find ways to present you with intricate strategic challenges far more quickly than Tactics Ogre can manage, while paradoxically overwhelming you far less. These days, indie games like Into the Breach or Invisible, Inc. Tactics Ogre very obviously traces its design back to the days before Advance Wars - a game in a parallel but very closely related genre - had done so much to clarify the rock-paper-scissors balance and problem-solving joy of tactical combat. Yet despite all this - and despite the 3D map design, which uses verticality to create some interesting spatial challenges - the game struggles to stage the sort of clean, intricate logic puzzles that represent the tactics genre at its best. You can assign AI to take over party members’ actions there’s a turn-speed button the skill and spell systems have been redesigned to provide access to better skills earlier in the game random encounters have been removed from the world map (and replaced with optional training battles if you feel the need to grind), and so on. To be fair, Reborn makes quite a few tweaks to speed things up and ease the mental load. It’s notable that Final Fantasy Tactics, which paired Matsuno with veteran Square designer Hiroyuki Ito, pared the number of units down to the four-to-six range, and gained a lot of focus as a result. Though it’s hardly grand strategy, it’s not an easy game to parse, and fights can feel scrappy and piecemeal. Complete battles often take upward of half an hour, and foregone conclusions (which, to be fair, aren’t too common - this is a well-balanced game) are excruciating.įurthermore, the number of units makes it hard to keep the status of your forces, and overall shape of the battlefield, in your mind’s eye. Turns take a long time to execute the opening movement round, when engaging the enemy is usually impossible and you’re simply moving each unit into striking distance, feels interminable. ![]() The standard party size for an encounter is somewhere between eight and 12 units. This is a turn-based tactics game in which you move characters around a gridded map, playing fantasy combat chess with an enemy force controlled by the AI. The simple one has to do with party size. There’s both a simple reason for this, and a less straightforward one. As an early masterwork in a highly specialized genre that has seen a lot of innovation since, it can feel dated and inflexible. (I’m one I knew the game well by reputation, but had never played it before I started this review.) Despite the many thoughtful revisions and quality-of-life improvements, this is still a daunting game that’s slow to reveal itself. ![]() New players should approach Tactics Ogre with caution, though. It says a lot about the game’s revered status that it has received more loving care from Square Enix - which bought Tactics Ogre’s publisher Quest in 2002, after hiring Matsuno away from them in ’95 - than Final Fantasy Tactics, a game in Square’s flagship franchise, whose PSP and mobile versions aren’t nearly as well made. But it also makes thorough and careful revisions to that one, tweaking essential design elements, adding features, overhauling the interface, and restoring the artwork. Reborn is, nominally, an updated port of 2010’s PlayStation Portable remake (this time for PC, PlayStation 4 and 5, and Nintendo Switch). In Tactics Ogre: Reborn, this 1995 game - which often ranks highly in polls of the best games of all time in Japan - receives its second major overhaul. It’s also the cornerstone of a remarkable, yet sadly not fully realized, career: that of its writer-director, Yasumi Matsuno, who went on to make cult classics Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story before flaming out midway through the tortured development of Final Fantasy 12, a personal and professional setback he seems never to have fully recovered from. ![]() It’s a keystone game - perhaps the keystone game - in a particular and demanding genre, the tactical role-playing game. There’s no doubting the historical importance of Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together.
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