Post Script
Uniting a world through redemption and reconciliation
With a face – as unkindly described by another character – resembling a corpse, Gammell is your typical RPG lowlife, the leader of a group of unscrupulous brigands who is supposed to warm you up for the main event. But upon defeat, the cutscene that plays out is unexpected. Begging for mercy, he speaks of his ailing sister and the exorbitant cost of a cure as the motivation behind his life of crime and villainy: “Thievin’s all I’m good for”. Given the choice to spare his life or execute him, we go with our bleeding heart, albeit not without protest from one of our onscreen allies.
When we encounter Gammell again, he’s fighting alongside the subjugated elves in Elheim – a man reformed, though one who still falls under the thief class when we recruit him. While this is an example that takes many hours to pay off, it’s a running theme throughout Unicorn Overlord: liberating Fevrith, it turns out, takes all sorts. There’s a familiar fantasy narrative trope, with the emperor Galerius having the power of mind control; Alain uses the Ring Of The Unicorn to restore people’s minds after defeating them in battle. However, you’ll also encounter opponents who have chosen to align themselves with the empire, be it out of desperation or self-preservation. They don’t all have sob stories to tell like our thief – we also encounter a mercenary hired by the empire to guard an ore-rich city but who had treated its imprisoned populace benevolently, while we also meet a cleric helping her lord conducting unspeakable experiments on a plague-ridden town, all for the purpose of producing a cure.
You might argue that the choice between spare or slaughter (or simply recruit or leave behind) is really no choice at all if it means depriving yourself of allies. You would, after all, be undercutting one of the game’s main selling points: the ability to assemble a vast army of unique characters. Should you take the executioner’s route, it’s still possible to increase your numbers by hiring mercenaries. Each fort in the overworld offers a different selection of character classes, and with a decent amount of customisation you effectively get to create your own Vanillaware character, such as our redheaded gryphon knight with their ‘apathetic’ voice. However, hiring means spending honor, while these recruits also tend to start out at a lower level, thus requiring more effort and resources on your part to make use of – and that’s before asking yourself if you can ever truly buy loyalty. There’s a clear incentive, then, to offering your foes a second chance.
While this might paint Alain as another wide-eyed JRPG protagonist (who we’d picture being the victim of multiple red weddings in a different fantasy setting), these decisions are not entirely born of naïvety. To be clear, there are still some irredeemable villains at the top who will get their just deserts, though even a few of these are afforded a measure of empathy in their final moments. But there’s a certain pragmatism to the alliances Alain is willing to accept – or perhaps he simply subscribes to the ancient proverb that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” – while there are some surprising arcs should you develop a rapport with the characters who seem least convinced by the presence of a former enemy among their ranks.
One absorbing sidequest has you settling a dispute between two warring beast factions. If you want to recruit both leaders, you’ll need to force them to see reason by fighting them both at the same time. It’s the most challenging of the available options, but also illustrates that this is less about Alain being soft-hearted than having the conviction to make tough choices in the name of unity. As our crown prince says to one character, “The Liberation exists to grant freedom, not oppress the downtrodden further”. You might say he’s striving to be more than just an overlord.