Garb is obsessed with Unicorn Overlord, which has a demo currently available on Switch, Playstation, and the Orxborx that you can use to get obsessed as well. It's the best kind of demo: it's the real game, just with a time limit, and your progress carries over. A blessing, in this dark age.
It's a Vanillaware game, so it's incredibly beautiful. I think the dynamic must be considered similar to "practical effects" - because I have damp larvae who have only just now chewed through their sacs, they are constantly on the prowl for sustenance. That search extends, yea, even unto the intellectual realm. This means among other things that I have to show them a ton of them Rated R movies. Just broadly, there are many films from the eighties that have lost none of their power to transport the viewer and it's because they involve a lot of handmade physical objects that don't give the mind an out or distract from the media. Had to show them shit like Alien and Aliens, plus a bunch of baller shit like Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. We just don't have any natural defense to this kind of art; it can't be cognitively set to the side. Vanillaware games just look rad and have always looked rad and will continue to do so for this reason. They tend to have whacked out gameplay concepts also. Let's take a look at a few just for shits and giggles:
- GrimGrimoire, a 2D RTS(?!)
- Dragon's Crown, a z-axis sidescrolling action RPG in the vein of the Dungeons & Dragons ones, which makes sense, because their fucking founder designed and drew that game
- Odin Sphere/Muramasa, novel 2D action RPGs, inheritors/redeemers of Princess Crown
- 13 Sentinels, a… I don't really know what this is exactly, but not in a bad way.
Even when they syntactically conform to a genre, in practice they can't help but get weird with it. So while Unicorn Overlords is technically a "tactical role-playing game," in practice it's a wacky mashup of wargaming, tactics, and somehow some MOBA type shit. Success emerges from the Units you deploy, except the Units You Deploy are handmade little formations - dark watchworks filled with cruel purpose - and you program their behavior based on various gameplay events and outcomes, which the game calls Conditions. I was too much of a stickler at the time to appreciate Final Fantasy XII's "gambit system," but these two concepts are if not siblings then first cousins at least. Using the abilities of the characters you put in your group, you say when you want their techniques to trigger and what priority these should occur in. When they fight, it's not quicktime shit or something - they just do what you said. Some people don't like that, but I'm down to fucking clown. It pulverizes drudgery. If I want to get all the way into moving a bunch of little dorks around, I wouldn't go here for that. I will, however, go here for this.
There's some nuance to how units are positioned on the overworld map, and losing a fight might not mean the unit is destroyed; there's some boardgame shit in here. I wish it was launching on PC, because that's where I am at currently, but I should be able to find and use one of the three Switch consoles we have in this house.
(CW)TB out.
