My third or fourth attempt to play this. A proof of concept, but is just so dreadfully slow and brain dead. Having played this on OG hardware and emulation, playing without a fast forward button is excruciating. It's hard to call this a strategy game when all the game offers you if a series of dots to connect while the enemy sends wave after wave of enemies rushing you mindlessly. This game is easily defeated by just relying on 2 or 3 really strong units placed at chokepoints, and if you play that way there's a lot more waiting in this game than anything else. There are some interesting meta systems at play in the background, but engaging with these mechanics can be extremely frustrating. Trying to play by the rules of charisma and alignment is more an exercise in patience than anything else as it requires an extreme amount of micro managing. This is fixed a little in 64 where the enemy behavior is more sophisticated, but here it can be hard to balance everything out when enemies that you're trying to avoid are dive bombing you by the dozens. The plot is also thin, being primarily delivered in a text crawl at the beginning of a mission with some boss and town dialog. Ogre Battle 64 invalidates this game totally by improving on nearly every single aspect while having a more in depth plot. I would only recommend for series completionists.

A surprisingly deep, unique and well designed game for it's time, hell, even for today. I definitely didn't expected to enjoy it as much as i did, even with some difficulty spikes. If you just wanted to play it because it's Matsuno's first game as a director, you can expect the same level of quality here, more so on the gameplay though. Story is definitely not the main attraction here, but this game is one of the best examples of storytelling through gameplay, right along with Fire Emblem 5 and Berwick Saga

Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen presented an interesting wedding of JRPG and RTS, pairing the former's battle system, character progression and artstyle with the strategy, scale and troop movement of the latter. The concoction - however, only represents half the scope. What lies ahead is a dizzying amount of different gameplay systems and rules with plenty of class/troop builds to experiment with.

The amount of customization options and details is overwhelming. While disguised as a simple war simulation/management game, Ogre Battle contains a cauldron of RPG aspects feeding into three distinct areas of gameplay: battle maps (where allied races and troop builds prevail), combat (relying on strategic team formations), and a universal morality system (the biggest factor shaping its story, affecting and affected by many player decisions), tied together by mechanical chemistry to weave a vast spiderweb of ideas. Surprisingly - the slow pacing, quasi-passive fights and agonizing difficulty isn't enough to derail the amount of enjoyable depth here. The mission-based format benefits the work as well, providing room for largely unique areas with plenty of bonuses, secrets, loot and side quests to uncover, while the writing bestows more flavor to each map and covers a vast gamut of morals and moods. Each of these maps could be an entire game for less capable developers.

Indeed, the writing represents another high point - a dark, political work that shuns the individual adventure in favor of perspective, injecting its initial good vs. evil (rebel vs. empire) paradigm with heavy doses of grey. Representing that is a branching storyline complete with 13 different endings, that simply takes advantage of the aforementioned morality mechanic and side quest variety. Heroic expectations unravel here to expose the confused, complex nature of war. Quest showed how a less 'personal' journey could feel more profound and powerful.