Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together
If you've read my top 20 favorite games (because I know you did, and not to spoil anything), it would be obvious Final Fantasy Tactics is at the top of the list. So when Square Enix announced they would be remaking the game that inspired it, I was a little more than giddy.
Being that this game was originally conceived before Final Fantasy Tactics, I put on my downgrade pants and expected to play a derivative of what I loved; and I was correct to do so. While I was far from hating what I was playing, my mind slowly succumbed to the pitfall of comparing every little thing to what Final Fantasy Tactics excelled at. But is it fair to hold Tactics Ogre to the standards of the game it inspired, a game that took the formula and expanded and improved on it in almost every way? Should I just appreciate how the mechanics, for their time, were advanced and changed how strategy games were played? It really doesn't matter because I'm going to gripe about it anyways. Nerd-gripe go!
The big new addition to the original is the Chariot system. At any point in the battle, you can roll back your turns to change the outcome up to 50 turns, counting both yours and the enemy's. Though this won't turn a missed hit into a landed hit, it does allow you to try out different tactics and actions without having to restart the entire battle all over. Some might think this would de-fang any difficulty the game has to offer, but it merely cuts out all the unfortunate moments in battle where the enemy gets lucky or a fluke occurs. I actually love this system and will judge every future strategy, turn-based game on whether they have a version of this or not. Looking at you Fire Emblem... Now less liking, more griping!
While each job class in Tactics Ogre does play out differently, there are still a lot of similarities that make them not diverse enough. 90% of the skills you can learn are shared through out all classes and breaks up the feeling of uniqueness each job should offer. This gets especially noticeable between similar job class types. All the melee classes run together, as well as all the offensive mage classes. In Final Fantasy Tactics, each job had a completely new set of skills and abilities that were only accessible once you learned them. You could then mix and match those abilities to create custom versions of any job; in Tactics Ogre, you can't really do that. Skill in TO (not Terrell Owens) has a level requirement, so though it may appear on the list of skills you can learn, you can't actually learn it until you satisfy that level requirement. So why is it on the list to begin with? Or better yet, why is there a level restriction? Why can't the more advanced abilities just cost more skill points?
Crafting also shows up in TO which was strangely absent from FFT, and I understand why after playing. While crafting and making +1 versions of your favorite gear is nice and affordable, Square thought it be prudent to keep a failure percentage tied to every weapon / armor recipe. Basically, the higher level item you craft, the more likely it is to fail. Which begs the question, why? Why is there a chance my +1 claymore will fail? If it fails, I'm just going to reload my last save and try again until it succeeds, so why? Why have it? Why make me waste time jumping through this arbitrary hoop that serves only to drive a artificial road block between me and my awesomeness? I would really love to know, so Square, go ahead and give me a call with your answer.
Instead of each action you take on the battlefield giving you experience points and some variation of skill points, your group shares all the EXP and SP after the battle is won, and is proportionally distributed according to level (sounds like socialism to me). Lower level job classes get more while higher level jobs get less. This helps when you need to power level a new job in order to catch up to the rest of the team. Instead of each person having their own individual level and job level, there exists only job levels, and that too is shared between all characters. If you have 1 level 20 wizard, all your characters can become a level 20 wizard. This alleviates a lot of the grinding that is associated with mastering all job classes, because you know people like me are going to do that.
One thing TO and FFT are both guilty of is poor exposition, more so TO than FFT. Square Enix has made quite the reputation of throwing a bunch of places, people and important terms at you without any back-story or explanation. So immediately you have no idea what's going on in the story because nothing is given a proper context. Sure, you could probably go through the Warren Report (glossary of the game) and read up on all the back-story and details, but should that really be a requirement to understanding the basic plot of the game? You aren't handed a dictionary each time you walk into a movie, so why do I have to read through paragraphs of information when I'm already reading through paragraphs of dialog?
Let's wrap up the griping with the lightning round: magic is bought instead of learned, the equipment has level requirements, equipment isn't as varied or offers the breadth of abilities or additions like FFT has, why can I only choose to wear a combination of two of the following: hats, armor, gauntlets and leggings, the game has the audacity to give you two level 3 characters in the final chapter of the game, ninjas suck, I never used most of the spells, random battles can take a while to trigger, there's like only 6 types of beasts and there's no Orlandu or spellswords for that matter.
While that does sound like a lot of complaining (because it is), that doesn't necessarily make it a bad game. In fact, its a great game. If I wanted to play FFT, I'd just play FFT for the 255th time. There are some unintentionally funny moments in the game where an AI character will walk into a lower-level set of tiles that act like a pit in the battle grind and are unable to get out because they lack the proper jump stat to get out (this happened twice in the final dungeon and was hilarious), making them easy targets. And if you land a critical strike against someone who is backed up against a high ledge that has no grounding, they'll fall off the battlefield completely and die (fourth wall breaking, but a surprise none the less).
Most of the game is paced moderately well, but all that falls to pieces at the end. The final dungeon includes 2 story-based battlefields and 9 battlefields that have absolutely nothing to do with anything. For some reason, the creators thought that through all the updates and enhancements, having basically the same battle replayed out over and over again was acceptable to leave in. They do nothing for the game and only serve to pad out the final 2 hours of the game and by the end of it, I felt like Bill Murray from Groundhog's Day.
Even after beating the game, there still is more to do. Going through the game, you have to make several choices that will affect how the plot will play out, and the game allows you to go back to these points and experience the choices you didn't make; which makes going through the game multiple times very flexible and user-friendly. Oh, also the music and graphics are good. Kinda hard to convince people of that with just text so consult YouTube or something.
So I recommend TO if you haven't played FFT unless you want to go through it with pre-conceived notions of awesomeness that it can't live up to.
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