Come tonight, come to the ogre site. Come to the ogre battle fight.

With each generic flop Square puts out, each scandal that comes to light, each pathetic attempt to force NFTs onto their consumers, I'm convinced games like Tactics Ogre Reborn and Triangle Strategy are the result of an accounting error. Clearly money is going to projects it shouldn't, because these are good games and Square isn't in the business of putting those out anymore. Whatever the case may be, as an avowed fan of Final Fantasy Tactics I'm glad I finally got to sit down and finally play Tactics Ogre, a game FFT owes much of its DNA to. After all, it was the first game Yasumi Matsuno (enjoyer of Queen and the Bosnian Genocide) worked on after leaving Quest Corp for Square, and as it happens, he brought over a number of other Ogre developers with him.

I never sat down with the original Tactics Ogre, both the original Playstation release as well as the PSP version are unknown quantities to me. I feel it's important to state this up front, because I couldn't possibly pick out any specific version differences or instances of rebalancing outside of a couple requirement changes for recruitable characters. Whatever was changed for Reborn, it is an unusual mix of modern sensibilities and antiquated systems. No better is this illustrated than in The Wheel, a game mechanic that allows you to roll back turns in a battle in order to get more favorable outcomes. It's definitely a quality of life feature I appreciated whenever a mistake cascaded into disaster, but it's also borne from the fact that Tactics Ogre can be incredibly harsh at times.

I phrase this as a negative, but honestly... I'm into it? It's an interesting balance of maintaining the integrity of Tactics Ogre's difficulty while also providing players a means to work around it should that become more frustrating than fun, and I think that while it does highlight some imbalance in the game, the imbalance is - if my point of comparison is FFT - part of the Tactics identity. In FFT you could place yourself in an unwinnable situation by making a save between consecutive battles, particularly before Weigraf, and it's still possible to do this in Ogre (arguably, you're more likely to do this than in FFT.) Thankfully Tactics Ogre places less of an emphasis on raw levels than FFT, and if you hit a wall then it's really more a matter of finding the right team composition than it is grinding. In fact, there's a floating level cap that prevents this, and it helps subtly train the player to learn where their party's strength really lies. Selecting the correct counter-picks is vital, so much so that you can scope out most battles beforehand to learn the enemy team's composition. This prevents you from rolling a fight against a bunch of beasts without having any dragoons, for example, but can also help you find holes in your party that may need to be filled before pressing on with the story. Thankfully, the job system is far less of a commitment than in Final Fantasy Tactics, there's no JP to earn and a lot of your progress is made towards weapon proficiencies that can be carried between classes, so if you're short on a few dragoons for that all-beast encounter, you can swap a few characters over at little penalty.

There's a reason one of the images the site pulls for this game is of the party menu, you're going to be spending a lot of time in there. You'll also spend a lot of time navigating Tactics Ogre's deep and complicated narrative. This fun and exciting story is largely based on uhhh... hold on let me see what I wrote down here... The Yugoslav Wars!? Oh NO!!

I don't want to spoil Tactics Ogre's story, even though I could realistically only ruin one-and-a-half of them. You see, early on in the game you're presented with a choice that will set your adventure down one of two paths: Law and Chaos, though a third Neutral route (what is this, SMT???) can be unlocked mid-way through Chaos. I feel that in most games alignment splits often don't feel substantive enough to warrant a replay, but Tactics Ogre's narratives divert so strongly that it really feels like you're getting three different games in one package. Characters and relationships are totally recontextualized between each route, and additional choices made throughout further contribute to different endings. Post-game Coda missions are also dependent on the choices you made, and there's so many branching paths throughout the game that a cursory glance as Tactics Ogre's timeline might be enough to make you go all cross-eyed. Thankfully, once you complete the game you have access to The World Tarot, which allows you to jump between various "anchor points" in the storyline. This allows you to go back and explore different paths through fortresses, recruit characters you missed, or dive into the routes you didn't take on your first playthrough. Want a 100% complete save? That's totally possible.

Unfortunately, this is also about where I fell off of the game. I completed the first Coda mission and then decided to take on some of the Chaos route before deciding to jump back over to Law and unlock the last few characters I was missing. Despite following a guide to ensure I didn't miss any steps, two of the recruits I targeted continued to slip through my fingers. With Ravness, I followed a guide to the letter then verified I wasn't missing anything off of two other guides, and for some reason I just couldn't unlock the second battle needed to recruit her. For the Dread Pirate Azelstan, the guide I was following missed a step completely and told me to continue with story missions to unlock the next leg of the recruitment process, which ate up about an hour of my time only to discover that I had locked myself out of recruiting him again and would need to go back and repeat everything.

The idea of having to cross reference a bunch of guides to make sure you don't miss a single critical step in the middle of a multi-part process to recruit a character is bad enough, but some of these requirements are so obtuse you'd think you were trying to progress a Dark Souls quest. Indeed, there's some cases where you have to exhaust all of a character's in-battle dialog or you can't recruit them, and god help you if they get killed mid-fight. Spin the Wheel and try again, assuming you even can. A few recruits need to be lowered to critical HP and not outright killed on top of exhausting their dialog, and if they're the last combatant alive then keep your fingers crossed that one of your units doesn't kill them in a counter-attack and end the battle. You can't rewind that, ass hole.

On the other hand, they fixed the requirements for getting Deneb in her Wicce class. Fun side mission, too. She made a bunch of pumpkin golems to run her shop only she gave them too much sentience and now they think they're people and they want fair wages. Deneb disagrees so they start a riot and you have to put it down. Look I know that sounds like you're playing the role of a Pinkerton, but I promise it works out for the golems in the end. Punkin is people. We all love Punkin.

My other gripe is it takes like 40 hours before someone says "ogre," and by that point everyone throws around the ogre word so much it loses all meaning. Oh they're an ogre, huh? Yeah I'm an ogre, too. Oh cool we'll all be ogres. Sure, next you're gonna tell me we're all going to the two-way mirror mountain. Is it to the east? No, we can't go that way, better head south...

i've been playign this game for 80 hours and it's killing me. my family is talking about putting me into hospice because i've played too much tactics ogre and now i'm a dehydrated husk of my former self. i tried to tell my mom how you unlock ozma and she started crying, she can't bear to see her son like this

this ogre man is going home...

Before Engage was revealed, my biggest hope for a new Fire Emblem game was for it to not just be a carbon copy of Three Houses and be a return to form. Be careful what you wish for.

Fire Emblem Engage is shaping up to be one of the most polarizing games in a series where every game is polarizing on some level. I fall into the camp that does not care for it and I’m putting my extended thoughts on it here just to have them somewhere. This is not meant to demean anyone who enjoys it but rather to explain why I feel the way I do.

I actually do see why a lot of people in the FE spaces I frequent really enjoy this one. Breaking is one of the best mechanics to get added to Fire Emblem in a while, as it gives a nice flow to player phases and makes you have to put more thought into playing around enemy phases. Rounds of combat look absolutely stunning with quite possibly the best 3D animations in the series (Kagetsu’s crit animation gives me life) and other neat touches like the cool subtle effect for hitting someone with bonus damage. Ring abilities can just be incredibly fun to utilize, whether it’s busted stuff like Celica’s warp and Sigurd’s massive movement boost or more situational but still fun to use stuff like Lyn’s copies and Ike’s risk vs reward attack. And there’s plenty of maps that stand as some of the best designed in the series, with chapter 11 being the obvious standout, 17 being a tough but fair gauntlet of six strong boss fights, and 19 having a ridiculous surprise that feels like something from a rom hack but in the best way possible.

Based purely on gameplay, I have more positive things than negative things to say about Engage. But that’s not to say that those negative things don’t exist. There are some parts of the game where the map design falters. The earlygame maps essentially being scripted tutorials is a drag, the Solm arc has a desert rout map, a fog of war map with a dumb gimmick of having to break crates with the Ike ring, and a map with the Corrin ring that feels Rev inspired (derogatory), and there’s plenty of otherwise good chapters that suffer from excessive reinforcements that end up slowing down an already fairly slow game.

I also dislike how units feel in this one. The earlygame units are actively unfun to use and are ridiculously outclassed by any mid to late game unit with the same class. Furthermore, I’m not a fan of the effect rings have on unit feel. Plenty of aspects behind units such as skills and weapon proficiency are locked behind bonds with certain rings so it makes units feel less like actually unique entities and more so just vessels for rings.

Lastly, this may just be my personal preference but I’ve never liked the rewind mechanics that have been in every game since FE15’s turnwheel and they’re arguably at their worst now that you can save mid-battle and effectively give yourself infinite rewind uses. I get why these mechanics are there but they feel redundant with the existence of casual mode and really just take me out of the experience as they remove a lot of the interesting dynamics that permadeath creates. And this is before the assholish design choices that they tend to inspire.

So overall, from a gameplay perspective, Engage is a flawed but fun experience. Base Fire Emblem gameplay activates my neurons on a level that I can’t explain so not fucking it up too much is enough to make me happy. I might even go as far to say that a good chunk of my gameplay issues won’t be as much of a problem when a fair bit of time passes and the meta gets easier to understand. But my main source of issues with Engage is not so much its gameplay as it is its story.

I’m seeing a lot of takes from Engage enjoyers along the lines of “people only hate the story because it’s not as serious.” However, I wouldn’t mind a less serious Fire Emblem story if done well. I genuinely love the cheesy 4kids/saturday morning style English opening and I would look forward to Fire Emblem’s G Gundam equivalent: a weird outlier in the series’ history with the primary appeal of being really stupid in a fun way. Sadly though, Engage fails to capture scenes of true peak fiction like having Holland use a windmill mech or having the protagonist get detained in post apocalyptic Italy and interrogated by having his head shoved into a pizza.
The story just overall feels dry and uninteresting. Alear has the personality of cardboard and the four “lords” that join him don’t get much screen time after their respective arcs so none of them have any chemistry amongst themselves or with Alear in the main story. I’m sure that they have interesting dynamics with each other in the supports but if I shouldn’t have to go out of my way to find character dynamics that should have been there in the first place.

Beyond that, the plot is your standard Fire Emblem fare and almost everything that happens in it is something that has happened several times in the series, whether it’s a possessed ruler who’s the pawn of the main villain, a wyvern riding character who starts out on the villain’s side but defects to your army, or the main villain being a generic purple dragon whose main “Fell Dragon” title is the same as another game in the series’ generic purple dragon. For fuck’s sake, the game’s central theme of “going against what you’re fated to be” and the plot twist associated with said theme were both already done before and better in Awakening. It’s hard for me to enjoy this as a less serious game in the series when it just ends up being the same shit as before but with the most superficial layer of “irony”.

The sad thing is that there’s a handful of times where the less serious tone pays off. Yunaka is a fun twist on the bubbly personalities you see in the series by having a character whose bubbly personality is actually just a way of hiding her criminal past and her introduction chapter where she tries to hide the fact that she stole the ring is a fun dynamic. Alcryst is an entertaining parody of angsty characters like Takumi and his introduction scene cracks me up. Fogado is incredibly charismatic and you can tell that his VA had the time of his life recording for him. But these redeeming qualities are the exception, not the norm.

There’s also several moments where the game tries and fails to do serious emotional beats and its villains are the worst example of this. The game arbitrarily makes villains sympathetic with little build up, presumably because of the perceived notion that sympathetic villains are inherently better. It tries and fails to make you feel bad for the side villain who beats up children multiple times and the other side villain who looks like a DeviantArt user’s edgy Fairy Tail OC and whose primary personality trait is being a sadomasochist. Even worse is that the game waits until the very final chapter to give the main antagonist a backstory and then proceeds to treat their death as a sad moment in a way that feels completely unwarranted.

Finally, I’m not a fan of the way the emblem rings were implemented into the narrative. They don’t feel like the actual characters they were in their home series (although calling Byleth a character is a stretch tbh) but rather feel more like generic collectibles that have the faces of past protagonists attached to them as a marketing gimmick. In the main story, they’ll get a little bit of screen time in their join chapter and then get reduced to doing nothing but giving off exposition for the rest of the game. In the game’s side content, their supports are only two to four lines of dialogue so there’s not much they can add beyond generic advice or “remember this thing from the past game” dialogue.

Now because Engage has spawned gameplay vs story discourse, I’ll just say this: I can enjoy games with bad stories and there’s plenty of FE games that fall into that camp. I’m even in the camp that enjoys Fates: Conquest for its gameplay even if I do understand why some might not be able to. But the way I see it, the more time a story takes up, the more of an impact that said story has on my opinion of a game. Cutscenes are lengthy, even more so than Conquest’s, and the game is becoming notorious for how dragged on death scenes in particular feel. These cutscenes take up a lot of the game’s time so I would prefer for the time spent on them to have good writing. And no, being able to skip cutscenes doesn’t make the issues go away. That excuse doesn’t hold up for games I like (like the aforementioned Fates: Conquest) and it doesn’t hold up here either.

Minor tangent but the victim complex a small but vocal portion of the FE fanbase has for any criticism of this game is pathetic. I totally get it if you enjoy games primarily for gameplay and there’s plenty of cases where I do just that but you have to understand why some people aren’t able to do so. If you get genuinely mad at someone for not liking/being interested in a game primarily because of its story, you are part of the reason why video games aren’t treated as seriously as other forms of art.

I guess to explain my apprehensiveness towards Engage overall in spite of liking the gameplay for the most part is that there’s a feeling of soullessness to it, at least to me. It doesn’t exist to do anything new or interesting and primarily exists to reference pre-existing games. There’s been a fairly common take that Engage has a worse story than Fates. Suffice it to say that I don’t agree with this take. Fates’ story is a level of poorly constructed that is the lowest of low bars to clear and that’s before the mountains of gross shit in it.

However, I can see where this take is coming from, even if I find it disagreeable, to say the least. Fates’ concept of a choice between your birth family or your adopted family was a novel idea, at least at the time. Conquest in particular had an interesting idea of focusing on the flaws of implementing change within the system. Both of these ideas were squandered though, in such a way that resulted in some of the worst writing I’ve ever seen. But while Fates had the issue of trying and failing unbelievably hard, Engage had the issue of not trying at all.

And one last thing that I couldn’t fit in here: Fuck Nintendo/Intelligent Systems for putting in pedophilic romance options and fuck Backloggd for deleting my friend’s review because he told pedophiles to do something to themselves that would make the world a better place.
FREE BATTLEHUNTZ