Tactical Ogre: Rebirth It’s a remake of a remake. But that makes it just as important—even essential—in the modern day. The strategy title — coming to PS4, PS5, Switch, and PC — is a remake of the infamous RPG from 2010, Tactical Ogre: Let’s Hug Closer It’s not afraid to reach into the original’s chest cavity, move organs around inside, and restart the heart with a nice and sharp pump of its fists.
Square Enix has basically removed the hurdles that kept Tactical Ogre: Rebirth in the hands of modern gamers. By having your units take a short trip across the battlefield and collecting cards that boost their stats and unlock their choices, you are no longer limited to one specific playstyle with your army. Say, make your defense class strengthen their sword arms and get stronger blows? It’s doable now.
This means your numerous battles – all lasting between 20 and 50 minutes – can unfold more fluidly. By dominating the field and being aware of your surroundings (and responding to buff cards you like to spawn on the field), you can respond to enemy threats more easily and spontaneously.
Sending out Dragoons to grab a crit+ card from the flank, then seeing them pierce the open side of the army, then slaughter the back line? That’s tactical RPG catnip. It makes you feel like a grandson. This doesn’t really exist in the original tarot system. With the latest additions, it’s a stroke of genius.
This hipper nature of the Tactics Ogre game also works wonders for the brain. While your left brain goes to work, calculating all the min/max math you do to ensure your wizard lives to see another battle, your right brain is flooded with fiction. Why does moving to this swampy plot give your ninja an attack buff? Maybe it’s because she can launch an assault on the phalanx behind the enemy’s line of defense from here? She hid behind a rock before sneaking down and picking up the stragglers.
In a slow game like Tactics Ogre: Reborn (not a criticism), it’s nice to give your brain room to think about the fiction of melee combat. Especially when the title itself does such a good job of fleshing out the world—the regal politics of its barbs and hooks on your cortex, drawing you into its intrigue and menace. Game of Thrones, eat your heart out.
To entice you even further, and to provide your senses with even more delicious thrills, you’ll get an all-new soundtrack; a barrage of bombast and triumphant emotional barrages that will — literally — have you gripping your Switch with glee, Because it wakes and swells to match the way you quell rebellions on a lake tile map.
I’ve been playing with the OLED Switch, and the character art and pixel-sharp representation of the in-game graphics manage to walk the fine line of nostalgia and familiarity, but are clean and befitting of modern hardware. It even looks better than it did on the handheld on the PSP back in 2010–which does say something, as the Sony version of this remaster is also rich.
If you’re coming here from the newer, more advanced strategy RPGs (hello, Fire Emblem: Three Houses fans), you’ll be put off by some of the finer UI stuff. With only two camera options in combat – overhead or isometric – navigating the map can be frustrating when things start to get trickier.
The game is also a relic of the grinding era; kill your hero knights when they reach level 42, for example, and you’ll be forced to recruit their replacements at level 1 (or try to convince rival mercenaries to join your ranks). I love this; it makes you value every life instead of simply thinking of your crew as expendable. It gives weight, consequence, danger to combat. If you screw it up, you can always boot up and save the old one. You’re only going to lose… wait – what, 90 minutes? ! Damn.
If you love the setup and execution of this remake as much as I do, you’ll also revel in the chance to travel back in time and see where branching narratives converge and diverge. Once you’re done, you can rewind time to any major event and choose a different path; see how things would have played out if you’d saved that character, or executed another. On a finer note, you can also move one by one during combat – rewind two turns to make sure your priest doesn’t get blowpipe sniped from across the map (again).
In a world where we’ve seen Square Enix go down with remakes (examples include the lackluster Final Fantasy Pixel remake and the shocking Switch version of Kingdom Hearts), Tactical Ogre: Rebirth stands out Something special — the Changing of the Guard, so to speak — bodes very well for the publisher’s other classic RPG titles.
