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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Authorial Intent Versus Player Interpretation In Unicorn Overlord’s Support Conversations
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.
Continue readingMissing Fire Emblem? Give Unicorn Overlord A Try
I’d heard a lot of alright reviews of Unicorn Overlord. There were plenty of bits that people seemed to love, some that seemed like they were inserting their preferred headcanon and some that was just people sharing the bits of the game they loved most. For example, there’s an exchange between two women in one of the early encounters that is easily read as incredibly gay. It isn’t a stretch at all and while I’m skeptical of actual lesbian representation in this game, I would be surprised to find out that this relationship isn’t canonical. Needless to say, short videos and screenshots of this exchange made their rounds on the internet in the weeks following the game’s release, which is how the game caught my attention. There’s some later interaction that lend to this kind of read as well, but still nothing that actually outright says it or demonstrates it. Shortly after those images and gifs went around, the absolutely delicious food you can get at taverns in the game–as part of the relationship building mechanics of the game–started showing up in screenshots and helped tip my opinion in favor of trying the game out. It all looks so delicious! Not quite like food in a Ghibli film, but close enough that the comparison is deserving. What really hooked me, though, was learning that it was basically a Fire Emblem type game but with different battle mechanics and a better gaming experience than Fire Emblem: Engage provided in early 2023. Which is a low bar to clear, in my opinion, but an important bar given how much I love those kinds of strategy games and how disappointed I was by Engage.
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