Unicorn Overlord - Tactical RPG by Vanillaware

[Jaedar]

Not really good news if topping the charts doesn't even give you a million.

That really depends on how much it cost to develop.

 

[I eat frozen vegetables]

Atlus is gauging interest for a sequel.

 

[Yosharian]

Release it on Steam and watch it sell millions

But noooo apparently they hate money

 

[I eat frozen vegetables]

Release it on Steam and watch it sell millions

But noooo apparently they hate money

Such is the fate of many other companies who don't bring their games to PC.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Not really good news if topping the charts doesn't even give you a million.

That really depends on how much it cost to develop.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it cost under a million to make.

When they were doing 13 Sentinels, George Kamitani said something about wanting to do something with a smaller budget than Dragon’s Crown, which was their biggest budget game. And Dragon’s Crown cost 100 million yen, which at the time was around $1,000,000.

I’d guess it more than made it’s budget back with the 500,000 units they sold in less than a month.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

I wouldn’t be surprised if it cost under a million to make.

When they were doing 13 Sentinels, George Kamitani said something about wanting to do something with a smaller budget than Dragon’s Crown, which was their biggest budget game. And Dragon’s Crown cost 100 million yen, which at the time was around $1,000,000.

I’d guess it more than made it’s budget back with the 500,000 units they sold in less than a month.

Director	Takafumi Noma
Planners	Wataru Nakanishi, Koji Yasumura, Takuma Hori, Hiroshi Nishimura, Takeshi Furukawa
Programmers	Takafumi Noma, Takashi Nishii, Shun Terauchi, Takahiro Suzuki, Yoshiki Shimada, Muneyoshi Mori, Subaru Inaba, Teruhisa Kanayama, Kentarō Ōnishi (as Kentaro Ohnishi)
Character Design	Takafumi Noma, Masami Yanagi
Character Animation	Akira Murakami, Yasuhiro Fujiwara, Yasuo Shirai, Takehiro Shiga, Masami Yanagi, Kouichi Maenou, Tomoyo Shimabukuro, Yukiko Hirai, Emika Kida, Sho Matsumoto, Nami Waku, Arisa Yamamoto, Yu Okada, Rio Ikegami
Background Design	Yukitsuna Maeda, Hiroshi Yamamori, Kaiji Suehiro, Tatsuki Iwamoto, Ryo Kobayashi, Daichi Yamashita
UI Design	Daichi Yamashita, Naoya Tsurumi
Title Logo Design	Yoshio Nishimura
Special Thanks	Mamoru Okada, Satonori Kawagishi, Ibuki Nakashima, Masako Noma, Taku Wakabayashi, Toshio Sano, George Kamitani

Not including the costs of music and voice-acting. Vanillaware's staff must subsist on peanuts ramen.

 

[Reinhardt]

Atlus is gauging interest for a sequel.

this is survey in question -

https://enq.sega.jp/orca/PA95361811

tell them directly you want pc version.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

I wouldn’t be surprised if it cost under a million to make.

When they were doing 13 Sentinels, George Kamitani said something about wanting to do something with a smaller budget than Dragon’s Crown, which was their biggest budget game. And Dragon’s Crown cost 100 million yen, which at the time was around $1,000,000.

I’d guess it more than made it’s budget back with the 500,000 units they sold in less than a month.

Director	Takafumi Noma
Planners	Wataru Nakanishi, Koji Yasumura, Takuma Hori, Hiroshi Nishimura, Takeshi Furukawa
Programmers	Takafumi Noma, Takashi Nishii, Shun Terauchi, Takahiro Suzuki, Yoshiki Shimada, Muneyoshi Mori, Subaru Inaba, Teruhisa Kanayama, Kentarō Ōnishi (as Kentaro Ohnishi)
Character Design	Takafumi Noma, Masami Yanagi
Character Animation	Akira Murakami, Yasuhiro Fujiwara, Yasuo Shirai, Takehiro Shiga, Masami Yanagi, Kouichi Maenou, Tomoyo Shimabukuro, Yukiko Hirai, Emika Kida, Sho Matsumoto, Nami Waku, Arisa Yamamoto, Yu Okada, Rio Ikegami
Background Design	Yukitsuna Maeda, Hiroshi Yamamori, Kaiji Suehiro, Tatsuki Iwamoto, Ryo Kobayashi, Daichi Yamashita
UI Design	Daichi Yamashita, Naoya Tsurumi
Title Logo Design	Yoshio Nishimura
Special Thanks	Mamoru Okada, Satonori Kawagishi, Ibuki Nakashima, Masako Noma, Taku Wakabayashi, Toshio Sano, George Kamitani

Not including the costs of music and voice-acting. Vanillaware's staff must subsist on peanuts ramen.

They probably do OK. 44 people. Make something that cost, let’s say it does cost a million, that cost a million dollars and sells 500,000 in less than a month for (at least in America) $59.99. That’s not bad.

 

[wolfbane]

Completed this game just a few days ago. I really thoroughly enjoyed it. I tried the demo when it first dropped and I almost uninstalled when I saw it was a real-time auto battler lol. I was expecting Fire Emblem (of which I am a major fan). I decided to give it a bit more of a chance and ended up falling in love with the game. I think I did nearly every quest you can, save for a few treasure hunts. The interaction with the overworld was great, and every continent was fun and exciting. Standout continents are Elheim and Palevia. True Ending was pretty awesome, and I really enjoyed all of it. The battle map design did seem to get a little repetitive towards the end but, to be fair, I went out of my way to do every single battle in the game. The overall plot was fairly generic, but it worked well for me and I was engaged for the entire run of the game. Overall a solid 10/10 game for me, and I would love to play sequels. The Bastorias arc felt almost like a different game haha, but I still enjoyed it. This was my first Vanillaware game, but you can bet it won’t be my last. I’ve gone and bought a few of their other games and I’m excited to play them.

 

[Reinhardt]

melisandre and virginia(well, their class ability to dual-wield) buffed in new patch. also you can refight awakened amalia outside of arena in each region. she's not alone anymore, instead she fields full party consisting of national troops.

 

[Abu Antar]

I've been progressing slowly but steadily. In the northern continent, all +units maxed out, so not enough slots for all recruited characters. Getting some of the star iron weapons + some of the special weapons from the fights at gates. My most useful units are in the lower 30's, while I have some units in the lower twenties. In the coliseum, I'm at seventh place. Yesterday, I did some online gifting, and it went pretty well, except for one fight that I lost to the person who was ranked 13th in the world. Having lost, I still feel like my unit did decently, but I was just outleveled and outgeared. I won't spend much time on online figting, but it's fun to pit your tactics against the ones of other units.

 

[Jacob]

So uhh finally Vanillaware made a game with an actually interesting gameplay?

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Unicorn Overlord has turn-based combat in which characters' actions are determined by a set of conditional statements laid down by the player beforehand, along with a real-time battle component during which the individual units engage on contact with each other resulting in that aforesaid turn-based combat, and these battles themselves are initiated as part of a still-broader layer. Meaning that it is drastically different from the action-based gameplay found in Dragon's Crown, Muramasa, or Odin Sphere, as well as the tower defense combat of 13 Sentinels.

Of course, at least three of those earlier games have good gameplay in their own right.

 

[Jacob]

Unicorn Overlord has turn-based combat in which characters' actions are determined by a set of conditional statements laid down by the player beforehand, along with a real-time battle component during which the individual units engage on contact with each other resulting in that aforesaid turn-based combat, and these battles themselves are initiated as part of a still-broader layer. Meaning that it is drastically different from the action-based gameplay found in Dragon's Crown, Muramasa, or Odin Sphere, as well as the tower defense combat of 13 Sentinels.

Of course, at least three of those earlier games have good gameplay in their own right.

Dragon's Crown, sure, in fact it's the only one of those games that I genuinely enjoy its gameplay. But I'm genuinely curious on how the "tower defense" (I don't think it's tower defense, more like rtwp tactics something) part of 13 Sentinels could be considered "good."

 

[deftonesrcool]

Release it on Steam and watch it sell millions

But noooo apparently they hate money

In time, maybe. One of the rare occasions I actually went out and bought a physical copy of a game for my PS5. Unicorn Overlord seems built for PC/Steam Deck more than it does console. Weird scenario.

 

[wolfbane]

Unicorn Overlord seems built for PC/Steam Deck more than it does console.

As far as I can see, Vanillaware has never released a game on PC, ever.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Release it on Steam and watch it sell millions

But noooo apparently they hate money

In time, maybe. One of the rare occasions I actually went out and bought a physical copy of a game for my PS5. Unicorn Overlord seems built for PC/Steam Deck more than it does console. Weird scenario.

They probably don’t see any point. They’re on the Switch. The Steam Deck has sold like a few million maybe, the Switch has sold 139.36 million. They’re a very small team, mostly making stuff specifically aimed at Japan, and they probably don’t want to spend the time and money reworking things to run on something other than a controller.

 

[Yosharian]

Yeah who needs money, it's too much effort to make a control scheme for MKB in exchange for millions and millions of revenue

 

[mediocrepoet]

Yeah who needs to buy games, it's too much effort to buy a game in the format its released on or even figure out how to pirate properly in exchange for millions and millions of games without loading your rig up with more viruses than a Chechen whore.


Wait, what?

 

[Cyberarmy]

Yeah who needs money, it's too much effort to make a control scheme for MKB in exchange for millions and millions of revenue

I played it with mouse and keyboard already

 

[Yosharian]

Yeah who needs money, it's too much effort to make a control scheme for MKB in exchange for millions and millions of revenue

I played it with mouse and keyboard already

Me too

 

[Yosharian]

Jokes aside yes of course it's not trivial to create a competent port of a console game to PC. But the developer is throwing away money, not too mention prestige, fame, etc, by not doing it. This game would sell by the fucking bucketload on Steam. Not only is it an extremely hot genre right now, but it's degenerate as fuck which is highly lucrative on Steam.

 

[Reinhardt]

it's degenerate as fuck

you misspelled "wholesome". like completely opposite to "degenerate".

 

[Saark]

Jokes aside yes of course it's not trivial to create a competent port of a console game to PC. But the developer is throwing away money, not too mention prestige, fame, etc, by not doing it. This game would sell by the fucking bucketload on Steam. Not only is it an extremely hot genre right now, but it's degenerate as fuck which is highly lucrative on Steam.

Only on the codex do you get people whining about devs not doing what would get them the most money, and then whining the next thread over about bad design decisions, delays in releases or bad PC ports just because devs wanted to cash in and appeal to a wider audience instead of continuing to cater to grognards.

They ran out of money before finishing both of their most recent titles, with the CEO having to dive into his own money to keep paying people. You really think they have the time or resources to also simultaneously work on a PC version? The only alternative is them developing it post-release, but then that just means instead of working on patches or a new game entirely, which they probably enjoy, they'd be spending a significant amount of time just getting the game to the PC. And all of that is assuming that they have the technical skill, know-how and tech to actually do it, which is likely not the case either.

I don't own a single console, but I can respect them simply refusing to do PC ports, and more importantly, not letting their publisher outsource the porting to PC. Maybe the success of UO will allow them to do a PC port for their next title, or Atlus will continue pressuring them to do one, but I wouldn't hold my breath and I'd rather have a new Vanillaware title sooner, or not compromise on quality, even if that means I have to play it on an emulator or might not be able to play it myself at all. Whatever their reasoning, "chasing easy money" is a trap many a dev has fallen into and it has lead to shovelware, the decline of gaming in general, and shitty business practices like year-long early access, MTX and a bunch of other dogshit developments.

 

[Jaedar]

They ran out of money before finishing both of their most recent titles, with the CEO having to dive into his own money to keep paying people. You really think they have the time or resources to also simultaneously work on a PC version? The only alternative is them developing it post-release, but then that just means instead of working on patches or a new game entirely, which they probably enjoy, they'd be spending a significant amount of time just getting the game to the PC.

This is flawed reasoning, it's assuming that it's a zero sum game. The original argument is that if they made a PC port, they would recoup the investment massively. More money = more time to develop the next game, possibility to hire more people to do it faster. And less odds of running out of money.

Fromsoft was also quite reticent about pc ports as I recall, but 10 years after dark souls first came to PC, 30% of Elden rings sales were on PC (allegedly). No way it wasn't worth it in the end for them. Would vanillaware have the same success? That is the real question to ask.

(I think: probably yes)

Speaking of Unicorn overlord though, I got a bit bored with it and quit in the snow area. Too much RNG to keep track of stuff and model fights in my head, so I just look at the combat preview. And I also found myself using fewer and fewer squads, and relying more on doomstacking the good unique units/items. Last few fights felt more like shepherding my weak formations so they can leech some xp, rather than any kind of tactical challenge.