Boring dialogues and dialogue design (all dialogues are in caps), long single battles, and horrible training system.
The story is very generic. The tactics battles are often frustrating, where the enemies for some reason always tend to take your loot, such as tarot cards that boost permanent status. I can't figure out why they even make it so that enemies can take your loot, it is not like the enemies will reappear with stat bonuses, and no it doesn't make the game harder nor more fun when enemies take your loot, it makes the game worst.
Certain missions will make you try many times before you can succeed in certain goals, such as trying to keep someone alive so you can recruit him or her.
If you are looking for a fun tactics RPG game, this is definitely not the kind as it has a ton of trial and errors, which makes the game extremely tedious, and not to mention the long dialogues you will have to go through every time you restart a battle.
Things that are bad about the game:
1. The skills for every human classes in the game are about 85% the same.
2. Not a lot of freedom of travel until maybe late game.
3. Again with the colorful sprites that are way off the concept art. So poor sprite design. I have seen better sprite design in other games (You would think they would have advanced their sprite design to look like the concept art).
4. You rarely encounter enemies to fight with, unless you have access to a dungeon, which contains monsters that will rape your low level units if you plan to deploy them when you want to train them.
5. The leveling system is extremely unforgiving, as there is no way to level up your low level character without having to sit through a battle with that character doing absolutely nothing or just getting killed, which makes you want to restart the battle (oh!, the tediousness).
6. Poor battle system in terms of missiles. Arrow missiles have a maximum height so they can NEVER shoot over a certain terrain. Magic missiles hits your own units if your unit is between the casting and the target, which makes no sense as why my own mage would want to hit his own team mate; this applies rarely to arrow missiles or possibly randomly.
Tactics Ogre is not the first tactics RPG I have played. Jeanne D'arc and Final Fantasy tactics are A LOT better. The tediousness in these tactic games are a lot more rewarding than Tactics Ogre, because you need to restart less times. Training in FF:tactics or Jeanne D'arc, although may be tedious, but you actually make you party stronger. In Tactics Ogre, you don't feel any stronger as the enemies you train on are always the same level as your highest level character, so it doesn't feel rewarding.
Although the enemies in FF:Tactics are also the same level as your party's highest level character, they have a system where your character gets stronger every time they take some action, so they can be more powerful than a higher level enemy if you took the effort to train them. This system does not exist in Tactics Ogre except in the form of a skill that describes a weapon type and the more you use the weapon, the stronger the character becomes when using the weapon, which is impossible to train when you level up a lot faster than the skill and so the enemies are a lot more powerful as the higher level you are the better equipments the enemies have.
The only good points about this game is that it is just another tactics RPG. All the good things of a tactics RPG is in this game because, well, this game is a tactics RPG. The only thing unique in this tactics RPG is that its horrible. The classes for these Square Enix tactics RPGS are always the same (ninjas, samurais, knights, etc although with different names) and most of the skills for humans in Tactics Ogre are the same (anatomy, golemny, resist stun etc., which all human classes have).
If you were to spend that $40 dollars or so on a tactics game, go buy Jeanne D'arc or FF:Tactics if you haven't already. If you have, then you can probably tell that Tactics Ogre is no where up to par with those tactic games.
I have no idea why this became an editors choice. One reason would be the same reason why some games, such as Monster Hunter titles are overlooked by Gamespot when they gave those PSP titles low ratings.