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...