Beat the game! 67 hours. I did most of the completionist content like upgrading all towns, obtaining all weapons from those tomb-battles, finding all treasures, etc., and now there's a bit of a post game to explore. The multistage final battle and true final boss were EPIC! One of the best RPG final battles in recent memory. TONS of enemies to fight and the minibosses / bosses were genuinely tough battles. The ending is very indulgent, like what you get at the end of Fallout, Earthbound, or Suikoden 2. You get paragraphs for every single character you recruited, plus you can explore the post-game map and talk to a bunch of familiar NPCs. On later playthroughs I'll have to recruit everyone and not execute the annoying ones, at least to see how their story ends.
Toward the end, I found myself skipping most of the rapport conversations. With that said, I liked most of the characters in terms of voice acting, how they perform in battle, and how they look. A handful of characters are genuinely good in the story department too.
Battle system is incredibly fun. I hope Vanillaware makes an expansion to add bigger maps and more units. This game is dying for a map-editor. The longer slugfests were my favorite battles but there aren't very many of em in the campaign. Things like artillery, capturing deploy-points, resting your units, traps, hidden units, and barriers matter a whole lot more over the course of the match when it's a big map. There isn't a single unique mechanic in this game yet there's no battle system quite like it.... similar to Ogre Battle, Phantom Brave, Warcraft 3, Fire Emblem, Soul Nomad & The World Eaters, X-COM, and several other notable games.
With a battle system this good, the game needs more battles to fight. It also needs a longer tail on the player's power growth. Colosseum battles and replayable Sigil battles aren't enough. The final battle was SO GOOD, I hope there's at least one or two more battles like that in the post-game. It would've been really nice to get a Tier 3 promotion for the human units and a Tier 2 promotion for the other nation's units. The fact that you only promote about 1/3rd of the available unit types is lame. Halfway through my playthrough, I had already promoted all the units I wanted to promote and never touched the function again. The end-game weapons aren't that much better than mid-tier stuff, and Fevrite levels the playing field anyway. So it kinda sucked how the first half of the game gave an incredible sense of growth, but by the second half it felt like I was coasting along with only a few meaningful upgrades to my army.
The art and animations are so pretty to look at, and full of creativity. The way that a Landsknetch throws their shield into the air for a Bastard Cross and then catches it is so cool. The way a Werebear gets knocked back onto one foot and then regains his balance is always entertaining to watch. The way a female Elven fencer flashes her butt is hilarious (the devs knew what they were doing). Every unit has a fairly unique set of attack animations and it's so cool to see them all in motion. What turn based RPG has battle animations that compare to Unicorn Overlord?
The unicorn-maiden ceremony is goofy. In some cases, you're just giving your best bro a family heirloom. In other cases, you're professing eternal love and holy matrimony. I recommend saving before the ceremony just to see a few different reactions for yourself. Some of them are lame, but others were fun to see. Some of the responses are more... generic, while others have a much more unique reaction (Berengaria and Virginia are both must-see). Watching a few of the boys' ceremonies is worth it, too, just to see how different they are compared to the girls. I ended up going for the obvious megatitty choice, Scarlett. I'll pick someone else next playthrough but I don't think the game is worth replaying just to see a different waifu cutscene at the end and a slightly different dialogue in the post-game area. The romance and dialogue aspect of this game ended up being kinda shallow if I compare it to games like Fire Emblem or Persona. Dialogue between your units is there and there's a decent amount of it to watch/read, but it's mostly teenage anime character-building and isn't all that interesting.
I wish for some deeper empire-building mechanics and more replayability, but I still clocked almost 70 hours for a full playthrough. That's about what I spent on Octopath and Triangle Strategy, but a lot less than I spent on FE Awakening or Disgaea 5.
