Highlights

  • Unicorn Overlord, a unique strategy RPG hybrid from Vanillaware and Atlus, takes inspiration from classics like Ogre Battle and Fire Emblem.
  • The long development of Unicorn Overlord was driven by a desire to create a new take on classic 90s strategy RPGs while staying true to the genre.
  • Balancing visuals, unit types, and narrative complexity was key in developing Unicorn Overlord to provide a fun experience for fans of the genre.

One of the more unexpected, but welcome, surprises of the September 2023 Nintendo Direct was the reveal of Unicorn Overlord. Coming from talented developer Vanillaware and published by Atlus, this unique strategy and tactics RPG hybrid takes Vanillaware's penchant for crafting captivating hand-drawn visuals and merges it with inspirations pulled from some of the genre's all-time greats, such as Ogre Battle, Fire Emblem, and the Sega Saturn classics Dragon Force and Dragon Force 2. It's been nearly five years since the release of Vanillaware's last game, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, and the developers recently revealed that both it and Unicorn Overlord began their development at roughly the same time.

Following the release of Vanillaware's side-scrolling action-RPG Dragon's Crown, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim would begin development in 2013. A year later, in 2014, Unicorn Overlord director Takafumi Noma and producer Akiyasu Yamamoto would submit the initial proposal for the game. After roughly two years of conceptualization and planning, development on Unicorn Overlord would begin in earnest in 2016 after securing publishing from Atlus. Interestingly, the original proposal for the title was submitted in March 2014, meaning that its launch date of March 8, 2024 will see the game arrive almost exactly 10 years after its conception.

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Trying Something 'New' Within the Genre Resulted in Unicorn Overlord's Long Development

In an interview conducted at last year's Tokyo Game Show, both Yamamoto and Naru, along with designer Wataru Nakanishi, spoke about the inspirations behind Unicorn Overlord and compared it to how the company approached making Dragon's Crown. While Dragon's Crown's genesis came from a place of wanting to modernize and reinvent the classic beat 'em up genre and inject it with some RPG mechanics, Unicorn Overlord was birthed from a desire to reimagine the classic strategy and tactical RPGs of the 1990s on the PlayStation and Sega Saturn. However, the key was that the studio needed to find a way to inject its own flair into the genre and provide something new that would feel simultaneously familiar and exciting.

According to Noma, the biggest goal that the team had (and the one that led to the game taking a significant amount of time to develop) was attempting to pull Unicorn Overlord's primary inspiration not from a single game, but the entire genre. By drawing all the disparate elements from classic games that the team enjoyed (Ogre Battle and Dragon Force's mix of commanding individual units and entire armies on the field, Fire Emblem's character relationships, etc.), Nakanishi and Noma hoped to build a game that should feel right at home for fans of the genre but also provide a unique amalgamation of systems and mechanics.

Balancing Unicorn Overlord's Story, Presentation, and Gameplay Took Time

The first thing that most fans will notice about Unicorn Overlord are its striking visuals, something that developer Vanillaware has a long and storied tradition of including in all of its titles. Not only does crafting all of these hand-drawn assets take time, but the different unit types at play in the game were continually being rebalanced. The tweaks to the various unit types to provide a more even balancing of difficulty were primarily done to prevent certain classes from being "broken", and this naturally led to additional time needed to redesign the look and animations of the units.

And of course, it would be nearly impossible for Unicorn Overlord to be a true homage to the strategy and tactics greats of the 1990s without a complex narrative grounded in political intrigue like Tactics Ogre or Final Fantasy Tactics' now-legendary storylines. Noma notes that Vanillaware's ultimate goal was to make the story and gameplay balance something that players would walk away from with a definitive feeling of it being "fun". The director states that much of the game's development time fell to "trial and error", but it seems as if the end result will be well worth the wait for fans of the genre.