The Great Villainess: Strategy of Lily on PC

It could be said that strategy games are enjoying a renaissance period in the modern era. Once upon a time, they were considered too niche for western markets, limiting franchises such as Fire Emblem or Famicom Wars to Japan-only releases.

Nowadays, both of those series are bona fide Nintendo staples — though significantly more so for the former, give me a new Advance Wars you cowards — and AAA studios and indies alike are tackling strategy in a breadth of interesting ways.

The Great Villainess: Strategy of Lily is part military combat, part turn based RPG, and all bombastic madness. Sounds good, but how does it translate as a gameplay experience? Let’s delve in.

Strategy of Lily takes place in a far-off kingdom on the brink of disaster. The capital has been set ablaze, and the emperor assassinated. When the prince and his retainers deploy into the fray, they encounter the mad duchess Scarlet. They accuse her of perpetrating this heinous crime, and though she doesn’t confess, she doesn’t exactly dissuade their concerns, either.

They attempt to apprehend Scarlet (to disastrous results) and afterwards, she turns her attention on a poor engineer named Lily, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Once Scarlet kills Lily, the pair are taken to a strange purgatory where they are given an opportunity to reflect on their mistakes.

Given a second chance at life, Lily instead joins Scarlet’s side, appealing to her ego while inadvertently joining in her growing insurrection. What follows is a series of campaigns to gain followers and bolster Scarlet’s influence across the kingdom.

Strategy of Lily’s gameplay loop takes place on a map with a series of spaces akin to a board game. As you move your units around the map, you engage with enemies in turn-based combat. At first, you will only have Lily and Scarlet at your disposal, but as you progress you will gain the ability to capture boss units and force them in line.

It’s a familiar premise, and amusingly enough, the map-based movement brought back dormant memories of Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 2’s story mode. Indeed, a great many of the mechanics within Strategy of Lily have been lifted from familiar sources, including a weapon triangle system straight from Fire Emblem. Why it works so well comes down to the execution, which has a premium feel far greater than you’d think possible from an indie team.

The narrative of this game is fairly straightforward, but my god it looks stunning. As characters exchange dialogue between battles, their portraits showcase their fantastic designs — the likes of which would be a cosplayer’s dream — and their expressions will shift depending on the severity of the discussion. They’ll even blink periodically, making them feel alive and engaged.

The game is fully voiced as well, with some absolutely stellar performances on display. Nonoka Obuchi and Hikaru Iida are wonderful as Scarlet and Lily respectively, but top to bottom, everyone is terrific. Even Sally Amaki is onboard, which is kind of insane to me.

There’s even a fully animated introduction, proving that no expenses were spared in bringing this to life. That isn’t to say that this level of detail is only present in the cinematics, however, as the combat visuals are also glorious in their own right. The battlefield has an aura similar to Square Enix’s vaunted HD-2D catalogue, with lively sprites and fluid, eye-catching animations.

Equally as satisfying as the presentation of these skirmishes is the way in which they flow. When you engage with enemy forces, you each have three turns to deal damage to one another. Each action you take accumulates MP which can then be exchanged for skills, including powerful EX Skills that can turn the tide of battle.

While stockpiling MP to unleash these skills sounds like a viable win con, the three-turn limit helps to keep your strategy more narrow. MP doesn’t carry over between battles, so you’ll have to work out when best to use them. Which is good, because some of them are absolutely beastly: Scarlet’s EX Skill, Scarlet of the People, changes her unit type to one that has an advantage over all others, boosts her attack by 75%, defence by 50%, and restores 300 HP.

You won’t have enough MP to activate it until turn 2, giving you only the third and final turn to actually let her loose on the enemies. But even if you don’t have enough MP to use it until the third turn, you could theoretically do this anyway, as it removes her weakness to soldier units in that last turn, as well as the healing and defensive benefits.

Keeping your HP high has an additional benefit, as it indicates how strong your fighting force is at the time: the more damage you take, the weaker your attacks become. The closest comparison would be Advance Wars, and it gives you incentive not to just blitzkrieg every encounter.

As an additional wrinkle, you can see who the enemy is targeting during your own combat turn, allowing you to amend your strategy on the fly. If they’ve got a powerful attack charging up, conventional wisdom suggests that the targeted unit should switch to defence, but equally so, you could try to inflict as much pre-emptive damage as possible to neuter their offences. It’s one of the more unique gameplay mechanics that replaces conventional guesswork with a fully considered approach to battle.

It might sound like a lot to take in, and at times you can feel like you’re thrown into the proverbial fire with all of the bells and whistles at your disposal. The game doesn’t exactly hold your hand with its difficulty curve, but Scarlet alone is enough of a juggernaut to help stave off failure.

Just as the prologue indicates, losing either Scarlet or Lily is an automatic game over, forcing you to reload from an earlier save. Permadeath isn’t present for the other units you amass throughout the game, and indeed they will respawn at home base after three turns out of commission. As a result, you can continuously throw them out as fodder to keep the main girls ticking.

Of all the nitpicks I’ve made throughout this review, most could be considered fairly trivial or even superficial. Yes, the story is simplistic. Yes, the disparity in importance between your main characters and the others is significant. Yes, Scarlet might be a bit too overpowered. All of these can be waved off for the most part, but one aspect of this game that is absolutely flawed lies in its optimisation.

For whatever reason, between combat turns, the complete map is rendered. And I don’t just mean the map of your current battleground — I am referring to the entirety of the world map. It is a gorgeous environment, riddled with minute details such as ships dotting the sea, but it can prove wildly taxing on your PC.

I experienced slowdown in these map turns so significant, entire button presses went ignored. Considering its passive atmosphere, it likely won’t cost you a battle, but it makes up such a large percentage of gameplay time it will quickly grow irksome.

Although you can adjust the graphical settings between high, medium and low, the downgrade in battle proved too devastating for me (see the comparison images below), to the point where it now resembled a PS1 game. It felt criminal to subject such a pretty world to such cruelty, so I elected to just suck it up and suffer through the sluggish map. If there was an option to just make said map less detailed, the whole experience would benefit as a whole.

UPDATE: A recent patch on 7 November does appear to have improved performance on the map significantly. It’s still not perfect, but it’s a definite step in the right direction!

Beyond this nuisance, it is really hard to fault Strategy of Lily for much else. It’s filled with a self-confidence befitting of its brash protagonist, equal parts riveting strategy title and uproarious anime adventure.

Deciding whether you execute enemy generals or snag them like rare Pokemon will impact the ending, as well as Scarlet’s destructive power. While most of us are surely recruit-happy softies instead of heartless thugs with a fondness for Stolypin’s necktie, the fact that the changes are more impactful than, say, Unicorn Overlord, makes a second homicidal run sound like an attractive prospect.

And in all likelihood, I will pick this game up again after completion. It’s the whole damn package, jam packed with content and quality-of-life features that handily bring it into the conversation for 2025 game of the year.

Final Verdict

The Great Villainess: Strategy of Lily

REVIEW COPY PROVIDED BY PUBLISHER

Release Date: 24 July 2025

Platform: PC

Developer: Alliance Arts, One or Eight, WSS Playground

Publisher: Alliance Arts

If you’re the kind of person who has been cutting their teeth on strategy title for the better part of the last three decades, it is not a stretch to say that The Great Villainess: Strategy of Lily would be an essential addition to your rotation.

It is mechanically rock solid, boasting a level of sheen in its presentation that rivals anything AAA studios could cook up. While its story can prove somewhat basic, it’s very much by design and enjoyable all the same. Aside from performance issues while navigating the map, there is little else that you can reasonably fault.

If it’s not the EZIYODA game of the year for 2025, it’s at least within the top three.