A great game for fans of strategy RPGs, old school gamers, and people that like reloading their save data . . . . a lot.
The story centers around a young man named Denim. It unfolds during battle and in short cut scenes using the games sprites. Starting you off in your home town under the rule of a foreign empire. You'll go on to start a revolution and form a liberation army before realizing that things aren't as simple as you once thought they were. The story is very political rather then something as simple as stopping one man from destroying the world like most RPGs. Several times you'll be faced with difficult decisions to make of which there is no real right or wrong answer and either will push the story down a different path leading to one of the games eight endings. It's an engaging story which is the main reason to play the game over again. Going back and making different decisions to see how things might have unfolded, who would join you, and who would leave your party as a result of the decisions you made as leader.
The game's battle system plays much the same as most strategy RPGs. You can take up to ten men, women, or monsters into battle. The human characters have access to a number of character classes for you to develop your party as you please. Each class has it's strengths and weaknesses, with only a few classes being able to cast spells and then the spells a magic user can use is limited to his or her class. Magic spells must be found or bought and then equipped, with a character only being able equip a max of four spells. For the most part it's a great system that leads to some very tactical battles and forces the player to carefully think their party and battle strategy.
The biggest and only real flaw in Tactics Ogre is by far the way it deals with death during battle. In just about any other game you can use an item or spell to revive your party member. This is not the case in Tactics Ogre. Once a character dies thats it, they are gone. And if the main character dies then it's instantly game over. One wrong decision, one tactical error can force you to reload to start a battle over. You do get a resurrection spell but it can only be used by one character class of which you likely won't see till near the end of the game. On top of that if any dead characters are still dead at the end of a given battle they are considered lost. The generic members of your party aren't that much of a loss as you can always recruit more and train them up to around the average level in your party without too much of a time investment. But once you start getting story characters that you don't want to die on you the game becomes very frustrating. It's unnecessary and serves only to make the game harder then it needs to be and frustrate the player in the process. The game tries to make up for this with the ability to save at any time during battles but it's still frustrating having to reload and replay the same few turns over and over till you get everything perfect. The game case boasts over one hundred hours of gameplay, if you just play the story missions without having to reload it shouldn't take you more then forty hours. There is an optional 50 floor dungeon and a couple side quests to pursue but you'll spend most of those one hundred hours replaying battles till you can do them without losing anybody.
Visually Tactics Ogre is quite dated. Unlike March of the Black Queen it didn't receive any visual touch ups in it's transition to the ps1. It looked amazing as a SNES title and fans of retro games will fall in love with it's 16 bit look. But those of you unable to play a game that doesn't feature gorgeous cut scenes or the third dimension might not like what they see. The same can be said of the games sound. Those expecting thrilling orchestral arrangements might not appreciate the simple 16 bit score and sound effects, but everyone else won't have a problem enjoying it.
Tactics Ogre is a good game that can be considered great if you can get past the games artificially high difficulty level brought on by your inability to help fallen comrades. For fans of older games and tactical RPGs it's worth checking out. Just be warned that your going to spend a lot of time on it, not necessarily making progress.