Perhaps my continual inability to get the game’s title correct was a sign that pretty much nothing about this game would sit well with me. My overall feelings towards Tactics Ogre are neither positive nor negative, but conversely I am definitely not ambivalent nor neutral about it. Maybe it would be better to say that I am both strongly positive and strongly negative about the game.
Flip that coin, TwoFace, and tell me if I like this game or not...
Ugh, now I am just confusing myself. I guess my feelings about Tactics Ogre can best be put that they are like a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.
Points to those who know why this picture is here!
Knowing that the choices I made throughout the game would have a profound impact on the story, I chose not to do any research before starting my playthrough. While I’m not a huge stickler about spoilers, I wanted to go through this one cold, with absolutely no preconceived notions.
Consequently, I was left scratching my head early on with the Tactics Ogre’s plentiful and overarching similarities to another ‘Tactics’ game of the Final Fantasy variety, that I happen to know extremely well. As I played on, I began to get a very sour taste in my mouth: I was playing a crappy clone of Final Fantasy Tactics! How dare the Ogre Battle series rip off one of my favorite games of all time! This would not do!
With my initial impression one of building hatred and anger, I decided it was time to go to the internet and thus I received an education in what I should have already known as someone who considers himself a Gamer with a Masters Degree in Tactical RPGs. First Tactics Ogre was a PS1 port of the original Super Famicon game, so it predated Final Fantasy Tactics by a good number of years. Second, the game was the brainchild of Yasumi Matsuno, who would later go on to direct Final Fantasy Tactics.
In the time it takes to read a Wikipedia entry, my opinion of Tactics Ogre changed 180 degrees. Instead of a poorly done clone, Ogre Tactics (doh!) was revolutionary and implemented (albeit in unpolished forms) mechanics and ideas that would later be perfected in Final Fantasy Tactics.
Given the startling similarities between the two games, it would not be surprising if Yasumi Matsuno didn’t think of Final Fantasy Tactics as a remake of Tactics Ogre and an opportunity to fix any problems from his original masterpiece.
Apparently, 'Poor Translation and Localization" was something Matsuno felt he got right the first time around.
Even with the knowledge of Tactics Ogre being the ‘spiritual predecessor’ to one of my favorite games, I still have a hard time determining how I feel. Every major positive has a rather glaring negative just sitting there staring at you. Similarly, major faults also seem to contain profound positives.
Want Proof? Positive: a guy named Boner. Negative: there are Boners all over the place.
For example, I enjoy the difficulty of Tactics Ogre. When playing at or near the levels of the enemy, the battles are challenging and require more than a bit of tactical thought. Most story battles cannot be won be simply conducting a mass charge with melee weapons.
The flip side is that, since the ability to revive dead characters only becomes available late in the game, when a character is killed, they are more or less gone for good. Thus, when a party member died, I hit the reset button. Given the above mentioned challenge, I ended up hitting the reset button a lot, which began to get increasingly frustrating. This frustration was compounded by the AI ganging up on wounded characters (a positive, as it’s a sound tactic that anyone with half a brain would use) and also seem to possess increased stats compared to my characters of comparable level and equipment (a negative, as well designed games don’t need to rely on cheating AI).
My resulting frustration would either lead to getting fed up and not touching a controller for five days or, ultimately leveling up way beyond the AI level, and consequently removing the afore mentioned challenge.
Another example centers on the job system. The character customization process is very diverse and allows quite a bit of flexibility. Want your Wizard to be equipped with a sword and shield? Go for it. There are no ‘this character can’t equip that’ messages here. Naturally, equipping a sword would reduce the Wizard’s magic power and he would still suck as a melee fighter, but if you wanted to do it, you could.
The down side however, after the first four or five hours of gameplay, I found a team that worked for me, and I never changed it the remainder of the game (with the exception of equipping some new weapons here or there). In fact, in order to prevent my characters from dying, almost all my characters were indirect attackers: i.e. archers. You see, an indirect attack, whether by bow, crossbow, shuriken, etc does not let the enemy counter attack, whereas a direct (melee) attack does. And, remember that I’m trying to prevent characters from dying, so keeping my distance and limiting the amount of damage by not giving the enemy the opportunity to counter attack seemed like a pretty solid plan.
In fact it was such a solid plan, that my party of 2 Archers, 2 Valkyries (with bows), Canopus (with a bow), 2 healers, a Wizard, a Swordsman, and a Bezerker (crossbow), were able to handle anything the game threw at them, with maybe two exceptions. Remember, I hit upon this combination at hour 5 of a 50 hour game. That’s 45 hours of essentially the same battle set up over and over and over…
The above examples are just the tip of the iceberg for the two-sided aspects of the game. Consequently, it has been hard to determine how I exactly feel about the game. On the one hand, I would replay this game in a heartbeat. If it were not for my ever increasing backlog of unplayed games, I would start a new game of Tactics Ogre today. The branching story and bonus dungeon that I only started exploring, plus all the abilities and items that I didn’t get or experiment fully with, all call me back to Tactics Ogre and make it a game I want to play.
But, on the other hand, I’m not sure I recommend it. I suppose if Tactical RPGs are your bread and butter, than yeah, go find a copy. But, even for Tactical RPG buffs, there are plenty of much more refined tactical games out there (to be fair, there are a lot worse too – Eternal Eyes anyone?). Likewise, Tactics Ogre has not aged well when compared to other Tactical RPGs of the past few generations. While Japan has a huge Tactics Ogre fan base, here in the US, the game has (at best) a cult following. Go ahead and count me as one of the members of that fan base, but I think those numbers are quite thin.
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