Despite its silly name,Final Fantasy 12’s Active Dimension Battle system remains one of the most lauded in RPG history. This is partly thanks to the Gambit system, an artificial intelligence crafted by the player with pieces picked up throughout the game. It allows you to determine the behaviour of your party with a set of simple, logical, if-then statements. If there’s an enemy nearby, then attack it. If an ally is low on health, then heal them.
This made combat far more streamlined than it had been in previous titles while still retaining some dynamism in being able to switch party members on the fly and order them around whenever you needed, something sorely missing in more recent entries. Setting up effective Gambits is a satisfying puzzle to solve - you’ll often have to bring up the menu in the middle of a fight to tweak options as you go, fiddling until it works. In many ways, it’s like Baby’s First Coding Class.
Giving the player the option to fiddle with artificial intelligence is a tricky thing to balance. Too little, and you’re limited to generic behaviour archetypes like those seen inFinal Fantasy TacticsandFire Emblem; too much, and you have an overwhelming slew of options with setup that take up more time than just entering the commands manually (see: Disgaea’s Demonic Intelligence). The Gambit system provides a keen sense of control without being tedious, andUnicorn Overlordhas refined that system wonderfully.
In Unicorn Overlord, a character’s actions in battle are based on a priority system. Units have lists of skills and will use their active skills based on which attacks are at the top and passive skills as soon as their conditions are triggered. You have no direct control once combat begins; it’s the computer ticking off action points and passive activations as it runs the calculations. This makes units predictable and inflexible, turning combat into an auto-battler with very little to do other than tweak formations and move around the map. Add conditions in, though, and you have very fine control over your units' actions.
This system is ostensibly just the Gambit system adapted to Unicorn Overlord’s battle system, but the mere addition of a second condition to each command elevates it to the granularity required of a strategic RPG. Say you have a lancer whose attacks will target an entire row of enemies, and you’re up against an entire formation of foes. Being able to set up her skills so that she always targets full rows is one thing, butalsobeing able to specify that she targets full rows with the weakest enemies is fantastic. With just one complex set of conditions, the lancer has some strategy behind her actions, and it takes just a few seconds of thought and button inputs.
In Final Fantasy 12, a fully-Gambited party is a well-oiled machine. In Unicorn Overlord, though, extensive use of conditions will make it feel like you have direct control over your units, turning them from mindless soldiers into units that make intelligent decisions based on your assessment of their abilities and predictions you have of your enemy.
While you don’t get the dynamism of being able to pause a battle and order them to change up their strategy in the heat of a clash, you really do feel like a general giving orders and setting up tactics. It’s revealing that the simple addition of a secondary condition adds so much complexity and nuance to the system and, in retrospect, is something FF12 could have benefited from in the first place.
Unicorn Overlord
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Unicorn Overlord is a tactical RPG set in Fevrith, a continent riven by war. As exiled prince Alain, you must gather your allies and attempt to take back your kingdom from General Valmore.
