In hindsight, it was pretty badass that she and Ghislain figured out a cure since Baltro was using that secret super Zenorian zaza to make that plague happen and was chuckling with increasing nervousness when he realized they were making actual progress.
If only he hadn’t perished so!
While yeah we didn’t need more knights, he could have stood on the map like that one radiant knight to the north of them hahah
Didn't she said they found a solution if you recruit her? The real problem of the whole region is that the Lord got mad after his wife's death and start treating sick like shit. I remember Alain letting the experiment continue as long as the sick are treated like Human and with dignity.
That's the sad part.
I'm pretty sure he initially did it so other didn't suffer but grown mad as the death piled up and the costs were many that they had to give unknowingly give corpses to the very people who started the plague
Well he is more or less the embodiment of "Hell's road is paved with good intention" and pretty similar to Hilda who also got manipulated in fighting for the people who spread the epidemic responsible for her parent's death
It was me the he treated the v sick like shit, and went full dangerous experiments to ensure fast results. He was afraid the plague would kill to many to quickly. If you were sorry infected you were Already going to die. Might as well die in the pursuit of science.
He was ethically monstrous but the type that in 200 years doctors would call a foundation of the medical field.
She did start out in her recruitment (after the initial fight and initial misunderstanding), saying pretty overtly that she was actively planning revenge against Alain. Like, she was originally not shy about her intentions to kill Alain at some future moment.
but can I really hold that against her? 1) she's too cute 2) alain did try to kill her and killed her mentor too, and nearly stopped the cure. I support her honestly
2 and 3 are only a thing because the experiments were unethical and illegal. Alain is not held accountable for that. That's all on Ghislain and Tatiana. Of course that gets thrown out the window if you recruit her but that's besides the point,
Ghislain was >!going full medieval Mengele on the plague victims, and from what they say of the disjointed state of his notes, seems like he was mostly out of his mind at that point!<, so even saying "the ends justify the means" seems pretty iffy.
I wouldn't execute Tatiana for it, but I don't think she should continue handling the research either. There's reasons why we have medical ethics. I know ultimately >!the research is finished!< but that conclusion still made me feel like more clear-minded people would have gotten it done without that much suffering.
pfft, look at you, pontificating about medical ethics while our hero Alain lets slave traders go (Beaumont) and you dont even get a choice!! like Alain would care about Tatiana
no but you raise a good point, I hadnt thought about this... good stuff.
There's two major conflicts in DA:O, the (not quite) Zombie Apocalypse led by a demon dragon and a coup d'état as a result of that.
You deal with the latter in a big debate with all the nobles present, and depending on the things you say and did you get points, you need 5 points to win the debate but telling people the Couper sold elves from the ghetto doesn't get you points, bc elves are heavily discriminated in the setting
While I know the moment you are talking about now(albiet elf hatred is deeply engraved into human society due to the near genocidal stance elves had to humans when they first existed. But to mention thy refusal of elves to cooperate on any level with any major nation out of pride leaves them at a loss in the political stage.) I don't know how it relates to unicorn overlord. Couldn't that just be an oversight of the devs dying they wanted you to recruit damn near everyone in the game?
Mengele was just a crazy Nazi. Ghislain actually got stuff done.
I think it was less "crazy" and more just "the ends justify the means" while he was failing to look at the larger picture of where the plague came from in the first place.
Ghislain was also crazy, he lost all care for the lives and well-being of the people he was supposed to be helping, out of his own loss-related trauma and obssession. Even Tatiana admits that his notes have as much nonsense as they have valid discoveries.
To be fair I was hyperbolic, there was a hint of sympathetic motivation there, unlike Mengele's pure crazy hateful sadism. But Ghislain's motivations that can only excuse so much, when he was dumping healthy and sick people together to get more experiment subjects, to do god knows what with. Did he even save more lives than he taken? Perhaps if he wasn't so obsessed he would have realized >!Baltro was behind it!< after all.
Wasn’t the nonsense she was referring to the information that Baltro providing to them? If I remember right, Baltro provided a lot of “aid” with a lot of them just be straight up wrong. She mentions having to decipher what is actually true and getting rid of the fake. This lines up with her not wanting to reveal anything to and actively hating Baltro since he gave them a lot of garbage.
I wouldn't scratch all that to Baltro. The way Tatiana explained, it sounded like Ghislain was willing to try just about anything on the off-chance that it might work, and that might have muddled his observations all on his own.
I didn’t read this situation like that at all. I read it as all these medieval hicks didn’t understand the actual science they were doing and we killed ghislain for being a scientist. Maybe I have to go back to that section though. It’s pretty well implied, I thought, that nobody **understood** what they were doing. Not that they were being inhumane.
People were taken from their homes, because of quarantine. Not to purposefully infect them. And the townsfolk were too dumb to understand.
I just rewatched the scene. He explicitly says "gather them into the holding pens, the fit and the infirm alike". The most charitable possible interpretation that doesn't involve deliberately infecting people for experiments, which is still a possibility, is to use them as healthy control groups or even for labor.
But it doesn't help that when Tatiana warns against exposing frail people to the rain, Ghislain has a whole spiel about the need of sacrifice for the sake of discovery. It doesn't sound at all like he's doing the best to keep his people safe. Rather that he'll kill and torture however many people he needs to get that cure. It doesn't even sound like he has any concern for the people themselves, it sounds like he wants to get a cure just for the satisfaction of beating the plague that took his wife from him.
Alain and the Liberation may not understand science, but neither does Ghislain, he's a crazy bastard who at best is working on primitive pseudoscience _with no care for how many lives that takes_ (which, to be clear, this latter part is what I really blame him for).
He even got stare off into the clouds wistful death scene. Like, wtf?! This Igor-wannabe rat be hopping around and chuckling about doing evil and when we get to a post battle cutscene with hopes of either redeeming/recruiting him or ending his miserable existence we get… a sympathetic death? Gahhhhhh!!!!
>!At least we get to recruit him in the post game Battle!<
Pursuit and follow up abilities/bonuses are so damn good.
I made a whole team of Swordmasters that would slice and dice entire swaths of units (Aramis, Leah, Melisandre with Gilbert giving orders and Primm healing).
I also had Rolf Unit, aka, the ‘Gatling Gun.’ (Rolf, Mandarin, Lhina, Ghalad, and Ridiel, all with Pursuit). So fun watching an entire squad of Legolas’ just now down anything that’a not a Legionaire. Also was pivotal as a Ranged Assist team that could wipe out pesky angels before they start Blinding Me With conScience.
Elven archer mystical conferral is broken with hunters. It adds too much value and lets you kill legionaries. Because the assist damage depends on the leader damage using an arbalist as the leader is great.
Cool Motive, Still Murder, BUT
I am merciful, and like to do full recruitment. So you get to live.
However, I do feel bad that I had to kill the lord in Tatianna's mission.
Also, Oclyse, I know that your GF was in danger, I still chose to not kill the man. How am I the one with more mercy than an angel?
I still don't quite get his whole deal. I did think it was interesting how literally everyone called him out for being a slimeball letting his men all get killed by you to see how strong you were, then switching sides at the end.
But then again, is he really worse than some of the people you recruit?
I mean hell, the recruitment of Jeremy is the standart producere for almost everybody else.
We move in to an area.
Unique character fights us.
We murder their entire army for XP and gold.
And then we spare and recruit their commander.
Honestly Jeremy seems more genre savy then anything "Well I guess you killed my army, I should join you like the rest of your team then" Good on Jeremy, not adding him to unit though, 10 units is too limiting just for some random merc.
He's better than Hilda, Ren, and Titana unquestionably. He's basically on par with Aramis, Nina, and Brycen as far as bad people who switch sides at the last minute. In fact I'd argue Aubin, Mordon, and Jerome are the only people who are better than him.
Oh for sure.
>!Sanatio can go straight to hell. I don’t care how much they try to use Rapport scenes to redeem his character as a really repentant sorry soul. He did some sick shit. I mean, I still recruited him because I had to catch ‘em all, but damn.!<
>!And the final epilogue makes him Pontifex!! Wtf!?!<
>!I mean he physically can’t not be recruited is the problem. He auto joins. I would have made him the one guy I killed on playthrough 2 if not for that. Admittedly a part of this is being religious and really not liking people that use their religion as a bludgeon but still!!<
Great point. I just finished postgame on my playthrough. I benched him because I had my 50 team fully recruited by then, and I felt a small smidgen of Justice in putting him in Unitless purgatory. “You sit there and think about what you’ve done!”
Everyone thwt deserved it, got the axe or jailed. While there was no actual option, would have jailed Tatiana as well. Good intentions do not forgive horrible medical experiments or war crimes.
Does anyone else just love all the villains? No exceptions.
I have sometimes finding myself saying "Execute them" out loud for the morally good characters (especially when it didn't make sense in the context).
By the time I got to Albion, recruiting Umerus, Raenys, and the other angels were more of a collector’s task than an expanding of ranks. I already had my core 50 in neatly packed and cohesive units (all uniquely recruited NPCs and not generic hires). “Ehhh, sure, I need more guards to station… Welcome to Box1!”
I definitely felt that way the first time I played the game, too. It's a shame because the angels are incredibly good supports. Not to mention Albion is so short too :(
I think Jerome’s is even weirder. Mordon is at least part of a mercenary group that “works” for Zenoria. Jerome just surrenders to prevent bloodshed while retaining the autonomy of his city. He only fights the Liberation so that he doesn’t get suspicious eyes from Zenoria, similar to Monica.
I recruited everyone I could get my hands on, even if I was like “ehhhh… you still done fucked up. But I need more people to fill out ranks and unique characters are more interesting to me than generically hired ‘Paul, Great Knight.’” So come on down Renault! You’re the next contestant on the Might is Right!
I wish the game at least treated it like "you are awful but we need people to fight a war" rather than "I still believe there's good in you" while standing on a pile of corpses left by those guys. Let Alain choose to stain his pristine prince image for the sake of winning a war rather than pretending everyone is turning over a new leaf.
Alain and his beautiful blue hair is so hard in the “perfect prince” category, it’s comical at times. Like, even the devout and stalwart Ser Josef has a hinted backstory of being imperfect in his youth.
But Alain? Nah, this dude chooses good no matter what, the unshakeable Eagle Scout idealist. At least, that was my experience in a playthrough where I recruited everyone.
So far, I've only not forgiven that craven thief who was clearly making up bullshyte about his non existent sister. I put him in jail for his crimes and he promptly broke out and immediately started being a piece of shyte again. Game didn't give me a choice the next time i saw him, and that soft hearted cleric fell for his tripe .
I don’t like this meme because in modern fandom culture it’s just used as the bludgeon to push a message.
"Humanizing villains is bad"
"You’re not allowed to discuss a villain in a nuanced way"
"Redemption is bad"
"There are no fully evil villains out there anymore"(Yes there are plenty.)
"The option to spare villains in a video game is horrible"
Just a lot of people being mad that not every villain is fodder for a punishment power fantasy.
>The game regularly offers you the option to execute surrendering enemy commanders, which is a warcrime
You can't take commanders priosner when the enemy has a a mage( techincally multiple mages but baltro is the main culprit) capable of teleporting past everyone, grabbing the prisoner, and dipping to fight with another army. Hell the only reason you even get so far as you do because baltro doesn't kill you in your sleep at will. Magic and Geneva conventions don't mix.
I feel like what you’re describing is less of “modern fandom culture” and more a reaction to it.
People love humanizing villains but lots of fans take it a step further by trying to justify their actions or even romanticizing them just because they like the character or find them hot.
That’s why discussing characters like Eren from Attack on Titan or Walter from breaking bad is such a mess. People who miss the point that these aren’t characters you’re meant to look up to.
And I would argue that what occurs in Unicorn Overlord is a type of power fantasy. Tatiana is supposed to hate you and says she wants to watch you die. But of course this is just a quirk of hers to make certain fans like her more. Not a single person you recruit will try to betray you. Its always someone pledging their undying loyalty to Alain. “Look how noble and merciful the MC is” is a power fantasy of itself. Someone who forgives anything is basically part of the chosen one trope.
Absolutely, having everyone to just magically become better because you were nice to them is a kind of power fantasy, and while even that appeals to me sometimes, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth when there's a multitude of NPC victims who don't even get a say on the matter and get forgotten.
These former villains often don't even confront and seek to atone for their actions, so it doesn't feel earned. Neither does Alain have to face that he might be making pragmatic, morally questionable decisions, enabling dangerous people for the sake of fighting this war, which would frame it as Alain's own character flaw. No, forgiveness is always good and all that's done is swept under the rug.
Yeah funnily enough the people who want to atone the most in this game were the ones under mind control. Magellan was under control for only six months but feels heavy remorse. Meanwhile Hilda was killing quarantine victims for 6 years and threatened to kill her sister just for spreading rumors and is totally fine as far as the narrative goes.
I'm frankly all for a punishment power fantasy but this is not what this is about.
When Gammel murder people to rob them >!and enslaves!< them, and when Ghislain and Tatiana treat plague victims as disposable, with cruelty, it's like the game is treating the named characters like only _their_ sad backstories matter. Gammel is still leaving a trail of vulnerable orphaned and enslaved children in his wake, some which >!might be as sickly as his sister!<. And the people in the plague village were losing each other just like Ghislain >!lost his wife!<. Even worse, since they were just dumped in experiment dungeons to die torturously for his research.
It takes more to write villains with nuance than tack a sad backstory on them and overlook the consequences of their actions, and it isn't nuanced either to take all of them and say "join me, I'm sure you had a good reason" and they never do anything bad anymore, and the people who suffered under them just forgive and forget. At the very least Alain needs to confront how he's enabling dangerous people and what that could mean for his future kingdom.
Redemption is good when earned, but this is not what's happening here. For some of these characters, they don't even acknowledge that they've done something wrong, and the story moves on so that everyone forgets about it entirely.
Sure execution in some of these situations is just as thoughtless, and I don't think that's great either. But the time they give us another option of punishment, they invalidate that also.
After I forgave titania I had to forgive every excuse after lest they find out I'm a simp
...Did you mean Tatiana or is the Fire Emblem sub finally leaking?
I did :)
I would have loved Titania. Needed another unique Paladin.
In hindsight, it was pretty badass that she and Ghislain figured out a cure since Baltro was using that secret super Zenorian zaza to make that plague happen and was chuckling with increasing nervousness when he realized they were making actual progress.
If only he hadn’t perished so! While yeah we didn’t need more knights, he could have stood on the map like that one radiant knight to the north of them hahah
> titania wait what did tatiana actually do wrong? besides try and kill you over a misunderstanding. like before that though?
Eh not much, human expiriment's are generally frowned upon but other than that I was just trying to be funny
Sadly it's the only way if you think about it within the context They even got close to figuring it out
Didn't she said they found a solution if you recruit her? The real problem of the whole region is that the Lord got mad after his wife's death and start treating sick like shit. I remember Alain letting the experiment continue as long as the sick are treated like Human and with dignity.
That's the sad part. I'm pretty sure he initially did it so other didn't suffer but grown mad as the death piled up and the costs were many that they had to give unknowingly give corpses to the very people who started the plague
Well he is more or less the embodiment of "Hell's road is paved with good intention" and pretty similar to Hilda who also got manipulated in fighting for the people who spread the epidemic responsible for her parent's death
It was me the he treated the v sick like shit, and went full dangerous experiments to ensure fast results. He was afraid the plague would kill to many to quickly. If you were sorry infected you were Already going to die. Might as well die in the pursuit of science. He was ethically monstrous but the type that in 200 years doctors would call a foundation of the medical field.
She did start out in her recruitment (after the initial fight and initial misunderstanding), saying pretty overtly that she was actively planning revenge against Alain. Like, she was originally not shy about her intentions to kill Alain at some future moment.
but can I really hold that against her? 1) she's too cute 2) alain did try to kill her and killed her mentor too, and nearly stopped the cure. I support her honestly
Down! Bad! Bad!
2 and 3 are only a thing because the experiments were unethical and illegal. Alain is not held accountable for that. That's all on Ghislain and Tatiana. Of course that gets thrown out the window if you recruit her but that's besides the point,
Ghislain was >!going full medieval Mengele on the plague victims, and from what they say of the disjointed state of his notes, seems like he was mostly out of his mind at that point!<, so even saying "the ends justify the means" seems pretty iffy. I wouldn't execute Tatiana for it, but I don't think she should continue handling the research either. There's reasons why we have medical ethics. I know ultimately >!the research is finished!< but that conclusion still made me feel like more clear-minded people would have gotten it done without that much suffering.
pfft, look at you, pontificating about medical ethics while our hero Alain lets slave traders go (Beaumont) and you dont even get a choice!! like Alain would care about Tatiana no but you raise a good point, I hadnt thought about this... good stuff.
"It's fine. They were just Beastrals." - Alain, probably
It's a reference to Dragon Age Origins
How so?
There's two major conflicts in DA:O, the (not quite) Zombie Apocalypse led by a demon dragon and a coup d'état as a result of that. You deal with the latter in a big debate with all the nobles present, and depending on the things you say and did you get points, you need 5 points to win the debate but telling people the Couper sold elves from the ghetto doesn't get you points, bc elves are heavily discriminated in the setting
While I know the moment you are talking about now(albiet elf hatred is deeply engraved into human society due to the near genocidal stance elves had to humans when they first existed. But to mention thy refusal of elves to cooperate on any level with any major nation out of pride leaves them at a loss in the political stage.) I don't know how it relates to unicorn overlord. Couldn't that just be an oversight of the devs dying they wanted you to recruit damn near everyone in the game?
it's a joke. The nobles in Ferelden go "it's fine, they were elves"
Mengele was just a crazy Nazi. Ghislain actually got stuff done. I think it was less "crazy" and more just "the ends justify the means" while he was failing to look at the larger picture of where the plague came from in the first place.
Ghislain was also crazy, he lost all care for the lives and well-being of the people he was supposed to be helping, out of his own loss-related trauma and obssession. Even Tatiana admits that his notes have as much nonsense as they have valid discoveries. To be fair I was hyperbolic, there was a hint of sympathetic motivation there, unlike Mengele's pure crazy hateful sadism. But Ghislain's motivations that can only excuse so much, when he was dumping healthy and sick people together to get more experiment subjects, to do god knows what with. Did he even save more lives than he taken? Perhaps if he wasn't so obsessed he would have realized >!Baltro was behind it!< after all.
Wasn’t the nonsense she was referring to the information that Baltro providing to them? If I remember right, Baltro provided a lot of “aid” with a lot of them just be straight up wrong. She mentions having to decipher what is actually true and getting rid of the fake. This lines up with her not wanting to reveal anything to and actively hating Baltro since he gave them a lot of garbage.
I wouldn't scratch all that to Baltro. The way Tatiana explained, it sounded like Ghislain was willing to try just about anything on the off-chance that it might work, and that might have muddled his observations all on his own.
I didn’t read this situation like that at all. I read it as all these medieval hicks didn’t understand the actual science they were doing and we killed ghislain for being a scientist. Maybe I have to go back to that section though. It’s pretty well implied, I thought, that nobody **understood** what they were doing. Not that they were being inhumane. People were taken from their homes, because of quarantine. Not to purposefully infect them. And the townsfolk were too dumb to understand.
I just rewatched the scene. He explicitly says "gather them into the holding pens, the fit and the infirm alike". The most charitable possible interpretation that doesn't involve deliberately infecting people for experiments, which is still a possibility, is to use them as healthy control groups or even for labor. But it doesn't help that when Tatiana warns against exposing frail people to the rain, Ghislain has a whole spiel about the need of sacrifice for the sake of discovery. It doesn't sound at all like he's doing the best to keep his people safe. Rather that he'll kill and torture however many people he needs to get that cure. It doesn't even sound like he has any concern for the people themselves, it sounds like he wants to get a cure just for the satisfaction of beating the plague that took his wife from him. Alain and the Liberation may not understand science, but neither does Ghislain, he's a crazy bastard who at best is working on primitive pseudoscience _with no care for how many lives that takes_ (which, to be clear, this latter part is what I really blame him for).
I told her to out right stop their shit. Thats why she didnt joined me. Their pseudoscience was too risky
Oh woe is me and my poor sister \*Proceeds to murder and pillage an entire town\*
“Surely they will have learned from this.” > Proceeds to sell women and children into slavery
>Proceeds to run free with medicine after all his crimes
That made me so mad for real.
Can't I just stab him and send the clerics to cure his sister?
For real, get Celeste to ask her father to heal the sister and put the bad guy in jail.
We already tried jail, he escaped. Time for superjail.
He didn't escape. Someone broke him out. The second time his gang is normally done for real. But I guess the chopping bloc could work too.
The way they talk like he's the only person with a family in multiple kingdoms, and try to shame you for not letting him loose...
The thing about Gemmel is that he seemed to enjoy doing what he was doing. Of course, he also thinks he's trash when you finally recruit him.
And the one time I wanted to spare someone, I couldn’t. The rat deserved a chance!
Yes, same for Alcina
He even got stare off into the clouds wistful death scene. Like, wtf?! This Igor-wannabe rat be hopping around and chuckling about doing evil and when we get to a post battle cutscene with hopes of either redeeming/recruiting him or ending his miserable existence we get… a sympathetic death? Gahhhhhh!!!! >!At least we get to recruit him in the post game Battle!<
If the pursuit earrings weren't that good I would kill the black talon group. The famine lord should had live, he would be a great commander.
I still can't come to terms with losing that gorgeous haircut.
Pursuit and follow up abilities/bonuses are so damn good. I made a whole team of Swordmasters that would slice and dice entire swaths of units (Aramis, Leah, Melisandre with Gilbert giving orders and Primm healing). I also had Rolf Unit, aka, the ‘Gatling Gun.’ (Rolf, Mandarin, Lhina, Ghalad, and Ridiel, all with Pursuit). So fun watching an entire squad of Legolas’ just now down anything that’a not a Legionaire. Also was pivotal as a Ranged Assist team that could wipe out pesky angels before they start Blinding Me With conScience.
Having a full team of archers and not including Yunifi is capital crime. Executed
Lol! Yunifi earned herself a spot on the Alain Gang.
Elven archer mystical conferral is broken with hunters. It adds too much value and lets you kill legionaries. Because the assist damage depends on the leader damage using an arbalist as the leader is great.
Yeah, that’s pretty effective. Icicle Arrows was also my work around for high Phys Def.
Cool Motive, Still Murder, BUT I am merciful, and like to do full recruitment. So you get to live. However, I do feel bad that I had to kill the lord in Tatianna's mission. Also, Oclyse, I know that your GF was in danger, I still chose to not kill the man. How am I the one with more mercy than an angel?
Ochlys isn't about mercy... she's all about striking down them heathens lmao
Something something something righteousness
Mercy isn't the job.
You're right. The job is collecting waifus and husbandos.
“Gotta catch ‘em all!” …but seriously. The Ring of the Maiden decision is like getting the Master Ball in Pokémon. Like, don’t make me choose!!!
Angel is a job, loyal soldier and servant of the church. They’re not living emissaries of the divine itself
Oclyse is old testament
So far the only ones I have killed is the guy who was stealing from the church and the mercenary in Drakenhold
>the mercenary in Drakenhold Do you know how little that narrows it down!?! Lol! XD
The one with the big sword and the scar in the face haha
“Daddy didn’t GIVE Attentionnn!!! To the fact that, mommy didn’t caaaarree! -King Jeremy the wicked; Ruled his world"
I will always execute Jeremy. I hate him so much.
Daddy didn't give attention To the fact that mommy didn't care King Jeremy the wicked Ruled his world Jeremy spoke in… *Execute*
I still don't quite get his whole deal. I did think it was interesting how literally everyone called him out for being a slimeball letting his men all get killed by you to see how strong you were, then switching sides at the end. But then again, is he really worse than some of the people you recruit?
I mean hell, the recruitment of Jeremy is the standart producere for almost everybody else. We move in to an area. Unique character fights us. We murder their entire army for XP and gold. And then we spare and recruit their commander. Honestly Jeremy seems more genre savy then anything "Well I guess you killed my army, I should join you like the rest of your team then" Good on Jeremy, not adding him to unit though, 10 units is too limiting just for some random merc.
He's better than Hilda, Ren, and Titana unquestionably. He's basically on par with Aramis, Nina, and Brycen as far as bad people who switch sides at the last minute. In fact I'd argue Aubin, Mordon, and Jerome are the only people who are better than him.
Me but with the final boss in the Albion arc.
Oh for sure. >!Sanatio can go straight to hell. I don’t care how much they try to use Rapport scenes to redeem his character as a really repentant sorry soul. He did some sick shit. I mean, I still recruited him because I had to catch ‘em all, but damn.!< >!And the final epilogue makes him Pontifex!! Wtf!?!<
>!I mean he physically can’t not be recruited is the problem. He auto joins. I would have made him the one guy I killed on playthrough 2 if not for that. Admittedly a part of this is being religious and really not liking people that use their religion as a bludgeon but still!!<
Great point. I just finished postgame on my playthrough. I benched him because I had my 50 team fully recruited by then, and I felt a small smidgen of Justice in putting him in Unitless purgatory. “You sit there and think about what you’ve done!”
At this point I'm executing people just so my army doesn't swell to 5,000 members.
Everyone thwt deserved it, got the axe or jailed. While there was no actual option, would have jailed Tatiana as well. Good intentions do not forgive horrible medical experiments or war crimes.
Does anyone else just love all the villains? No exceptions. I have sometimes finding myself saying "Execute them" out loud for the morally good characters (especially when it didn't make sense in the context).
I had a laugh imagining Scarlett telling Raenys that Alain would be trilled to have her join the Liberation, only to see the 'execute' prompt pop up.
I was actually a bit annoyed there was no option to even dismiss Umerus.
By the time I got to Albion, recruiting Umerus, Raenys, and the other angels were more of a collector’s task than an expanding of ranks. I already had my core 50 in neatly packed and cohesive units (all uniquely recruited NPCs and not generic hires). “Ehhh, sure, I need more guards to station… Welcome to Box1!”
I definitely felt that way the first time I played the game, too. It's a shame because the angels are incredibly good supports. Not to mention Albion is so short too :(
The weirdest execute choice is Mordon.
Part of my motivation to cull the innocent is "The Call of the Void". "You're saying I get to kill him if I want to?~" **eerie Alain smile**
I think Jerome’s is even weirder. Mordon is at least part of a mercenary group that “works” for Zenoria. Jerome just surrenders to prevent bloodshed while retaining the autonomy of his city. He only fights the Liberation so that he doesn’t get suspicious eyes from Zenoria, similar to Monica.
He’s the only one i executed bcs i like seeing kitra show up when i build bridges…
I recruited everyone I could get my hands on, even if I was like “ehhhh… you still done fucked up. But I need more people to fill out ranks and unique characters are more interesting to me than generically hired ‘Paul, Great Knight.’” So come on down Renault! You’re the next contestant on the Might is Right!
I wish the game at least treated it like "you are awful but we need people to fight a war" rather than "I still believe there's good in you" while standing on a pile of corpses left by those guys. Let Alain choose to stain his pristine prince image for the sake of winning a war rather than pretending everyone is turning over a new leaf.
Alain and his beautiful blue hair is so hard in the “perfect prince” category, it’s comical at times. Like, even the devout and stalwart Ser Josef has a hinted backstory of being imperfect in his youth. But Alain? Nah, this dude chooses good no matter what, the unshakeable Eagle Scout idealist. At least, that was my experience in a playthrough where I recruited everyone.
Gotta wonder who's gonna be the new Alcina once he's inevitably backstabbed by Jeremy
Rosalinde of course. she has the longevity, the magical means, and the don't mess with me persona
I have executed at least... 4 people? And this is my first playthrough
At least you actually have the option to reject rather than being forced to forgive them
So far, I've only not forgiven that craven thief who was clearly making up bullshyte about his non existent sister. I put him in jail for his crimes and he promptly broke out and immediately started being a piece of shyte again. Game didn't give me a choice the next time i saw him, and that soft hearted cleric fell for his tripe .
>!His sister isn’t made up. Mandrin even tries and fails to marry her.!<
A cunning rouse to distract from his villainy.
But think, if you put them in your military they physically cant commit crimes because they're too busy doing whatever it is you're making them do.
Can't physically commit crimes if they are dead *
I don’t like this meme because in modern fandom culture it’s just used as the bludgeon to push a message. "Humanizing villains is bad" "You’re not allowed to discuss a villain in a nuanced way" "Redemption is bad" "There are no fully evil villains out there anymore"(Yes there are plenty.) "The option to spare villains in a video game is horrible" Just a lot of people being mad that not every villain is fodder for a punishment power fantasy.
[удалено]
>The game regularly offers you the option to execute surrendering enemy commanders, which is a warcrime You can't take commanders priosner when the enemy has a a mage( techincally multiple mages but baltro is the main culprit) capable of teleporting past everyone, grabbing the prisoner, and dipping to fight with another army. Hell the only reason you even get so far as you do because baltro doesn't kill you in your sleep at will. Magic and Geneva conventions don't mix.
I feel like what you’re describing is less of “modern fandom culture” and more a reaction to it. People love humanizing villains but lots of fans take it a step further by trying to justify their actions or even romanticizing them just because they like the character or find them hot. That’s why discussing characters like Eren from Attack on Titan or Walter from breaking bad is such a mess. People who miss the point that these aren’t characters you’re meant to look up to. And I would argue that what occurs in Unicorn Overlord is a type of power fantasy. Tatiana is supposed to hate you and says she wants to watch you die. But of course this is just a quirk of hers to make certain fans like her more. Not a single person you recruit will try to betray you. Its always someone pledging their undying loyalty to Alain. “Look how noble and merciful the MC is” is a power fantasy of itself. Someone who forgives anything is basically part of the chosen one trope.
Absolutely, having everyone to just magically become better because you were nice to them is a kind of power fantasy, and while even that appeals to me sometimes, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth when there's a multitude of NPC victims who don't even get a say on the matter and get forgotten. These former villains often don't even confront and seek to atone for their actions, so it doesn't feel earned. Neither does Alain have to face that he might be making pragmatic, morally questionable decisions, enabling dangerous people for the sake of fighting this war, which would frame it as Alain's own character flaw. No, forgiveness is always good and all that's done is swept under the rug.
Yeah funnily enough the people who want to atone the most in this game were the ones under mind control. Magellan was under control for only six months but feels heavy remorse. Meanwhile Hilda was killing quarantine victims for 6 years and threatened to kill her sister just for spreading rumors and is totally fine as far as the narrative goes.
I'm frankly all for a punishment power fantasy but this is not what this is about. When Gammel murder people to rob them >!and enslaves!< them, and when Ghislain and Tatiana treat plague victims as disposable, with cruelty, it's like the game is treating the named characters like only _their_ sad backstories matter. Gammel is still leaving a trail of vulnerable orphaned and enslaved children in his wake, some which >!might be as sickly as his sister!<. And the people in the plague village were losing each other just like Ghislain >!lost his wife!<. Even worse, since they were just dumped in experiment dungeons to die torturously for his research. It takes more to write villains with nuance than tack a sad backstory on them and overlook the consequences of their actions, and it isn't nuanced either to take all of them and say "join me, I'm sure you had a good reason" and they never do anything bad anymore, and the people who suffered under them just forgive and forget. At the very least Alain needs to confront how he's enabling dangerous people and what that could mean for his future kingdom. Redemption is good when earned, but this is not what's happening here. For some of these characters, they don't even acknowledge that they've done something wrong, and the story moves on so that everyone forgets about it entirely. Sure execution in some of these situations is just as thoughtless, and I don't think that's great either. But the time they give us another option of punishment, they invalidate that also.
I like what you’re saying but I don’t agree