Tactics Ogre: Reborn

If you play these types of games for the story, by all means get this. As good now as it was in the 90s, and the new voice acting is phenomenal. If you play these for the gameplay, figure out how to play the PSP version. Most of the systems have been stripped/streamlined for this version. Character building and battles are significantly less engaging in this version. That is enough for me to give the dreaded thumbs down, but even a 'bad' version of this game is a pretty damn good game.

Had to stop a battle midway because of how atrocious the game is. Why they added a level cap and left in an incredibly poor translation is beyond me. This game was a mistake and is best played on the PSP.

Recently gave it another try, only to be reminded of why I quit so early in my last few attempts years back. The level cap system forces grinding every few stages, not to mention that moving around 10 characters is a pain in the a** and eats up your precious weekends. It can be auto, so I can kind of cope with the slow pace, but the guests turning into murderous psychopaths every f***ing single time I set enemies' HP low for recruitment... It gets on my nerves so badly that I just couldn't. Come to think of it, I should have just killed them at the beginning. Why couldn't I think of this simple, obvious, and extra clumsy solution? Anyways, I believe there were more to it that bothered me, but man, I don't even want to recall. I get the game is old and all, and some design flaws are expected, but all this stress for full price? No. Maybe I'll try this another time when I'm finally drunk.

バランス悪すぎ

Honestly feels very stiff and slow compared to other versions. I hate the card system which is a preference. I also don't mind the stripped-down skills and jobs for beginners/newbies to the genre. It leads to a very generic feel that did not justify sitting through boring battles that were more about learning a level vs. prep/unique strategy. You just use buffs/debuffs with generic classes and enemies will melt. Go play a different version of this game. They are all far better.

Possibly my favorite game. The storyline is particularly well written for a videogame and I liked the gameplay a lot. The game has lots of replayability and no misseable content. The only downside is that you are going to want to invest lots of time, like more than 100 hours. The main game takes almost that alone to complete. It's the longest JRPG I played. The game was made in 1995, but it feels timeless.

One of the best SRPGs that I played, and I can't reccomend it enough for newcomers of the Ogre Battle Saga series, Tactics Ogre is a incredible well-written gem of a game, with so much attention to detail and care put into it. Every single rival character you encounter has a little biography written about them. You can take diferent routes that do change events and the story in very, VERY meaningful ways. Ten there is also the music, the art, the voice acting, the gampelay, the decision-making, the characters... Its just so good. This game is a semi-port of the PSP port, which, by itself, is a massive port of the SNES game. Most of the content in the PC version are in the PSP version, but with a little more extra content dusted in, re-balancing, a card upgrade-system and party level cap, most of the changes make the game play a little different to Let Us Cling Together. Union Levels make so that your whole party have a level cap depending on where you are during the story to make sure you don't steamroll enemies with higher stats and just ignore more strategic play. I don't really mind how leveling works in this version, if you really like grinding and item hoarding you'll hate it, but it doesn't really make the game unplayable at all, a tiny bit more challenging since you can't overlevel. Cards at first are the most unique mechanic that actually feels weird at first. When you're in a battle, random cards will spawn with different effects (more physical damage, mp recovery, etc). Those do clutter the battlefield a bit and don't seem too important at first, but cards are actually really useful. It's not just a tiny physical damage boost, it can almost double your damage with two cards. There are cards that can activate a strong character passive (which are plenty in this game) that can win a fight for you. There are green colored cards that give your character permanent buffs. There are red cards that destroy all card buffs, and you can throw an enemy on them or stop you from going to a specific tile that just so happens to be next to the low hp enemy cleric, the thing is, cards actually makes the game really fun, and positioning yourself being mindfully around them rewards you. There is too much to talk about what I enjoy in this game, but I also think a blind experience makes it way more impactful, so I quite frankly don't really want to spoil it since I think most of the audience that will enjoy it are people who never played it before.

An absolute masterpiece. It's very easy to see right away why Tactics Ogre has the reputation it does as one of the best games ever made. As is typical for Japanese games of this era, the polish is just on another level. I haven't played the previous releases, so I can't really compare them. I understand why many dislike the addition of the buff cards, as they certainly add a lot of visual clutter. However they do discourage turtling and have the effect of speeding up fights the longer they drag on, which I assume was the intended purpose and I don't mind that at all. The party level system and removing random encounters both sound like improvements over the original. The Tarot rewind mechanic can be fully ignored, which I recommend doing. Regardless of how one feels about the changes, it should be said that none of them are remotely significant enough to "ruin the game" as some overly dramatic reviewers have claimed. What I especially like about the re-release are the high definition UI, the overhead view and the ample help and lore features. I've read through all of it so far, and not only are the descriptions and tooltips extremely helpful in figuring out the mechanics and details of the items and abilities without needing to google anything, they also add a lot of nice world building and character detail that isn't necessary to enjoy the game, but I really appreciate. Unsurprisingly it's a perfect fit for the Deck, having been previously released on the PSP.