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.
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