My only prior experience with Tactics Ogre was playing the PSP version when it was first released. I had fun with it, but I only completed one story path and didn't do any of the post game content. Now that the "Remaster" was released, I ended up completing every story path and even all of the Post Game stories which includes CODA 4.
The story is a heavy political one that involves multiple factions, people and events. The story is interesting, but I feel it moves a bit too fast at times. The main story consists of just 4 chapters and it doesn't seem particularly long. Cutscenes are also on the short side so I think having them be a bit longer would help flesh things out.
The key feature of the branching paths are pretty well done. The story variance interesting and worth playing through all 3 routes to experience. That said, every chapter 4 in each route plays out nearly the same. Roughly 85% of it is the same despite various character deaths and the different events that lead up to it.
The characters are mostly well done. Denam as the MC is written pretty well, but I couldn't say the same for every other character. None of them are particularly terrible, but with characters like Catiua who undergoes a dramatic character change, I felt that the game didn't spend enough time to set it up.
The cast is quite large overall and it's fun to recruit many different characters. Each of them have interesting background stories, but a flaw with this game is that once characters join you permanently, they mostly lose their relevance. They either cease to appear in many subsequent cutscenes or just don't say much. I guess the game just couldn't handle the many different variance where you have a character die post recruitment or just decline having them join the party in the first place. This results in certain expected character interactions to just not happen at all.
Music is great. There's many different tracks and with Reborn adding Orchestral version, the music sounds very good.
The graphics are decent overall. The same goes for the sprites, but I found most of their design pretty boring. Fully unique sprites aren't as common as I'd liked.
The gameplay is pretty great. A solid SRPG experience with many classes and abilities. The change in the skill system is not completely positive, but I do like the change overall. Auto-skills are nice, but having just 4 total skill slots for battle does feel limiting. The same goes for just 4 spell slots too.
Gone are the class cross skills except for Denam's special class. You lose out on customization that way, but it allows people to try out different classes anytime they want without fear of creating a broken build.
The level cap can be annoying where you're pretty much always underleveled, but it wasn't too bad for me at least. It help provided a decent challenge. That said, I didn't like how the level cap persists for the post game content. Worse is that for the final post game battle, you're stuck being 21 levels below every enemy. It's doubly annoying when the battle conditions were already hard enough.
Battles are normally on the long side which can be fun for having epic strategy battles, but there are a few that does dragged out after a while. Fortunately, you can set characters to A.I. and clear maps that you don't find interesting enough to do.
Overall, the game has a lot of content and even hidden content. Lots of character recruitments, equipment and spells to find. Some new QOL stuff for this new version including fully voiced cutscenes makes this a very good version of Tactics Ogre even if you don't like some of the gameplay changes.
The story is a heavy political one that involves multiple factions, people and events. The story is interesting, but I feel it moves a bit too fast at times. The main story consists of just 4 chapters and it doesn't seem particularly long. Cutscenes are also on the short side so I think having them be a bit longer would help flesh things out.
The key feature of the branching paths are pretty well done. The story variance interesting and worth playing through all 3 routes to experience. That said, every chapter 4 in each route plays out nearly the same. Roughly 85% of it is the same despite various character deaths and the different events that lead up to it.
The characters are mostly well done. Denam as the MC is written pretty well, but I couldn't say the same for every other character. None of them are particularly terrible, but with characters like Catiua who undergoes a dramatic character change, I felt that the game didn't spend enough time to set it up.
The cast is quite large overall and it's fun to recruit many different characters. Each of them have interesting background stories, but a flaw with this game is that once characters join you permanently, they mostly lose their relevance. They either cease to appear in many subsequent cutscenes or just don't say much. I guess the game just couldn't handle the many different variance where you have a character die post recruitment or just decline having them join the party in the first place. This results in certain expected character interactions to just not happen at all.
Music is great. There's many different tracks and with Reborn adding Orchestral version, the music sounds very good.
The graphics are decent overall. The same goes for the sprites, but I found most of their design pretty boring. Fully unique sprites aren't as common as I'd liked.
The gameplay is pretty great. A solid SRPG experience with many classes and abilities. The change in the skill system is not completely positive, but I do like the change overall. Auto-skills are nice, but having just 4 total skill slots for battle does feel limiting. The same goes for just 4 spell slots too.
Gone are the class cross skills except for Denam's special class. You lose out on customization that way, but it allows people to try out different classes anytime they want without fear of creating a broken build.
The level cap can be annoying where you're pretty much always underleveled, but it wasn't too bad for me at least. It help provided a decent challenge. That said, I didn't like how the level cap persists for the post game content. Worse is that for the final post game battle, you're stuck being 21 levels below every enemy. It's doubly annoying when the battle conditions were already hard enough.
Battles are normally on the long side which can be fun for having epic strategy battles, but there are a few that does dragged out after a while. Fortunately, you can set characters to A.I. and clear maps that you don't find interesting enough to do.
Overall, the game has a lot of content and even hidden content. Lots of character recruitments, equipment and spells to find. Some new QOL stuff for this new version including fully voiced cutscenes makes this a very good version of Tactics Ogre even if you don't like some of the gameplay changes.