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Review of Tactics Ogre: Reborn: Classic Tactical RPG is showing its age

There is no doubt about the historical importance of Tactics Ogre: Let us cling to each other. It’s a keystone game – maybe the keystone games – in a specific and demanding genre, tactical role-playing games. It’s also the foundation of a remarkable, but sadly under-recognized career: that of writer-director, Yasumi Matsuno, who has gone on to create cult classics Final Fantasy Tactics and The Vagrant Story before igniting midway through the tortured development of Final Fantasy 12a personal and professional failure from which he never seemed to fully recover.

In Tactics Ogre: RebornThis 1995 game – which often ranks highly in polls of the best games of all time in Japan – receives a second overhaul. Easter is, nominally, an update of 2010’s PlayStation Portable remake (this time for PC, PlayStation 4 and 5, and Nintendo Switch). But it also does thorough and careful revisions to that one, tweaking essential design elements, adding features, overhauling the look and feel, and restoring artwork. It says so much about the game’s revered state that it has received more loving attention from Square Enix – the company that bought Goblin Tacticsby Quest publishers in 2002, after hiring Matsuno from them in ’95 – more Final Fantasy Tacticsa game in Square’s flagship franchise, whose PSP and mobile versions are not nearly as well made.

New players should approach Goblin Tactics with caution, though. (I’m a person; I know the game well by reputation, but never played it before I started this review.) Despite the many thoughtful revisions and quality of life improvements, This is still a scary game and slow to reveal. As an early work in a highly specialized genre, with so much innovation since then, it can feel outdated and inflexible. And it’s often just a chore to play.

An isometric battle map from Tactics Ogre Reborn with several units visible, large character portraits on the left and right, and a multi-unit row at the bottom

Image: Square Enix

There is both a simple reason for this and a less simple one. The simple thing has to do with the party size. It’s a turn-based strategy game in which you move characters around a gridded map, playing checkers to battle fantasy against enemy forces controlled by AI. The standard party size for a get-together is between 8 and 12 units. Turns take a long time to make; The opening movement cycle, when engaging with the enemy is often impossible and you are simply moving each unit into a striking distance, feeling interrupted. Complete battles usually last up to half an hour, and the previous conclusion (to be fair, this isn’t all that common – it’s a balanced game) is horrendous.

Moreover, the number of units makes it difficult to keep the state of the force and the overall shape of the battlefield within your sight. While it’s not an epic strategy, it’s not an easy game to analyze, and the battles can feel clunky and fragmentary. Notably Final Fantasy Tacticsteamed up Matsuno with veteran Square designer Hiroyuki Ito, reducing the number of units to a range of four to six, and resulting in a lot of focus.

For fairness, Easter made some tweaks to speed things up and reduce mental load. You can assign AI to take care of the actions of your team members; there is a speed switch; the skill and spell system has been redesigned to provide 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), etc. Yet despite all of this – and despite the 3D map design, uses verticality to create some interesting spatial challenges – the game struggles to sort through complex logic puzzles, clearly representing the best of the strategy genre .

Party menu screen from Tactics Ogre Reborn, with character portraits, attributes, skills, and inventory list

Image: Square Enix

Goblin Tactics very clearly traces its design back to earlier days War before – a game of a parallel but very closely related genre – did a lot to clarify the balance between rock-paper-scissors and the problem-solving fun of tactical combat. Nowadays, indie games like Into the Breach or Invisible, Inc. seeks to present you with complex strategic challenges much more quickly than Goblin Tactics manageable, while paradox overwhelms you much less. But maybe this isn’t just about age. Probably Goblin Tactics It also wasn’t a strategy game by its very nature but more of an RPG – and what I wanted to call a behind-the-scenes RPG at the time.

Backroom RPG is a game where the real action happens outside of combat, deep in the party menu. (Final Fantasy 12with the Gambit programming system and the game-like License Board, being one of the prime examples.) Goblin Tactics is a theorist’s dream, with great customizability and depth, Easter deliberately do little to streamline. In fact, it even removed the full-class leveling of the PSP version in favor of going back to the individual unit level. Team members can be recruited from far and wide, and their classes can be reassigned, as can their element alignment, which is crucial in battle. Skills, spells, equipment, and items are assigned and evolved for each character, and there are ways to craft and combine more powerful gear to increase stats.

There’s a huge amount of inventory and unit management to be had here as you develop and refine your preferred formation – as well as the satisfaction of having that team efficient in battle. For a particular type of player, this would be heaven. I’ve been known to love that stuff myself. But in Goblin Tactics, it feels like all the hectic work of the menu is drawing attention away from a combat system that is already struggling to focus strategically. Battle is definitely the focus of a game like this, and if it doesn’t sing, all that supports it can feel like a waste of effort.

Classy view of a medieval town in Tactics Ogre Reborn.  A woman is saying 'Help... Please, help us!'

Image: Square Enix

But there’s an entirely different grand design at work in goblin tactic, a game that has aged much better and will return your investment in the game in installments. That’s the story. Matsuno is said to be a talented writer and more influential than a designer. Despite their fantasy setting, his games tend to be grounded, humanistic works that lay out complex maps of political intrigue – with cumbersome naming and mystical jargon. virtual, sounds dry and hard to follow at first. But they open up to something personal, sincere, and engaged with the real world. Goblin Tactics is no different.

Matsuno has said that the game’s brutal branching storyline was inspired by the wars of the early 90s in Yugoslavia when that country fell apart after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Goblin Tactics imagine the Valerian Islands, an archipelago raised by ethnic and class conflict between its three main constituencies: Bakram, Galgastani, and Walister. After the death of a unified king, civil war broke out; In a time of tumultuous 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 friendly squad of mercenaries as the resistance leader, Duke Ronwey, leads them deeper into the conflict between factions, complicated loyalties, and tricks. dirty.

This is a branching storyline in which choices – rated on a scale from legal to chaotic, rather than good to evil – can leave them suffering in moral ambiguity, and end The results can be painfully bleak. Denam’s willingness to follow the Duke, and his degree of commitment to Walister’s cause, have been rigorously tested. As an exploration of the moral and political quagmire of war, Easter rather complex, and Matsuno’s refusal to describe it in black-and-white terms makes the ramifications brighter rather than diminished. The useful World Tarot feature allows you to explore all the branches in parallel realities without affecting your progress. (There’s a similar rewind function in battle that allows you to replay your selections and switch between different tactical outcomes without overwriting them – a great feature.)

There is genius and sincerity at work here. Go deep enough Goblin Tactics and the request of its subtitles, Let us stick together, starts to sound a lot less goofy and a lot more urgent and sad. How deeply you get into the game depends on your taste for micromanagement and your patience with game systems that, 27 years later, are starting to fail, despite all that. all the lucid tinkering was done with them. Tactics Ogre: Reborn is a welcomed, polished and thoughtful update to a game that defined a genre – one that has now been left behind.

Tactics Ogre: Reborn will be released on November 11th on Windows PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5. The game has been evaluated on Switch using a pre-release download code provided by Square Enix. Vox Media has an affiliate partnership. These do not affect editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. You can find Additional information on Polygon’s ethics policy can be found here.



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