The Japanese made video games in 1995 like medieval artisans made stained glass windows—beautiful, cryptic, and curiously-translated things whose full meaning revealed itself only through devotion. Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen stood tall among them, a strategy game that worked like nothing else. You moved armies across maps while an alignment system tracked your moral choices, though nobody explained what those choices meant. Your troops fought in formations that seemed to follow their own arcane logic. The game trusted you to figure it out, or maybe it didn't care if you did.
Time's rendered these games differently. Ogre Battle arrived in American video stores without context, its Japanese manual's explanations lost in translation. Kids rented it based on the box art—two armies of mythological warriors straight out of Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards poised to square off in dubious battle. You figured out its systems alone in your room, piecing together its lore like some archeologist discovering a forgotten civilization. No YouTube tutorials explained its hidden mechanics. No Reddit threads debated optimal party builds. You learned by doing or you didn't learn at all.
Unicorn Overlord knows this history. It builds on those foundations with modern sensibilities, created by artisans at Vanillaware who understand exactly what made those old games magical. The old games were obtuse because nobody knew better. This one's clear because its makers learned from 30 years of iterations. Your armies move with purpose across gorgeous hand-drawn maps that recall the best anime backgrounds of the 1990s. Characters join your rebellion carrying their own stories, their own reasons for fighting. The art sings with detail—every warrior, wizard, werebeast, and wildly-endowed witch rendered in loving detail by artists who grew up studying the classics.
The story runs familiar tracks, but they're tracks worn smooth by meaning. You're the dispossessed prince, gathering forces to retake your kingdom. This plot powered a hundred JRPGs, but Unicorn Overlord understands precisely why it worked. Like those tactical games, it trusts its players to find meaning in small moments between battles. A mercenary joins because you helped his village. A knight defects because you showed mercy to his brother. A beast-warrior follows you because you treated his people with respect. The plot points might be predictable, but the paths between them surprise.
Fantasy works best when it builds its own logic. Some modern games stumble here, like Dragon Age's recent ham-handed foray into our world's sexual politics. They forget the power of creating new worlds with their own rules, their own reasons. Unicorn Overlord remembers.
The game's world teems with life drawn from its own imagination. Beast-warriors walk alongside humans not because some committee demanded representation, but because their kingdoms have warred and traded for centuries. The elves carry themselves with pride earned through generations of history you can feel in every interaction. Angels and lost souls play their parts in a cosmic drama that makes sense within the story's own theological framework. Even the nearly-extinct werelions of Bastorias are given their own highly specific culture, their own reasons for fighting that stem from the world's internal logic rather than external pressures.
This is how the best fantasy has always worked. Like it or not, Tolkien's Middle-earth didn't need modern diversity consultants tacking on conversations cut-and-pasted from undergrad gender studies classes because it grew naturally from its own mythological soil. The same truth powers Unicorn Overlord's world. Its characters come from different backgrounds because that's how their world works, not because someone checked boxes on a form. You feel it in the way they interact, in their prejudices and alliances, in the way their cultures clash and combine as your rebellion grows.
A merchant from the beast kingdoms haggles differently than an elven trader. A human knight's honor means something different than a werebear's pride. These differences matter because they follow logically from the plan of the world itself. When members of your army share intimate scenes between battles, the conversations flow naturally across racial and cultural lines, each character bringing their own perspective shaped by their place in this carefully constructed universe.
Combat flows like water now, where once it moved like stone. Your units move in formations that recall Ogre Battle's strange armies, but now every interaction makes sense. Abilities trigger in intricate dances of cause and effect, each unit supporting the others in ways that feel natural rather than numerical. It's complex without being complicated, deep without being obtuse (though, to be fair to Ogre Battle, there’s no unit in this game as cool as the Pumpkinhead). The old games made you learn through failure. This one teaches through success, each victory revealing new tactical possibilities.
The game's world spreads wide but never thin. Five kingdoms wait to be liberated, each imbued by the design team with its own character. The elven forests feel different from the beast-tribes' wilderness, each region painted with the kind of care only obsessive Japanese artists can lavish on anime cels. Cities change as you free them, their markets growing, their people returning. Your army's march reshapes the land behind it, just like in Ogre Battle, but now you can see the change happening.
What's missing can't be replaced. That first time feeling, discovering these strange Japanese games in dim video store aisles, piecing together their secrets all by your lonesome—that's gone forever. The internet killed that kind of discovery. But Unicorn Overlord offers something else: the perfection of the form. Every system that once frustrated is now as smooth as silk. Every story beat lands with practiced grace. Even the menu text reads clearly, a far cry from the mysterious “Engrish” of many vintage Japanese games.
This is how genres mature. The rough edges are polished away. The systems clarify. The art is clearly the ne plus ultra for this genre. Some will miss the ancient mysteries, the way those Japanese games from the 1980s and 1990s felt like extraterrestrial dispatches in search of their Rosetta Stone. But for those who remember what these games once were, who understand what they've become, Unicorn Overlord stands as a testament to their evolution. The Japanese still make gloriously weird video games like this—but they’re patient, professionally-made oddball things that respect their heritage while pushing forward. Unicorn Overlord carries that tradition proudly, even if it can't quite recapture the magic of renting Ogre Battle that first time, when everything was new and nothing needed to be perfect.
