relationship is romantic. If not, then it is purely platonic. Each relationship comes down explicitly on one side or another, with one or two small exceptions between the NPCs.

In Unicorn Overlord, though, such ironclad relationships are much more a reflection of the individual characters than the gender and sexual orientation of said characters. There is one support conversation I saw, between Alain and a woman (who, like the Elven women mentioned above, will go unnamed for the purposes of avoiding spoilers) who had been saved by the Liberation Army, made it clear that while the two of them had spent a bunch of time together, there was nothing romantic about their relationship and perhaps even barely platonic, at that. Then there is another, between a Alain and another royal, that doesn’t seem to stray towards any romantic undertones. It avoids them so perfectly that it seems to be hinting at something behind those words that is not shown on screen (which is reminiscent of how homosexual relationships were talked about and depicted in late 19th and early 20th century armies) to the point that it difficult to consider any other interpretation. While most of the characters relationships tend to skew romantic along lines of heterosexuality, romance is not as heavily confined to the “one male and one female, with two notable bisexual exceptions” system that Fire Emblem: Three Houses was. There’s a lot more room for non-heterosexual interpretation even if there aren’t as many explicitly examples of it (which, again, in FE:3H is basically two of each of the two depicted genders).

Anyway, I’ve still got most of two continents left to explore, a bunch of third-tier support conversations to have, and who knows how many more hours of gameplay to go before I finish with the game. I don’t know if I’ll have anything else to say about the game until the end since I’m pretty sure I’m out of interesting things to consider other than the battle mechanics and I think that’s going to be most of my final thoughts on the game. After all, I’m really not expecting to have much to say about the plot. It’s pretty thin and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing (and, since this game seems to know what it wants to do and is doing it well, entirely unnecessary), it really won’t give me much to think about or say at the end of a game. I’ll also continue collecting data on this relationship and support conversation stuff, but I’ll probably only cover it again if any of the patterns I wrote about shift or change in a significant way. I don’t want to beat this topic to death, after all. Gotta leave some room for you all to make up your own minds about it all.