The Great Villainess Strategy Of Lily
When I first saw “The Great Villainess: Strategy of Lily” with a friend at first I wasn’t sure how to feel about it. That was, at first. When I saw Scarlet and Lily I instantly grew interested and added it to my wishlist. The game had come out recently and when I saw the relatively modest price tag (plus a 10% discount!) I figured I had been looking forward to it enough that I’d pick it up, and honestly I’m glad I did!
To start off, the most striking and wonderful thing about the game is how beautiful all the art is. All the character art and CGs are amazing and stellar. Not too surprising since I’ve found Rolua’s art incredible, but I just love the way the characters come to life through their drawings. Which of course is the other greatest part of this game.
Scarlet and Lily are both faaaaantastic characters. I found Scarlet especially entertaining because she’s very unabashedly herself and has such a dominating presence through the entire game. She sticks to her ideals and every conversation and speech she gives is a great and fun ride. Lily as her partner was also a great choice and I think they did an excellent job with making the two have a very fun dynamic with each other. Of course what also really helps is that they’re gay! For each other! A great boon to a yuri lover much like myself.
Most of the other characters are also fun. As to be expected with a strategy game like this, you recruit other units, some being a little more standout than others. I think the decision to keep the bonds conversations limited to two per unit was a really good choice, since it helped prevent the bond conversations from feeling too bloated. Or well, at least in theory.
Unfortunately I found some of the bond conversations a little shallow and abrupt. It’s a shame since I felt that the good ones were really good, just some of the other ones were a bit bland and uninteresting.
This is sort of inline with the main overall plot of the game which ultimately is somewhat shallow. But I also want to say, this isn’t exactly a bad thing. I guess what I mean is that it’s a pretty typical plot that most people who are familiar with similar stories will be able to guess pretty much every story beat from start to finish.
Where the game does excel with the writing though in my opinion is having a really fun cast of characters to both convey the story as well as the themes. There’s basically two main themes the game conveys that also intertwine with each other, one being that people will often perceive what they want to perceive (something Scarlet is very good at dealing with), the other talking about how you can’t define happiness for others (something that Lily is very involved with). They’re relatively simple themes but presented through the lens of Scarlet and Lily make the story an enjoyable experience to go through.
I also found the game fun to go through. The controls are simple and not complex, and while I found at times some of the controls to be a biiiit frustrating (accidentally selected units and moved the wrong ones haha…), overall I think the UI and experience to be enjoyable. I played on the strategic difficulty which I think offered enough of a challenge where I found I had to actively think about how to approach attacking certain locations, while not being overly difficult so I think they struck a good balance there.
If there were any complaints I had to offer about the gameplay is that I think they could’ve added a few more complexities to it. I found that the same overall strategy worked well for pretty much the entire game, only really having to change my tactics in slight differing ways. Now I will say that I think the way the maps/locations varied also help with keeping it fresh and it became almost a puzzle with trying to apply my strategy so in that sense I think the game did a good job.
The turn counter being kept the same between acts was also… interesting. It is funny to think about how many total turns I took across the entire game but at the same time I think one downside of this is that between acts there never felt like a good time to reposition properly. I would’ve liked a maybe inbetween act intermission to allow for rearranging of troops (perhaps within a certain group of bases), I will also admit this is primarily so I could pair units off better to build up bonds quicker haha…
All in all I have zero regrets about buying this on launch. I had a great time with it, smiling at all the antics Scarlet and Lily get up to and having fun with the gameplay. There are actually two routes so I maaaay replay it to get the other ending (and clean up the last achievements as a result).