Zenoira
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Boss spoilers ahead.
That last boss is ridiculous. I will never beat this game. Advice: level your main protag. A lot. If you donāt you will also not beat this game. Fucking surprise attack that turns all of your troops against you. And the only cure is to use a skill that costs four fucking valor. Or you can kill them, and maybe use one of the limited use items to revive them of course. Just for them to be turned again because that boss keeps spamming that attack regularly, though tbf itās only hitting in a straight line afterwards and not all units at once. Still unlimited range and wrecks you good though, because it makes it impossible to defend any of your conquered bases. And if you lose a base you lose valor. Which you need a lot of. Itās nuts.
Like how even hold your home base and avoid losing I have no idea. Probably deploy and withdraw in a timely fashion? Bait the attack with shit units? Itās fucking nuts. There must be some trick to it Iām missing.
Anyway, Iām done. This game got a lot more interesting for me on the last island though. Like I had to deploy and maneuver my units carefully, actually use items and skills sparingly and effectively. Some actual resource management there at the end. Low on funds, healing items are expensive. You can probably grind the trials or whatever, but I didnāt. All in all a real good time. Still a bit of a cakewalk. Until that last boss of course.
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The final boss (or is it?) also surprised me by being so much more difficult than the battles leading up to it.
I found that only one of my units could do significant damage. (I was too lazy to try reconfiguring any of them to specifically address the boss; I just cycled through them to find which ones could do any damage at all.) I did manage to defeat enough other units to always have enough valor to win back the mind-controlled ones (except once when I wasnāt really paying attention and one attacked first).
The unit that worked for me was
- Doom Knight
- Dark Marquess
- Druid
- Werefox
- Werefox
This was basically my best unit in general for most purposes, focused on causing and exploiting status effects (druid with sandstorm and the others with fire and poison).
Fortunately in typical RPG fashion I rarely or never used the most valuable items so I had them available as a cheap crutch at the end.
Another thing that threw me in the final parts of the game is that when you power up the Unicorn ring it apparently gets unequipped. Thereās a point where youāre required to use its ability (which I donāt think the game is very clear about) and after losing many units and using many items I noticed that empty accessory slot.
1 Like
i think one of the issues iām having right now (in the snow land with the beast people) is that itās unclear to me if some of my teams are just bad configurations or if theyāre bad configurations for these particular areas. again, the game doesnāt really give the player enough feedback to know why certain combos work or donāt work, or why some units that seem like they should be fine just get decimated.
at the moment, i feel like i have 5 really good units and then the rest are variable and unpredictable.
iāve also noticed the predictions that the game makes about fight results uhhh change? from moment to moment, sometimes? iāll send out a unit to go to a fight that the game says theyāll definitely win, then i check in before they reach the other unit, and suddenly weāre looking at multiple deaths.
game is maybe a little too big for its britches imo
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I get this a lot and I think itās because there is a difference between the initial battle prediction when moving a unit and then the change in circumstances when they get there. Ranged/healing assists are usually to blame since they arenāt factored in when first moving to an individual unit, even though the player should be made aware of them.
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Yeah the game will predict how the battle will go with the current RNG.
If a character with a 50% hit rate will miss, the damage from the attack wonāt be shown in the prediction.
But if the RNG changes (because another formation went into another battle for example), the random numbers are different, that 50% hit rate attack might now hit, and the whole battle will lead to a different result.
Thatās why you sometimes get lower damage or get hit harder if you use assists - assists are used first in battle and use some random numbers, so if theyāre used, the random numbers of every subsequent attack changes.
An attack that misses when an assist was used before would have hit without the assist, and the game predicts all of it in its battle predictions
The game would be so cool if battle predictions could be disabledā¦ thinking about the reddit guy who put scotch tape on his tv to hide the area showing the damage prediction
4 Likes
yeah this is kind of what iāve assumed in most cases
i guess something else that bugs me is that they give you so many characters - more than you could ever fit into the roster, and itās a real investment to build up a character, so can i really be expected to swap folks in and out, willy nilly? (the answer is no, for me)
iām trying to get all my units to 5 members each now, but itās going to take a grind.
the only unit i have that feels totally useless and will probably need to be repurposed is a the combo of: Fighter, 2 Elven Fencers, Druid - they just canāt seem to do anything really
Anyone got any tips on whether itās worth upgrading units to 5 members or just promoting all my babies? Feels like Promotions is just a straight improvement whereas a 5 person unit carries risks of activating full row/full column abilities.
iāve been doing both - everyone i could upgrade is upgraded, so now iām just trying to get 5-person teams.
iām in the last area and a few of my units now seem kind of useless, and some are overpowered - i donāt feel like iāve ever gotten a grasp on how or why things work the way they do, and i feel like i need to drag myself over the finish line with this game. iām kind of wondering if beating the game is possible if i have like 3-4 units that are really good - is it totally necessary for me to have every unit be great?
i think the other aspect that feels unpredictable is what kinds of weaknesses units will have in the end game. i guess i can just restructure my teams?
2 Likes
One thing I found I had to watch out for is when a character levels up and gets a new ability. It automatically sits at the top of the list and can mess up your programmed triggers. Even if itās a good ability, it can make the unit much weaker until you make adjustments. Same thing with the abilities you get from weapons and even sometimes accessories.
I often removed the abilities that consumed a lot of AP unless they were an important part of my setup.
That said, one thing I never quite figured out is exactly when a character runs out of moves. Do they have a defined number of generic attacks aside from the abilities that use active or passive points? Seemed that way but I never analyzed it closely.
Iām in a similar boat, one unit was doing 500+ damage, tanking everything while others barely get out of most encounters without at least 1 person dead.
This fucked me over mid-stage because a character just stopped doing the thing they were set up to and suddenly no damage, unit die.
I think thereās a natural limit. My guess is itās the unitās maximum AP/PP+1 of extra actions that they get from getting +PP/AP from abilities mid-combat. You see it a lot with sellswords, otherwise they could theoretically attack forever at the end of initiative. The limit is there for balance but (like many things) never really told to the player.
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yeah i definitely mess with the legally-distinct-gambit system but it feels like later on, some early classes just canāt deal with the latter classes. i guess the key is to reconfigure your units all the time
I didnāt have to reconfigure very often (playing on normal) and almost never for specific fights, but I did sometimes reshuffle several of my units at once to try to make them all more effective.
Some characters that were pretty strong individually (such as Josef) I ended up not using at all toward the end of the game. With so many named units, you technically never need to use generics but I did in several units just because a certain combo outperformed an assortment of individually strong but not necessarily complementary characters.
(As I understand it, thereās no difference between named and generic characters. Any two characters with the same class, level, and personality traits are going to have the same stats.)
Some of my strongest units early on (such as a couple with three horses in front) ended up being some of my weakest by the end of the game, but that was probably just because I didnāt come up with the right set of complementary classes and abilities. I just used them for ācleanupā (such as getting the last hit in on a weakened unit when possible) sometimes so theyād gain levels along with everyone else.
Speaking of, one thing I forgot to do more than not but that I should have done every time is use Royal Order on whoever was going to get the last hit in on the ābossā unit of a scenario. Doing that can sometimes jump you two or three levels in one shot.
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the end is in sight. iām now in the process of finishing up sidequests remaining like treasure hunts and gathering hidden weapons etc. i have basically every unit up to 5 members, except for one, which is my worst unit. i feel like, even if i level them up to 5, they will still suck.
my hope is to polish the game off in the next few days - i just have a few liberation missions left, and then the final(?) battle.
i just looked up to see if there was a New Game+ for this, andā¦somehow there isnāt? i feel like the best-case scenario for understanding this game would have been to let me start over with all my units so i can experiment with configurations, but i guess that wouldnāt work for story purposes. still, kind of a bummer!
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i beat this last night - i donāt know exactly what level Alain was at (i think around 46?) but the Valor Skill that clears everyoneās mind only cost me 1 Valor, not 4, so i had overprepared for that whole battle.
i might say that this is my āleast favoriteā Vanillaware game, but i donāt mean to say i disliked it. ultimately, i just did not really care about any of these characters, or the stakes. there are some moments that touched me because iām old now. for example, seeing Alain reunited with his mom was nice. but overall, there are just too many people in this game. around the time i made it to the North Country, i just kind of stopped paying as much attention to the trials and tribulations of these folks i was encountering. it doesnāt help that most characters disappear from the main story once youāve moved on from their homeland. yes, there are these moments you can see by seeking out the friendship events, but most of these are like āletās go shopping!ā or something equally banal.
the game is good at scope and scale and making you feel like youāve been on a long journey, but ultimately it just couldnāt make me care very much. i also understand that thematically the game wants to present a very optimistic and idealistic vision of what people can be, but i think it comes off naive and, and even trite at times. like yes, in theory it would be really nice if everyone who ever committed an atrocity came to their senses and joined the forces of good, but this is not reality. i guess the game works more as a fable, or a fairy tale, and perhaps iām judging it based on preconceived ideas of what this kind of game is āsupposed to be.ā
Matsuno, for example, really captures the realities of politics and murder and succession issues. you expect betrayals, and a lack of forgiveness, and violence that is avoidable but necessary for the aims of the gameās characters. Unicorn Overlord presents a world wherein everyone truly, actually, can just get along.
i donāt hate that, but it doesnāt really do anything for me, personally. itās endearing, i guess, and cute, but since i doubt weāll see these characters again, iām not sure what iām supposed to take away from this whole experience.
i never really, actually, learned what all the classes can do and why they do what they do against other classes. if i were an obsessive, i believe in time i could do this. maybe if there were a really robust after-game, or some huge, super hard DLC planned for this game, it would make sense to have so many classes and characters and locales, but as it is, i feel like i made it through without needing to think too hard about anything. there are a few skill checks throughout the game, but they mostly teach you how and when to deploy, how fast you should be going, etc. usually i would just deploy a unit, check how theyād do against an enemy, and if they wouldnāt do well, iād withdraw them and deploy another unit. sometimes i could predict which units would do well, but often it was just random checking.
i do really like the online colosseum. i donāt know why. iām currently ranked 11 for this session, until the end of the month, i guess. i didnāt realize you can only do 10 battles in each period (i thought it refreshed daily), so i did them all in one go.
i had Alain marry Berengaria, because she is goth and hot and kills everyone, but i thought the ending was really dismissive and it actually annoyed me (it says that her sharp wit made her a bad fit as Queen so Alain tasks her with reforming a band of mercenaries. what?)
iām glad i played all the way through and iāll actually probably do some of the end game stuff and keep working on colosseum battles, but i would really like to see a UI sequel that tightens things up more.
edit: OH i canāt believe i forgot to include this. the only other thing i feel really critical about with this game is itās yet ANOTHER RPG wherein some ancient tragic civilization is trying to be reborn and supplant the current occupants of the world. i guess this has only been in three games iāve played (as far as i can currently remember), but it does feel like itās becoming a trope the way RPGs reused the idea of fighting God at the end of the game (sometimes for fun, sometimes because theyāre the real bad guy, etc.). i donāt know long this game had been in development, but some part of me feels like that if i were a scenario writer, i would have maybe altered it at least a little bit.
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Re: your edit spoiler: this is also FF14, if you didnāt have that on your list
yeah that was the original one where i saw this
and itās still the best!
Everyone out here biting Creative Business Unit 3ās style
More like uncreative business unit heyo
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itās frustrating because 13 sentinels actually had really nice writing with acceptable challenge and balancing and I feel like that played far more to vanillawareās strengths.
I swear there is something about Matsuno dialogue and presentation that people just cannot seem to put their finger on and always miss the point of in these cover acts. I know I only posted the screenshots that were about being Italian but I actually do believe that my FFT rewrite is the best thing thatās been done with Matsuno writing in the last 20 years
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I never even attempted the online coliseum. When I first came across it, none of my units had five characters and every one I saw there did. So I figured I wouldnāt have a chance. And I guess I never went back because I assumed everyone who participated would have perfectly-tuned units that would steamroll mine.
It might have been interesting to see some of these be insincere and end up turning against you somehow, even if just running off with some equipment or something like that. But of course anything like that would probably be very unpopular so I can understand why they wouldnāt dare even if they wanted to. (Itās a little surprising that they even have that little team run off temporarily and disrupt your formations.)
Then again, some games of this type have permanent death and I guess players tolerate that (or reload saves so it never happens). Thinking about it right now, as much as I liked the GameCube Fire Emblem game I barely remember the story except for one thing, a character who died and had a little tribute at the end relating which battle they died in. (I donāt think I let that be permanent intentionally; it was something about timing of saves in a two-part battle.)
At first those decisions in Unicorn Overlord feel like moral dilemmas in the moment but with sparing everyone never having negative consequences and almost always resulting in free new recruits, they soon become unremarkable and just make the whole story seem a little more implausible.
That said, I found that I came to appreciate the earnestness and sincerity of the personalities in the game, even if it might not be realistic. And I think the developers were going for a smooth, comfortable experience that isnāt ever going to set you back much (or even make you watch a single cutscene or battle if you donāt want to).
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