Tactics Ogre: Reborn Review: The classic tactical RPG is showing its age

There is no doubt about the historical importance of Tactics Ogre: Let’s stick together. It’s a key game – maybe the Keystone game – in a special and challenging genre, tactical RPG. It is also the cornerstone of a remarkable but unfortunately not fully realized career: that of its writer-director Yasumi Matsuno, who went on to make cult classics Final Fantasy Tactics and vagabond story before flaring up in the midst of the tormented development of Final Fantasy 12a personal and professional setback from which he never seems to have fully recovered.

in the Tactical Ogre: RebornThis 1995 game – which often ranks high in polls for the best games of all time in Japan – is getting its second major overhaul. reborn is nominally an updated port of the 2010 PlayStation Portable remake (this time for PC, PlayStation 4 and 5, and Nintendo Switch). But it also makes thorough and painstaking revisions to it, tweaking key design elements, adding features, overhauling the UI and restoring the graphics. It says a lot about the game’s revered status that it was more lovingly cared for by Square Enix – which bought it Tactic Ogre‘s publishers Quest in 2002, after renting Matsuno away from them in 1995 — then Final Fantasy Tacticsa game in Square’s flagship franchise, the PSP and mobile versions of which aren’t nearly as well made.

New players should approach Tactic Ogre however with caution. (I am one; I knew the game well by reputation, but had never played it before starting this review.) Despite the many thoughtful overhauls and quality of life improvements, this is still a daunting game that’s slow to evolve disclosed . As an early masterpiece in a highly specialized genre that has seen many innovations since then, it can feel dated and inflexible. And it’s often just a chore to play.

There is both a simple and a less simple reason for this. The simple has to do with the party size. This is a turn-based tactics game where you move characters around a grid map and play fantasy battle chess with an enemy force controlled by the AI. The standard group size for an encounter is between eight and 12 units. Rounds take a long time to complete; The opening round of movement, when the enemy can’t normally be engaged and you just put every unit within striking distance, feels endless. Full battles often last more than half an hour, and anticipated conclusions (which, to be fair, aren’t all that common – this is a matched game) are excruciating.

In addition, the number of units makes it difficult to keep track of the status of your forces and the overall shape of the battlefield. While hardly a great strategy, it’s not an easy game to analyze, and combat can feel piecemeal and piecemeal. That’s remarkable Final Fantasy Tacticswhich Matsuno teamed up with veteran square designer Hiroyuki Ito, reduced the number of units to four to six, thereby gaining a lot of attention.

to be fair reborn makes some changes to speed things up and ease mental strain. You can assign the AI ​​to take over the actions of the group members. there is a rotation speed knob; The skill and spell system has been redesigned to allow access to better skills earlier in the game; Random encounters have been removed from the world map (and replaced with optional training battles if you feel the need to grind), and so on. Yet despite all of this – and despite the 3D map design that uses verticality to create some interesting spatial challenges – the game struggles to stage the kind of clean, intricate logic puzzles that represent the tactical genre at its best.

Tactic Ogre quite obviously its design dates back to the days before pre-wars – a game in a parallel but very closely related genre – had done so much to illustrate the balance between rock, paper, scissors and the problem-solving spirit of tactical combat. Nowadays indie games are like into the breach or Invisible, Inc. Finding ways to make you face complicated strategic challenges much faster Tactic Ogre can handle, while paradoxically, it’s much less overwhelming. But maybe it’s not just age. Maybe Tactic Ogre is inherently less of a tactics game and more of an RPG – and what I like to call a backroom RPG.

A backroom roleplaying game is a game where the actual action takes place outside of combat, deep in the party menus. (Final Fantasy 12with its Gambit programming system and game-like License Board, is one of the best examples.) In that regard Tactic Ogre is a theorycrafter’s dream, with tremendous customizability and depth that reborn intentionally does little to rationalize. In fact, even class-wide leveling is being scrapped from the PSP version in favor of going back to individual unit leveling. Party members can be recruited from near and far and their classes can be reassigned, as can their elemental alignment, which is important in combat. Skills, spells, gear, and items are assigned and developed for each character, and there are ways to craft and combine more powerful gear to improve stats.

Here you’ll have a ton of inventory and units to manage while developing and refining your favorite squad – as well as satisfaction from seeing that squad perform effectively in combat. For a certain type of player, this will be heaven. I’ve been known to love this kind of thing myself. But in Tactic Ogre, it feels like all the menu work is drawing attention away from a combat system that’s already struggling for strategic focus. Combat is inevitably at the heart of a game like this, and when it’s not singing all the work for it can feel like wasted effort.

But there’s a whole other great design at work there tactical ogre, One that has aged much better and will return your investment in the game in the greatest measure. It’s the story. Matsuno is arguably an even more talented and influential writer than a designer. Despite their fantasy settings, his games tend to be grounded, humanistic works that depict intricate maps of political intrigue – which, laden with delicate names and fanciful jargon, can initially seem dry and difficult to understand. But they unfold into something personal, genuine, and preoccupied with the real world. Tactic Ogre is no different.

Matsuno said the game’s devastating, branching storyline was inspired by the wars in Yugoslavia in the early ’90s, when that country was falling apart after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Tactic Ogre imagines the Valerian Islands, an archipelago torn by ethnic and class struggles between its three main factions: the Bakram, the Galgastani, and the Walister. A civil war has broken out after the death of a unifying king; During a time of uneasy peace, we join a group of oppressed Walister revolutionaries led by young Denam Pavel, his sister Catiua, and childhood friend Vyce. They are soon joined by a team of friendly mercenaries, while Resistance leader Duke Ronwey leads them deeper into a conflict of shifting factions, complex loyalties, and dirty tricks.

This is a branching tale where the choices – judged on a scale from legal to messy, not good to bad – can be nagging in their moral ambiguity and the results can be painfully dismal. Denam’s willingness to follow the Duke and his commitment to the Welsh cause are severely tested. As an exploration of the moral and political swamp of war, reborn is quite sophisticated, and Matsuno’s refusal to describe it in black-and-white terms makes the branching results illuminating rather than reductive. A World Tarot feature usefully allows you to explore all branches in parallel realities without reversing your progress. (There’s a similar in-combat rewind feature that lets you repeat your decisions and switch between different tactical outcomes without overriding them – a brilliant feature.)

Genius and sincerity are at work here. Go in deep enough Tactic Ogre and the request of its subtitle, let’s stick togetherIt starts to sound a lot less goofy and a lot more haunting and sad. How deep you delve into the game will depend on your appetite for micromanagement and your patience with gameplay systems that, 27 years later, are beginning to creak despite all the sensible tinkering that’s been done to them. Tactical Ogre: Reborn is a welcome, polished, and thoughtful update to a game that defined a genre – a genre that it has now left behind.

Tactical Ogre: Reborn will be released on November 11th on Windows PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. The game has been verified on Switch using a pre-release download code provided by Square Enix. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not affect editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions on products purchased through affiliate links. You can find For more information on Polygon’s Ethics Policy, click here.