Why Do They Call It an Xbox 360

[ghoulmouse]

Haven't been posting much here but it's pointless to apologize every time I fall off posting, so I won't.

The Game Awards were tonight and for some reason I watch them religiously every year, even though I couldn't possibly care less about most of the games mentioned. It's somehow fun to complain about it with my friends, and in a weird way it makes me feel great about video games in general. Somehow seeing a whole bunch of bloated-budget garbage helps me remember how many incredible games there are out there -- games that were made with love and joy and talent. So many I couldn't play all of them if I spent the rest of my life doing nothing but playing video games. Thoughts include:

-- Congratulations to Okami fans
-- Games which were robbed include: Unicorn Overlord, 1000xResist, Mouthwashing, Animal Well, Nine Sols, probably Prince of Persia: the Lost Crown which I haven't played but everyone I know who did seems to love it
-- Watching them give an award to a guy essentially running damage control for sweeping layoffs was unbearable
-- I have seen so many trailers for Infinity Nikki and not one of them has showed the dressup interface, which I consider a bad sign
-- Creative director for Warframe was onstage and the only person with any fashion sense
-- I don't know why I'm so resistant to Arcane, I guess it's got that League of Legends grime all over it
-- Congrats Balatro
-- I really just cannot get into games with realistic graphics sorry. I need my games to look like somebody made them.

Incidentally I've been playing insane amounts of Unicorn Overlord. I cannot say enough good things about it, honestly -- it's SO good. Pretty much the perfect evolution of the formula set out by Ogre Battle, a formula which so very few strategy games have looked to. I could spend hours micromanaging all my little guys and their equipment and their detailed tactical loadouts.

Unbelievably, it contains a sad blonde prince named Gilbert. Two nickels, etc. He didn't bail on the royal title to go wander around incognito, but his brother did, so I guess it's just a blonde RPG prince thing generally.

I had Alain marry the erstwhile brother, who might be my favorite character? There are a lot of characters but dang it you cannot expect me to resist a dashing swashbuckler who is secretly a prince. He randomly brought up Gilbert while they were exchanging rings, though, so IDK maybe Alain is gonna have to marry both of them. Hope he's open-minded.

I'm encroaching upon the end of the game, though, so I'll need a new RPG to play (probably Romancing Saga 3 or Ni no Kuni 2).

Comments

[muscle_wizard]

I love Unicorn Overlord so much - it's the kind of game that legitimately makes you fall in love with video games again. I'm already a hardcore Vanillaware fan but wasn't prepared for how FUN the game is to play.

I was initially intimidated by the battle system because I'm not a super crunchy numbers person but the set-up allowing me to be hands off actually encouraged me to explore and fine tweak characters. Great game design!!

The characters were sooo good. I also had a fondness for the Drakenhold brothers, excellent taste c: I ended up marrying Aubin because they precision striked me with his character type lol but my favorite overall was Virginia <3_<3

I think my favorite aspect of the game was honestly exploring the map - I never even used Alain's horse once he got it lmao. I was having too much fun wandering on foot.

Every detail in this game was just... /sighs dreamily

[ghoulmouse]

It is SO fucking good. I was cautiously excited because I love Vanillaware's art style (it's basically what I thought "better graphics" were going to look like as a child, lol -- like a drawing come to life) and Ogre Battle is one of my favorite games, so it was like almost too good to be true when I heard this was coming out ...but no, it was that good.

The battle system is extremely well explained -- there are a ton of classes and abilities and they do a really good job of introducing you to everything, and I can't say I encountered any classes/characters I thought were truly sub-par, which is honestly incredible. Ogre Battle is like famously obtuse (there are still essentially urban legends floating around about it to this day) so it was kind of a nice change to go with the increased complexity of the battle system.

I was surprised how much I ended up liking basically all the characters! I don't there were any huge duds for me (I didn't like Scarlett at first but now that I've gotten to Albion and she's spending all her time being gay with the angels there I've warmed up to her, and Lex annoyed me at first because for some reason he kept showing up in unrelated rapport convos early on and I was like, dude can you give me some space here. Maybe I just have an allergy to childhood friends). I feel like almost anybody will have at least one character who is their Type. I actually had a hard time picking who to marry, but ultimately "runaway royal" is maybe one of my favorite RPG tropes of all time and I love fencers. One of the best IRL rapier fencers I ever met had long blonde hair actually so that was also kind of a funny coincidence.

So far my only complaint was that they didn't let me recruit the rat.

[ryulynn]

I just started playing Unicorn Overlord and I can’t stop?? I didn’t even realize you can marry??

I’m totally just having fun with the gameplay. It is so much better than what they were doing with Grand Knights History (although I got stuck because the game necessitated online play for leveling and it’s dead and also I’m not in Japan lol). Playing around with the formations and the tactics is so interesting!

I don’t care for the game awards but I still think it sucks when deserving games get overlooked

[ghoulmouse]

Yeah, it's a plot point later on -- well, it's some kind of ritual where you have to give the "Ring of the Maiden" to the person you care for the most, so it's like...marriage-adjacent, lol. I have to be careful picking up the game because it's SO easy to get sucked into unit design and fiddling with tactics for HOURS.

I've never played Grand Knights History for all those reasons...the servers shut down only a few years after it launched anyway, didn't it? Unicorn Overlord IIRC took like... a zillion years to make, so it was clearly a passion project, which is awesome and also you can absolutely tell.

I don't actually care about the results of the game awards (they always give the awards to AAA sludge anyway), but in a weird way watching it and being like "ugh I would have nominated/awarded THIS instead" is kind of a nice way to reflect about the games that I played this year. Although I'm usually several years behind on releases, unless they're indie games (Unicorn Overlord was an exception because of how much I love Ogre Battle, and I'm really glad I decided to pick it up close to release!)

[lassarina]

I just got Unicorn Overlord as a holiday present and I'm excited to give it a try! At. some point. *dies in backlog*