Happy New Year! Since the holidays gave me more time to get through tactics backlog, this post is coming sooner than expected. Hooray! We're covering Tactics Ogre: Reborn from Square Enix for the Nintendo Switch, PS4/5 and Steam! The original Tactics Ogre was released on the SNES by Quest Corporation in 1995 with a PSP remake in 2010. Reborn is technically a remaster of the 2010 remake with quality of life polish and some graphical updates. Tactics Ogre: Reborn at heart is an SNES Tactics game with all the quirks of design choices of that era. An early foundation of the Final Fantasy Tactics Job System and art direction is present, adjusted by remaster polish. All the difficulty of games of that era is well and present too! So let's get on to it! Let Us Cling Together. Yasumi Matsuno and Tragedy of War As director and writer of both Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics, Yasumi Matsuno's influence lies heavy on Tactics RPGs. Both games tell stories about the hollowness of war as a tool of powerful. Enemies in war are other common folk like yourself being led by squabbling nobility fighting for power. Tactics Ogre focuses on Denam Pavel, a young member of the Walister Resistance fighting against occupying forces. Denam quickly becomes acclaimed as a hero of the people and is brought into the conflict between the three factions: Walister, Galgastani, and Bakram. Rather than build a hero's epic around Denam, the world questions Denam if he's willing to launder his reputation as an underdog hero to do evil in service of the Walister. Will Denam choose to be loyal and do atrocious deeds or turn his back and be shunned and hunted. And this is a choice to be made by the player! Tactics Ogre is home to an extremely dense branching narrative depending on major decisions made by Denam. So far my Denam has been firm in his morals, which also means he's driven further to the edges of society. Poor guy. In line with the more grim fantasy, it's underscored how every ally and foe are people with full lives much like Denam. Every enemy can be recruited as an ally and major enemies have bios detailing their path until clashing with Denam. While I have praise, the game does have an initial issue of throwing you headfirst into the narrative heavy with Proper Nouns that may be easy to be lost in. An initial exposition dump or color coordination of faction may have helped in the multiple iterations of the game. I also have issues with how Catiua, Denam's sister, is handled for much of her characterization. She's given a very contrarian and sorta self-centering personality which is a big waste for an advising character type. Still, the tone of Tactics Ogre has a firm clarity in skepticism of power and the nobility that wields it. It's a narrative tone I hope will be more common in medieval fantasy narratives over hero king type narratives. Tactics - Sprawling Brawls Maps are really big in Tactics Ogre on account of providing a battlefield for upwards of 20+ total units. They have multiple levels of verticality to consider for height difference limits and projectile trajectory. Often maps have a memorable feel to them when they center one side with a consistent height advantage or have limited points of approach, creating a tight chokehold. You really remember when you have to change your team around rushing several archers and mages on high rooftops or when you're the annoying archer barrage. Symmetrical Design... Partially Units between the player and enemy are symmetrical in design with:
Combat then centers on out-optimizing the enemy or having a better strategy over the enemy AI in a direct competitive sense. This mirrored balancing of enemy against the player also fits with all enemies being possibly recruitable (barring narrative exceptions). What would be the use of recruiting weak enemies, right? The issue comes with where the symmetry breaks and instead of a chess match it's trying to best a cruel Game Master. The risk and reward from the player changes to really slow pace. First, the player at most can deploy 10 units with 2 additional AI-controlled guest units. The enemy deploys 12+ similar-to-player-stats units, already creating a raw numbers issue. This is really noticeable with unit death mechanics and how those change between player and enemy. Player units are at risk of permanent death if a unit's turn passes 3 times while they're at 0 health. This either requires the map to be quickly rushed (very risky unless units are lucky enough to rush the boss unit), or spend one of the expensive revival items. Permadeath starts to encourage you to clump your units all together to drastically lower risk. Clumping means healers are in range more often to prevent the initial KO, somebody can easily reach the KO'd unit with the revive orb, or a clumped party can just rush down the boss all together. Unit death in tactics games has just been difficult design prompts, especially as people get more attached to their units. Tactics Ogre does let new units bounce to the average level of the army quickly, but letting that loss of unit happen is tough! Final Fantasy Tactics would also take this approach to unit death a few years later, though widening revival options with the series staple White Magic and Phoenix Downs. I'm curious if my risk/reward complaints will be similar for the rumored remake of that. My personal taste has come to like the unit death approach of further later Square Enix projects like Final Fantasy Tactics Advance or Triangle Strategy which essentially reduces the mechanic to temporary map death or extremely one-off risks. Tactics Ogre actually implements temporary death in training battle, which I would've liked to have as an option! Items! Cool Power Up Cards! When it comes to offense, the player has to play greedy when it comes to enemy unit death. All units drop loot on death, containing equipment the unit may have worn or really powerful items like Job Marks. Many key upgrades or new jobs can only be received from these loot drops! Any unit that picks up a loot drop adds that equipment to their eventual death loot drop for the map. So if an enemy steals your stuff, slap them too! Double do so before the map ends as all loot drops uncollected on the map are auto-collected but any loot picked up by an enemy is with that enemy until they die. This method of item collection naturally slows pace by training the player to methodically kill and protect the loot bags dropped by enemy. So the unit clump slowly crawls across the map to gather new swords and prevent dying in service to Denam. There are also randomly spawning buff cards in maps. These buffs are high impact with effects like greatly increasing critical hit chance, increasing all damage, increasing MP restore rate. It serves as additional incentive to not focus on combat and have units walk over these cards, but does risk putting your army's formation really easy to get through. A Game of Overwhelming Defense Stats An interesting concept I came across from a (not yet uploaded to Youtube) GameDevOfColors talk, Massive Damage: Creative Storytelling through Numbers in RPGs, was to increase attack stats faster than defense stats to create a compelling increase of combat prowess. Tactics Ogre, thus, is insightful on this advice in showing the possible pitfalls of increasing defense too quickly. As mentioned before, enemy units can be recruited and act as a mirror of the player and should have stats on par to the player units. The issue is that defense is overly effective, with 1 damage attacks being an often occurrence even with units with near optimal equipment/levels for the map. This is felt heaviest with Jobs (like Knights) that are built to resist physical damage primarily or when units are just underleveled a bit. Much of this comes from quirks of combat calculations with multiple stats driving damage. Take an average Knight vs Archer fight. Knights excel in Vitality, and Archers in Dexterity. Vitality increases defense by 110% while dexterity only increases attack by 70%, often making knights near invincible. Other units with high Strength are able to pass this big vitality boost. This really drags the pace of a fight as the particular combat calculations favor slow heavy units as both fighters and defensive tanks with mages and archers as niche support or minor damage. Finishers do provide an odd fallback underscoring the defensive stat problem. Many finishers, as 'special move' type abilities, ignore or reduce defense in their combat calculation. But finishers are often only usable every 3-4 turns by a unit due to slow MP recharge. The effectiveness of defense is definitely where I struggle with long sessions with the game or experimenting with units. Hitting with 1 damage due to odd damage calculation, but struggling to find other targets without putting a unit in danger is frustrating. The low damage ranged physical units deal does make it easier to transition those units into support units that either provide buffs or focus only on ailments. Still, the effective of defense should have been reduced in further iterations of Tactics Ogre. Bad Dice Roll Recruiting I've mentioned recruiting a couple times, so I should cover it more properly here. It's.. rough. Many units can have one of their 4 skills be taken by a Recruit skill that targets other humanoids or specific type of monster. Recruiting has a low max percentage of succeeding around 25%, decreased by higher health, distance from the enemy, and a unit's random loyalty stat. Recruiting also exists along the previously mentioned risk/reward of standard play, creating a big risk to waste a unit's turn on an unsuccessful recruitment. With how much control given over human units, it's often beneficial to just not recruit any human units unless they're unique recruitments (which is best found through guides). Monsters can't be obtained outside of recruitment, providing an incentive for the system. Though, the presence of multiple different types of monsters with different recruitment skills does add a layer of tediousness. Recruitment really tends to haunt the string of Square Enix-adjacent tactics games from Tactics Ogre forward. Wasting an action on really low percent chances just often feels bad, and good 'recruits' tend to just be story related characters with their own short stories. Strategy - Slow Burn Unit Management The major structure of Tactics Ogre is a simple key battle area to key battle area with occasional side maps. More optional areas open up much further for the game, but for the first dozen or so hours it is a linear flow of areas. Tactics Ogre originally had random encounters occur on areas across the overworld, providing a heavy risk for retreading to areas for shops. A similar system would be used for Final Fantasy Tactics and I felt it slowed pacing negatively. Instead, Reborn removes random encounters and provides a 'training' option for a low risk combat encounter where units can't die. No additional gold can be obtained from these maps but EXP can still be accumulated, up to a point. There's also a level cap (called Union Level) where any unit cannot level past. Union Level increases by passing certain battles, creating a direct control over difficulty curve. The Union Level system is fine in theory as a heavy hand of the designers but does create an awkwardness when grinding to the level cap before a difficult map. Union Level never increases during a map, so you'll just receive no experience for the map. You do get a pity EXP item to spend later, which is nice. Lots to Buy, Limited to Spend Money in Tactics Ogre is primarily obtained by selling items picked up in battles. This does require the player to keep an eye on loot bags to avoid receiving small amounts of money due to an enemy stealing all the gold as a map ends. I do wish gold was more generous within the game as you can finish a difficult fight with low rewards, which really hurts unit improvement pace. There's a few cases where fights can end suddenly due to narrative reasons and gold was stolen. I had it happen once and was too tired to redo a whole fight for the money. With that money, you can use it all at the many shops across the world! Equipment ranges from usual hat, armor, boots, accessory, and primary hand weapons. I tend to autopilot to whatever equipment is strongest for a while until about late Chapter 2 when ailment-based equipment starts to occur. Along with equipment, Arcana are a major spend from shops. Arcana are the spells of Tactics Ogre and are many! There are 8 elements of Arcana, healing Arcana, dark-element ailment Arcana, and unique class Arcana (like ninja's ninjutsu). Eight elements of Arcana on paper feels too many, but you often assign only 1 Arcana to a unit that matches their own element. It still creates a really dense inventory of spells to sort through, and would eventually be condensed to 4 or so elements in future Final Fantasy Tactics games. Eventually in Chapter 2, you unlock Crafting from the shops. You can synthesize more random junk you pick up in battles like wood or ores to improvement equipment stats or add special effects to equipment. The ailment upgrades to equipment was a huge turn of tactics for me and evolving past the large stat number vs large stat number gameplay loop. The Crafting system is way too dense in number of items and number of levels crafting material can climb. Thankfully, Tactics Ogre allows itself to do the heavy lifting of fusing pre-requisite materials. It uses a overly dense nested menu system to resolve all that crafting. The costs of fusing is actually quite low, so you come to the system often! Still would've been easier to parse the system if it reduced the number of materials to deal with. Juggling Jobs & Elements, No Clown Jobs Though ;( Tactics Ogre has its own Job system to manage across a playthrough, though much simpler than what would be common in Final Fantasy series proper. A unit can change their Job anytime outside combat with Job Marks that are purchased from shops or dropped by units with that Job. You often can pick up Job Marks long before they're in shops, so prep to rush for loot bags! Each job has unique skills tied to unit levels, some job skills shared between similar archetypes. The job skills vary heavily from the Knight's skill to stop movement when an enemy moves within 1 tile to Cleric's skill to randomly increase next healing. If a unique Job Skill is not available for a level, the Weapon Skill of any equipped weapon is increased instead. Weapon Skill levels increase accuracy and damage a small amount and can be increased outside unit levels by just hitting with a weapon a lot. They definitely feel tertiary to the skill system with how low their impact is. Switching jobs, thankfully, just automatically unlocks all Job Skills up to the current unit level. It does allow a much lower cost for experimenting with different jobs, especially with Weapon Skills' low impact. In the flow of gameplay, the skill system definitely takes a bit to parse with how many different skills are thrown at you constantly. It gets really hard to keep track of what each unit can do and really adds busy work to management outside battle. A Long, Bold Tale
It's really interesting to see how Tactics Ogre forms the foundation for tactics game in the lineage of Final Fantasy Tactics and beyond. Denam is a fun early iteration of what would become Ramza Beoulve of a hopeful hero being pushed against by a cruel world of nobles and war. Still, the pacing of Tactics Ogre: Reborn is real rough especially against my attempt to make this post relatively quickly since its launch. I'm roughly 20 hours in and feel nebulously a third through and they've been 20 tough hours of tactical thinking. The writing style that Matsuno helmed is really strong and one I'm curious how current Square Enix implements in its coming projects. Final Fantasy XVI seems to be concerned heavily with medieval fantasy intrigue so we'll see how that ends up. I have some.. qualms on how it already seems to be viewing 'historical accuracy' through presenting a very homogenous type of people. Ah well. For now, I'll steadily get through Tactics Ogre: Reborn. Next time, we'll hit Fire Emblem Engage! A much goofier looking game in narrative from previews, but seems like a fun contrast.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AboutTriangles, Tactics, and Tabletop, Kupo! is a blog discussing thoughts on tactics games and tabletop rpgs I've played. Archives
May 2023
Categories
All
|