The Great Villainess: Strategy of Lily – Game Review

The Great Villainess: Strategy of Lily – “Leges à victoribus dicuntur, accipiuntur à victis”, meaning “Laws laid down by the victors and imposed on the losers”, written by Quintus Curtius in “The Life of Alexander the Great”.

If the answer is yes, The Great Villainess: Strategy of Lily comes from the studio Alliance Artsis exactly a game for you. Come on, let’s find out with Vietgame.asia how the “bad guy’s” perspective will play out in this somewhat strange game, okay?

YOU WILL LIKE

Role-playing as… a villain?

Surely you are familiar with JRPG motifs where we play the role of a hero saving the world, then discover the dark secret of some villain and stop it in time before the world explodes.

Or at best, play the role of some “anti-hero”, crazy to achieve the goal at any cost, no matter how cruel or bad, but have a relatively “honest” reason or origin, and in the end still fight to defeat the villain to save the world.

But have you ever tried playing the role of a “real evil” person?

The Great Villainess: Strategy of Lily begins by following Lily, a beautiful engineer who goes to the capital of a kingdom to test the streaming system (that’s right, streaming like Twitch) of a spaceship.

While walking normally, “boom” the city became “chaotic”. The emperor was assassinated, and Lily was caught up in the conflict between Scarlet, a duchess with… destructive tendencies, and the prince who accused her of killing her father, and somehow they fought wildly and they both… died, but instead of going down to the royal stream, they ended up in a place called Dead End Theater, were… revived, and escaped.

After Scarlet escapes the city, she decides to follow Lily to get revenge on the empire and, perhaps, prove her innocence in the process.

In this game, we will take turns playing the roles of Lily and Scarlet. Lily seems like an honest girl, and Scarlet is… crazy! It seems that she is innocent, but it turns out that she really likes to sabotage and “stick the wheels”, causing chaos with every step she takes, and actually instead of always having to promote “righteousness”, playing the role of a crazy bad guy is also quite interesting and innovative!

The Great Villainess: Strategy of Lily breaking traditional JRPG stereotypes, blending modern technology into a medieval setting and maximizing its “pure entertainment” strengths to create a unique and humorous game

Another highlight is the world of The Great Villainess: Strategy of Lily. On the surface of the character costume design, it seems that the game is set in a setting similar to pre-modern Europe, perhaps around after 1850. However, strangely enough, this world has… streaming technology and spaceships, so the characters use a bunch of modern slang words like “sus”, “stan”, “rip bozo”, etc., leading to the dialogue between the characters becoming extremely humorous and not stereotypical.

The Great Villainess: Strategy of Lily does not hesitate to show that its game content focuses on “comedy”, each story line begins in a strange way and increasingly “transforms” in ways that no one could have expected. It feels like the writer is watching a visual novel “sitcom”, very relaxing and entertaining.

In short, The Great Villainess: Strategy of Lily breaking traditional JRPG stereotypes, blending modern technology into a medieval setting and maximizing its “pure entertainment” strengths to create a unique and humorous game.

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Quality combat mechanics!

Fight of The Great Villainess: Strategy of Lily perhaps inspired by many different turn-based strategy titles, from Fire Emblem, Advance Warsor even even… Civilization. You will be given a world map, where there are many bases connected by roads, and each turn you can move your soldiers from one base to another in a certain number of steps.

Each base will have a certain limit of soldiers, and a “health” amount to show how many turns the user needs to occupy to completely capture that base. Therefore, you cannot just depend on Lily and Scarlet to “balance the whole map”, but you need to capture enemy champions to control many different fronts in a reasonable way, both defending and attacking in harmony.

When entering each battle, you will have exactly… 3 turns! There is no way to attack until one of them “falls asleep” like normal JPRG, or only attack once like Fire Emblemwhich you will have 3 turns to execute commands.

If you attack, you must destroy all enemies within these 3 turns, otherwise the attack will be considered a failure and you will have to perform another attack, and if you defend, you only need to last 3 turns. There is a “Command” mode where you do it manually, or a “Delegate” mode where you ask the AI ​​to fight for you, but the writer’s experience is that the AI ​​is “very stupid”, and unless you “overwhelm” the enemy too much, use Command mode to fight effectively!

There are three types of soldiers: infantry, artillery and cavalry, according to the principle of “scissors, hammer, paper”: infantry eats cavalry, cavalry eats artillery and artillery eats infantry. However, each team of soldiers will have its own unique skills in combat, so fighting will not be too monotonous. In reality, it seems that this “golden triangle” is not as tight as it seems Fire Emblembecause the writer still uses infantry with good skills to “punch” artillery as usual, you just need to coordinate the skills of soldier teams and coordinate with command skills in a reasonable way.

The game’s map is very large, each base is connected to another base by transport roads, and if you control the base at both ends of the road, you control the whole road. If the transport route to the headquarters is maintained, the soldiers on the base will recover some health, so the player can apply the “cutting off the transport” strategy to besiege a base, and also have to protect their own transport routes, adding a relatively attractive strategy!

The most special point of The Great Villainess: Strategy of Lily is the spacecraft that the writer mentioned at the beginning of the article. This spaceship (actually looks more like a hot air balloon) has the ability to… stream, players can… choose a stream channel to project onto the spaceship, and depending on the channel the player chooses, the spaceship will have different functions.

For example, if you want to convince an enemy general to join your army, you have to reduce that army’s health below a threshold, then send a spaceship to that base and broadcast a “persuasion” channel – basically Lily babbling something about wanting to dominate the world and… brainwashing – and so the enemy general – perhaps “captivated” by her beauty – will become an ally and fight with Scarlet and Lily.

The enemy army will become unexpectedly strong and numerous, and at the same time they will “sprout” everywhere, forcing players to maximize the way they mobilize troops and arrange forces on the map, creating a pretty good experience that the writer has not tried for a long time.

Initially there will only be two stream channels, Capture Stream and Stall Stream, but as you capture more enemy champions and continue playing, you will “unlock” more stream channels with many different effects and coverage – unfortunately there are no Pokimane guests or… IShowSpeed ​​to stream comedy, sadly!

In general, towards the end of the game, for some reason in the plot, you will have to really use your “genius strategy” ability to win, because suddenly the enemy army will become surprisingly strong and numerous, and at the same time they will “sprout” everywhere, forcing the player to maximize the way they mobilize troops and arrange forces on the map, creating a pretty good experience that the writer has not tried for a long time.

Players can even choose between two different endings depending on whether they choose to “capture” the champion or go wherever they want, with each time doing so will increase Scarlet’s power – creating replay value for the game.

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Pretty!

The writer must admit that from the first time he saw the trailer, he was impressed with the graphic style of this game.

The drawings depicting the characters in the game come from Rolua, the artist who adapted them CRYMACHINAand indeed this drawing is very suitable for a game like The Great Villainess: Strategy of Lily.

It seems that the game is designed in the style of Square Enix’s HD-2D simulation. Although the quality of the sprite image cannot be as smooth and detailed as the “original” product, overall it is still very cute and eye-catching!

Although the quality of the sprite image cannot be as smooth and detailed as the “original” product, overall it is still very cute and eye-catching!

YOU WILL HATE

Fight, fight and fight…

Most of the game is fighting, and you don’t even have any breaks between chapters. Instead of moving from one map to another like Fire Emblem and interspersed with it are plot lines, then The Great Villainess: Strategy of Lily will “throw” the player into a fixed map from beginning to (near) the end, and even the map state remains the same, where the soldiers are, how much health is left will remain there.

This leads to a rather humorous consequence: the distribution of experience will be strongly skewed, fronts that fight a lot will naturally have a much higher level than other fronts. This means that to fight effectively, instead of achieving the goal quickly, you will have to “hold the reins” and level up all fronts evenly, otherwise it will be easy to “eat your fill” at the end.

The focus on map combat and too few plot scenes also causes the story’s pace to be too short, and sometimes too much information is poured in in too short a time, making it almost impossible for the writer to keep up with the story lines anymore. For those who like pure strategy, it’s okay, but the writer wants to enjoy the plot and watch the beautiful girls in the game but there are almost no opportunities.

Indeed, if you remove the fighting part and just look at the plot, you won’t know The Great Villainess: Strategy of Lily Can you last 1 hour…

This leads to another problem: the relationships between the characters are not fully developed. This means that the writer feels that the characters go together “for the sake of it”, when it’s convenient, but there is no compatibility or connection that must be developed during the process of adventuring together, which most JRPGs possess. The character development of the characters is also greatly limited.

For those who are passionate about a proper JRPG story line, well The Great Villainess: Strategy of Lily It certainly won’t satisfy your “thirst”.

For those who are passionate about a standard JRPG story line, then The Great Villainess: Strategy of Lily It certainly won’t satisfy your “thirst”.