Making the World a Better Place, One Step at a Time

A recent gameplay element I’ve found myself particularly attached to in a couple of games, namely Okami and Unicorn Overlord, is the effect the player has on the world around them, represented in a very visual and impactful way. These games excel at making you feel as though not only are you on a grand quest to save the world, but part of that quest is improving the lives of the souls that inhabit that world.

Take Okami, as my first example. At the beginning of that game, the world is shrouded in darkness, nature is decaying, and people and wildlife alike suffer greatly. But as Amaterasu regains her abilities, she is able not only to defeat the imps that serve Orochi, but bring life back to the landscape, both in massive waves of regrowth when she revives a guardian tree sapling and in minor ways as she revives small groves of flowers and individual cherry blossoms. What really caught my wonder, however, were the animals.

As you revive nature, animals will return to roam the world. Deer, boars, sparrows, monkeys, and tigers abound, never as enemies but seemingly, at first, as part of the background. Check inside shops or break enough destructible objects, however, and you’ll find food bags of various dietary varieties which you can give to these animals. Doing so nets you a generally negligible amount of faith, but more importantly, from that point on, whenever you pass near that group of animals again, they all have hearts over them, representative of both the fact that you don’t need to worry about feeding this group anymore, but also of the joy Amaterasu (and thus, you) has brought back into a ravaged world.

The world of Unicorn Overlord is similarly shrouded in darkness, though I see this as a bit more metaphorical of the evil regime that has conquered the land. As you explore the various countries and liberate towns, cities, and forts, the world will brighten in those areas as hope is brought back to the people. Notably, however, simply liberating a location is not enough, as towns and cities often start in a visual state of disrepair, and you have to return to these locations with supplies found on the overworld to repair them. Delivering these supplies will give you battle items, small amounts of gold, and between 1-6 honors (a consumable used to upgrade your army), as well as a decent amount of renown when you deliver all the supplies they request. This is all a big incentive to repair these cities, but I found myself mostly invested in the little animation that plays after you do so, where the city fades from disrepair to newfound beauty and fireworks pop off celebrating this absolute victory over the horrors wrought by Zenoira.

I continued to repair cities well after I reached the highest renown rank and even after the point where I really needed honors or gold just because it felt good to help these people in need. If you repair every location in a given country, you even get a little conversation scene between the leaders of the area commenting on it, but noticeably, there is no tangible reward for doing so. No great weapon or accessory, no influx of consumables or items, no characters recruited, just the joy of having rebuilt a country from ruin.

These are not the first nor the only games to toy with this idea of your actions having visible positive effects on the world. I can point to Dark Cloud on the Playstation 2 or the more recent indie title Littlewood as examples of rebuilding a ruined world from scratch, but what Okami and Unicorn Overlord did that felt special was remove a lot of the busywork surrounding it. Dark Cloud and Littlewood can get a little too involved with placement of buildings and furniture, making you feel more like a city planner and/or interior decorator at times than a hero on a quest to save the world (or who just did, in Littlewood’s case). Okami and Unicorn Overlord integrated the idea in a seamless fashion, not distracting from the goal at hand but amplifying it by paying attention to the micro as well as the macro.