In what seemed like the longest conclusion to a mission-based video game I’ve ever played, I finished Unicorn Overlord. I enjoyed the mechanical challenges posed by the last few missions, as the maps grew longer and the fights within each map more numerous, but each one of those missions felt like it just kept spawning a new mission behind it, despite me being certain that each one must finally be the final mission. It wasn’t bad writing or anything, just a sort of endless series of gotcha moments parading as unexpected twists that were things I absolutely expected given the form of the narrative. There were no surprises for me in any part of this ending other than the realization right at the end that there absolutely must be multiple endings to the game. Which makes a lot of sense in retrospect, given how early you can fight the final mission and how, with the right abilities and weapons, you can just cheese your way through most battles, but it just so happens that I lucked my way into the “best” ending since I did literally everything the game had to offer. I wish that had taken less than ninety hours of gaming time to get that far (with the usual caveat that some of that time was me letting the game run while I did other things because I apparently can’t focus on one thing at a time anymore), but I did it all and only have a few small things left to do, like getting alternate endings, viewing the relationship conversations for all the remaining companions, and fighting a bunch of the same enemy that showed up on my map.

Which I’m sure I’ll do eventually and not completely forget about since I finally took the game out of my Switch console and put The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom in its place. If I do go back, it’ll be because the “good” ending involves the protagonist, Alain, being called the “Unicorn Overlord” by the history books and while I agree that he definitely was that, I do wish the game had grappled with the fact that I basically replaced a vile, conquering emperor with a new, kind emperor who takes care of his people and absolutely still conquers them via humanitarian aid and rebuilding kingdoms with his allies, who all know how easily he could overthrow them, leading said kingdoms from within his shadow. It’s pretty grim when you think about it.

The thing I think about the most, though, as I look back on my time playing the game, is how important battle strategy was until suddenly it wasn’t. Once I figured out what my strong units where, learned what sorts of unit types worked well in concert, and had the ability to let my units act enough times in a battle, I didn’t really lose fights anymore. Sure, if there was a huge disparity in level between my unit and the enemy unit, I would absolutely get wrecked (I unlocked the S-Rank army stuff at level twenty-five and couldn’t even come close to touching Alain’s grandfather until the next time I checked, at level thirty-three, where I could absolutely wreck him), but even being down by three or four levels wasn’t enough to hold me back from easy victories once I got into the higher levels and later parts of the game. I literally brought multiple low-thirties units up to the upper thirties and forties in the final few missions just by building a solid base and shifting my units around until I found the combination or placement that worked against any particular foe. I stopped having to actually think about the game, when my units’ levels where somewhere in the twenties, and just swapped units around on each little battlefield assembly until I found a winning combination. Sure, there a few times where that wouldn’t work, but bringing in another squad would usually just automatically win since the only reasons I’d lose is because the enemy squad was set up in a way that specifically countered the squad I’d sent to fight them. Even that stopped later on, towards the end, when I figured out which enemies each of my squads could face and easily win against well enough that I didn’t have to actively think about it anymore. It didn’t take that much looking or effort to get to that point either, once I knew that the game basically revolved around unit types and placement more than almost anything else.

I didn’t really hate playing the game once I hit that sort of post-strategy period of the game, but I was definitely not enjoying myself as much as I used to. It didn’t really help, either, that I quickly found the limits of the conditional formatting that guided the way each unit used their active and passive abilities. I mean, most combat preparation and detailed planning eventually wound up mattering so little that I stopped changing people’s gear once they had a decent lower-powered weapon since all that really mattered was the abilities my units got from their gear, not the stats associated with said gear. Sure, an extra ten attack from a more powerful sword couldn’t hurt, but it usually helped more to have a weaker sword that healed my unit for ten percent of their hit point total every time they took an action. The amount of disengagement I eventually felt is probably epitomized by the fact that I wound up getting through the last few huge maps with tons of battles pretty quickly since I stopped feeling the need to watch the battles play out (something that’s only really useful when you’re interested in the exchange of blows or in seeing why your chosen strategy isn’t working). It really kind of drained the fun out of the game’s strategic side when it became clear that the path to victory in most of those missions was just using your most powerful units a whole bunch and either using items to restore their stamina or letting them take rests (and using items to end those rests quickly). I tried to bring a bunch of units along for the ride on a few of them, but it almost never worked out since my best units also happened to be my fastest and there was very little point in me letting my other squads struggle when I could just keep blasting through towards my goal with my strong squads. Again, it wasn’t super boring, since each of the last few missions had enough going on that there was always at least some small puzzle for me to solve, but it wasn’t as interesting or engaging as the earlier parts of the game were.

Now, with all this done, Unicorn Overlord has been tucked away into my game case and Echoes of Wisdom has replaced it. I’m having fun with EoW right now, but I’m having a difficult time grasping the scale of the game I’m playing. I’ve had some pretty interesting moments, including accidentally solving a puzzle without having all the pieces because I’d forgotten that there were pieces I was missing (love using the wrong logic to get to the correct answer, especially when it’s technically not the wrong logic so much as tangential logic that is absolutely correct but definitely not the way the problem was supposed to be solved since you relied on game design knowledge rather than in-game information), but I’m kind of disappointed in how empty most of the world is. Sure, you can walk around all kinds of places thanks to the game not limiting your traversal, but it doesn’t require any kind of clever engagement so far and I’ve gotten very little out of actually climbing weird walls or taking non-traditional paths. I’ll have more to say later, but it will probably take me a bit to get deep enough into the game to have a whole post’s worth of stuff to say about it since I am still splitting my time between it and Dragon Age: Inquisition (plus a little Palia and maybe some other games a friend clued me into). Regardless, I shall not lack for things to write about before Veilguard comes out in just a few more weeks.