Overlord II

Overlord 2 was a game released in 2009 for the Playstation3 and Xbox360. Much like the first game this one has a focus on some dark humour (though not quite Dead Baby Comedy) and is also written by the daughter of Terry Pratchett, Rhianna Pratchett.

The game focuses on the son of the first game's Overlord, abandoned in the town of Nordberg where he's shunned for his magic power and evil glowing eyes. One midwinter's festival though, the minions find the child and convince him to embark on a trail of destruction.

The Overlad's rampage doesn't go far however, as he's captured by the villagers and thrown outside the city walls. Left to die at the hands of the magic-hating Glorious Empire, he escapes only to be frozen when an ice flow breaks beneath him. He's later recovered by his father's former advisor and dragon Gnarl and raised to adulthood in the fiery depths of the minion's home dimension of the netherworld.

Now an adult, the Overlad returns to the surface with vengeance in his heart and much weaker morals than his father before him. With the minions at his charge and his axe and magic in hand, he sets out to Subdue or Destroy the town that cast him out and all else who oppose him, and remind the world that they don't need an empire, just an Evil Overlord!

---

Tropes used in Overlord II include:

• A Taste of Power: At the end of Overlad's childhood tutorial you're given infinitely respawning Brown minions to beat the crap out of the imperial legion blocking your escape.** This is arguably par for the course for most minion tutorials, your numbers are limited by your maximum horde size, but the minions will infinitely and freely respawn until you capture their hives (with the exception of the blues).
• Absurdly Spacious Sewer
• A God Am I: Florian, after he reveals that he was The Emperor.
• Acrofatic: Elven Priestesses force feed themselves to look like their Mother Goddess. They're also mini-bosses, capable of easily jumping across a battlefield.
• Action Bomb: Minion Missile/Explosion spell. If only used part-way, the minion takes off like a shot and explodes wherever he lands. Using it at full charge makes them explode where they're standing.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Kelda, from an early age.
• All of the Other Reindeer: The Witch-boy was feared and hated by Nordberg for his magical powers and just generally being creepy, leading to him being bullied and tormented by the kids. This turns out... Badly for them thirteen years later, when he returns as the Overlord.
  • The other magical creatures mocking Florian for being unable to use magic unlike every other Elf along with the frustration of magical ineptitude led to Florian's Start of Darkness.
• Balance Seesaw Of Good And Evil: Rose makes a few comments to the effect that the world needs balance, though it appears that the world swings wildly from one extreme to the other, with good periodically succeeding over evil only to be inevitably corrupted and/or destroyed by the return of a previous evil.
• Batman Gambit: Florian's gambit is quite impessive. Basically, after failing to seize the Overlord's power, he capitalizes on the disaster he created to build a magic hating empire so he can harvest all of their magic for himself. He then passes himself off as an elfish victim to destroy the various holdouts of magic.
• Beauty Equals Goodness: Inverted; Beauty equals Evil as Queen Fay, the only good looking person on the good guy's team, does a Face Heel Turn
  • On the other hand, if you substitute good with 'on the protagonist's side', this generally holds true. All the enemies are either obese, skinny, or effeminate while the Overlord is pretty built under the armor and the mistresses are dead sexy. The only major exception is Queen Fay and as seen above, this eventually doesn't apply to her either.
• Big Bad: Emperor Solarius. AKA, Florian
• Big Good: Queen Fay Initially...
• Big Badass Wolf: Browns can ride wolves as mounts.
• Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: A one-eyed Yeti appears early on and makes several appearances throughout the game.
• Big No: Queen Fay when you kill her on the destruction path, as opposed to letting her live as the corrupted dark fay.
• Bullying a Dragon: Let's all throw snowballs at the kid who can shoot lightning from his hands!
  • The gnomes declare war on the Overlord over a slight. They're smaller than the Overlord's foot, and their most damaging attack is suicide-bombing with a firecracker.
  • On first encounter with the Gargantuan, a minion steps forward with a grin and a 'come get some' gesture.
• Chekhov's Gun: The presence of the yeti and the baby seal in the arena... a very subtle hint to an incoming plot twist...
  • Also, when you're gathering Tower Heart shards, and the giant slug appears, Florian shouts for you to squash it...before hastily saying that he meant to say 'ease it gently to the next world,' or something to that extent. At first, it just seems like the hypocrisy of the elves for only caring about 'fuzzy' creatures when they protect nature, but given The Reveal that comes late game...
  • In the Time Skip cutscene where Gnarl talks about the empire, you see a blue minion being carted off in a cage, at first all this does is drive the point home that no magical creature is safe, but later you find the blue minions and their hive in the arena dungeons.
• Collection Sidequest: The Gnome Genocide sidequest, which will net you a Nice Hat and an Achievement. Also the Dark Crystals, many of which are notoriously well hidden, and a few can be Lost Forever.
• Continuity Nod: Few, mostly by Gnarl.

Gnarl: Try not to get yourself locked in an Infernal Abyss sire. Just for the record.

• Coup De Grace Cutscene: When you defeat the Spider Queen and the Salamander King the Overlord has a cutscene in which he finishes them off by cutting them open stylishly. Even if he is using a mace.
• Creepy Child: The Overlad in the beginning, who is known to the residents of Nordberg as the Witch-Boy.
  • Probably creepy to the point of being a parody of the standard Creepy Child.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Queen Fay seems to enjoy her forced Face Heel Turn a bit too much.
  • In that same vein, when you possess your minions (Greens are bad about this during the stealth mission) They let out a very orgasmic sounding "Maaaasteerrr!"
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: You kill the Emperor as he ascends to godhood and destroy the Eldritch Abomination that is powering his ascenscion.
• Distracted by the Sexy: Overlord sees Juno for the first time. He doesn't notice the giant spider. Shipwreck ensues
• Dressing as the Enemy: The minions disguise themselves in legionnaire uniforms.
• The Dragon: Marius is this as well as the Professional Butt-Kisser of Solarius.
• Drunk on the Dark Side: Queen Fay as she turns to Dark Fay.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Devourer
• Enfante Terrible: The player starts off as this, being the son of the previous Overlord.
• Enemy Mine: Queen Fay offers an alliance with the Overlord against Solarius, helping him reconstruct and power up the Tower Heart. It Got Worse... for the Elves that is.
• The Empire: The Glorious Empire.
• Evil Feels Good: Queen Fay, as she becomes overtaken by the Overlord's evil when she allows him to drain her energy to power the Tower Heart. As the process goes on, she begins to embrace the darkness and goes on to become his mistress.
  • Also an example of Evil Redhead, as hair actually turns red once you finish draining her.
• Evil Is Easy: Averted as far as the obtuse Mind Control vs. Ax Crazy Karma Meter goes, suprisingly. Choosing destruction gives you good instant payoff, but not enough to buy everything in the game, as opposed to having a fully dominated town that's always giving money. In the end, Being domination pays off more than being destruction.
• Extreme Omnivore: The Devourer devours pretty much anything.
• Face Heel Turn: The elven queen. Of course, that's to your benefit.
• Fallen Hero: Queen Fay.
• Fan Disservice: There are a lot of barely covered breasts in the game, unfortunately, besides your mistresses (who, though sexy, dress modestly in comparison), they're all horribly, horribly overweight, and some of them are male.
• Fantastic Nature Reserve: Everlight Sanctuary.
• Fantastic Racism: The Empire is anti-magic due to the Magical Cataclysm that created a plague that causes horrible mutations. Florian, the one who caused all this takes advantage of all of this with the help of Marius and Rose.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: The Glorious Empire is basically the Roman Empire. The Elves embody all sorts of hippie stereotypes.
• Fat Bastard: Fat mermaids, fat elf ladies, fat Empire people, fat fairies...this game is not kind to fat people.
• Fetus Terrible: The son of the Overlord.
• Giant Spiders: Can be used as mounts by Greens, although you have to defeat their queen first.
  • "nice spidy..."
• Hero Antagonist: The Elves and other Light Magic creatures of the Everlight Sanctuary, with Queen Fay in particular at least until she was corrupted by the Overlord's magic.
• The High Queen: Queen Fay.
• I Love the Dead: If you're destruction, Queen fay dies when you continue draining her, even after she's become fully corrupted and turned into dark fay, she still returns as a ghost to voluntarily Heel Face Turn and become your third consort regardless.
• I Found You Like This: In the opening, the "Overlad" is frozen after the tutorial, then found by his father's former minions who cheerfully note he just needs the right (evil) upbringing....
• It Got Worse: The domain of the previous Overlord has become the magical equivalent of the Tchernobyl area...
• Jiggle Physics: Done so disturbingly that it might as well count as a parody. Jiggle applies to everyone and everything with fat. And there are far too many instances of this.
• Lady Macbeth: The game lets you have three mistresses: Kelda, the Overlord's childhood friend (equivalent to Rose), Juno, a seductress from the Empire (similar to Velvet) and the corrupted Fay. You later get to choose a First Mistress, though you can always go back and change whenever you feel like it.
• Lost Forever: There are two Dark Crystals in the game that can be Lost Forever if you don't grab them, one can be stolen by a gnome (And you'll have no way to get it back due to plot leaving you with no minions) the other is in an area that can only be accessed once, and is destroyed after you exit, making return impossible. The Champion hats can also be Lost Forever if you don't grab them immediately since they disappear if you exit the area. Getting the Spider Champion Hat is especially bad since there's a limited window of opportunity to get it.
• Light Is Not Good: Emperor Solarius
• Overlad, I Am Your Mother

Gnarl: What! How did you know-hang on, I recognize that voice now! Rose! Former Mistress Rose! Or Mrs. Marius now, I should say. Don't trust her. She's a devious, manipulative, abandoner... Oh and she's your mother!

• • One has to wonder how Gnarl knows all this and yet had absolutely no idea Florian was Solarus. You'd think finding out about one would reveal the other.
    • Rose wears a cloak for the entire game and it took her saying "Shut up, Gnarl" for him to actually know who she is. He also does note that she is rather familiar when she enters the Netherworld.
    • And yet once he identified her, he had no problem spouting off that she'd married Marius, and all that implies. I doubt who she married was a state secret.
    • Gnarl does seem to have a habit of keeping secrets from his boss.
• Melee a Trois: Between the Overlord, the Elves and the Glorious Empire. The Elves are taken out of the picture during their Enemy Mine moment with the Overlord later on though.
• Mind Control: The lead character doesn't bother with the "cultivating a good reputation through taking care of his subjects" of his 0% Corruption Father or Lord Gromgard from Overlord: Dark Legend, and just dominates peoples' wills and turns them into his eager and willing slaves.
  • Well unlike his dad, who was a Fallen Hero, he was born and raised into evil.
• Necessarily Evil: Rose, who initially took her son away from the tower to prevent his rise to evil later accepts the Overlad as perhaps someone who would bring some proper order to the world and restore the Balance between Light and Darkness.
• Nice Hat: Your brown minions will wear various items on their heads some of which are only obtainable once. Special mention must go to one hat which is the rather large top of a banner pole.
• Nightmare Fetishist: Kelda, who as a child sympathized and had a crush upon the Witch-boy. She is then spared when the Overlad returns as a man to conquer Nordberg and instead happily becomes his Mistress, saying how she hated her town for tossing him out for the Empire.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Florian's act as a regular sappy Elf is merely his continuing efforts to sabotage the Sanctuaries from the inside. The reveal is made glorious by simply hearing him drop that stupid stoner accent.
• One-Winged Angel: Solarius flung himself into a vat of pure magic and became a giant tentacled slug "that's made of pure magic," as Gnarl said.
• Only Sane Man: Queen Fay of the elves. You're either a tyrant or an Omnicidal Maniac, the Glorious Empire is actively genocidal towards magical creatures, and her underlings are all complete imbeciles.
  • Kelda and Rose might count.
• Overlord, Jr.: The Main Character is a literal case.
• Our Mermaids Are Different: They're fat, ugly and mean.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: The Empire are pretty easily convinced by Minions dressed up in the armor of the Imperial Guard. They do ponder a bit why the new recruits are so short, deciding that they've chosen to recruit Gnomes.
• Parental Abandonment: The Witch-Boy.
• People Puppets: One of the abilities allows the player character to take direct control of a minon to access places the Overlord can't go.
• Power Floats: Rose.
• Professional Butt-Kisser: Marius, towards Solarius.
• Randomly Drops: Fairy crystals, required more and more for forging.
• Redemption Demotion: Inverted with Queen Fay, who loses her magical powers following her Face Heel Turn. Justified in that her change in allegiance is a side effect of you draining her powers to recharge your Tower Heart
• Ripped from the Headlines: A rich imperial citizen approaches the Overlord: "Everything's gone wrong! I need a bailout! A few thousand golds should do... Maybe you can get them from the people in the slums?" The overlord then fries the man with lightning.
• Red Right Hand: While hard to miss the Overlad has blue skin
• Slouch of Villainy: The Overlord gets to sit in his throne, and slouches magnificently. He also gets bonus points for being able to do so in armor.
• Small Annoying Creature: The Gnomes. The suicide bomber Red Gnomes reach Goddamned Bats status and Demonic Spiders status in large numbers. Probably intentional since it makes killing Gnomes that much more cathartic.
  • Unless you master the spin attack, that is.
• Start of Darkness: The game opens up to the Witch-Boy being picked on and bullied for, well, being The Witch-Boy.
• Stealth-Based Mission: You have to guide a group of green minions though a castle filled with guards and towers that sweep areas you need to avoid.
  • And later, you have to do a much shorter stealth mission involving the blue minions who, thankfully, can turn invisible while being swept.
• Stripperiffic: The Mermaids, Fairies, and Elven Priestesses. Unfortunately.
  • But, hey, the minions love the fairies, so it's still Fan Service for them.
• Stupid Good: The Elves and fairies, who try to stop you from draining Queen Fay's power, despite the fact that she's willing, and that doing so is the only way the Empire can be stopped. Then again, it's her power that's holding the Last Sanctuary together, and, quite frankly, even if she says that she's willingly letting the Sauron-lookalike zap her with Force Lightning, the elves wouldn't be inclined to believe her.
• Super Drowning Skills: As in the first game, The Overlord will wade through waist-high water and won't enter anything deeper and only the Blues can swim.
  • Well he IS wearing a full plate suit of armor. You try swimming with 45 pounds of metal on you, and that's assuming the minions are craftsmen to rival the best in the world.
• Tenchi Solution: As opposed to his father, the Overlord can keep all three of the mistresses he meets as part of his harem at the same time. They're even seen slouching together on the throne in the ending.
  • The Overlord may even successfully convince the ladies to partake in a foursome
  • You still have to choose a First Mistress though.
• Too Dumb to Live: Not a single one of the peasants seeking an audience are able to deliver their message without adding a few unreasonable demands from the dark lord. Or perhaps they all fail to notice that they're kneeling on a giant trap door above a sea of lava.
• Trap Door: As mentioned above, the #1 method of disposing of stupid peasants. Doesn't work on Rose though.
• Unholy Matrimony: In the sequel, choosing a mistress will decide of which kind of mount your minions will get for the final battle.
• Unicorn: A couple of these in the arena.
• Unwinnable By Mistake: Quitting the game at certain points can make the map objectives unachievable, halting the main quest progress. Autosave makes the entire save slot a dead end.
• Victorious Childhood Friend: Kelda if she's kept as First Mistress.
• Villain Protagonist: Do we have to explain this one?
• We Have Reserves: You have a lot of minions, and they're easily replaced, although you can resurrect fallen ones that you've taken a liking to. Or sacrifice them to regenerate your life.
• What Measure Is a Non-Cute?: The Elves are mainly concerned with protecting creatures they consider cute and fluffy.
• Where I Was Born and Razed: Nordberg, depending on your allegiance, either ends up completely destroyed or brainwashed and enslaved. Note that they were Kind of asking for it.