Tag: reborn
Tactics Ogre: Reborn review – One of the best strategy games of all time gets even better
Tactics Ogre: Reborn is a remake of a remake. But that makes it no less important – essential, even – in the modern day. The strategy title – coming to PS4, PS5, Switch and PC – is a lush reworking of 2010’s infamous RPG, Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together that isn’t afriad to dip its hands into the chest cavity of the original and move the organs around inside, restarting the heart with a well-presented and sharp pump of its fist.
Square Enix has, essentially, removed barriers to play in getting Tactics Ogre: Reborn out into modern players’ hands. By letting your units take a little tour of the battlefield and collect cards that buff their stats and open their options up, you’re no longer confined into one specific style of play with your armies. Letting your defensive classes, say, beef up their sword arms and get stronger hits in? That’s viable now.
It means that your myriad battles – all lasting somewhere between 20 to 50 minutes – can unfold more fluidly. By dominating the battlefield and understanding your surroundings (and responding to the Buff Cards that like to spawn into the field), you can more readily and spontaneously respond to enemy threats.
Tactics Ogre Reborn Review – 4D Chess
Tactics Ogre is a landmark game in the evolution of the strategy-RPG genre, yet it’s never quite received the appreciation it deserves outside of Japan. Part of this has to do with the long shadow cast by its directly-inspired and much-beloved younger sibling, Final Fantasy Tactics. Despite receiving an incredible remake in 2011, PSP exclusivity once again limited the audience for Tactics Ogre. Now, with the release of the HD and massively revamped Tactics Ogre Reborn on every platform under the sun, Square Enix is taking steps to correct a long-standing injustice–though some quibbles with presentation and gameplay changes keep this from being the definitive version of the all-time classic.
Our story follows young Denam and his sister Catiua, two siblings of the Walister clan. The Walister have suffered under the oppression of the ruling Galgastani for years, and a resistance movement has begun to form among them. What begins as a plan to avenge the death of the siblings’ father snowballs into a mission to rescue Duke Ronwey, leader of the resistance. But as Denam becomes part of the growing resistance force, he discovers the lengths that Duke Ronwey will go to advance his cause, forcing him to make very difficult choices. As the struggle expands to involve neighboring states, Denam will need to find his own way to put an end to the conflict.
If you’re familiar with previous works by director and writer Yasumi Matsuno (Final Fantasy Tactics, Vagrant Story, Final Fantasy XII), you’ll find similar themes here: intertwining politics, moral quandaries, class struggles, and idealism gone awry. Depending on the choices you make (including some absolutely gut-wrenching, life-or-death decisions) the story’s path–as well as which special characters you can recruit–will change dramatically. There are plenty of twists and surprises to experience, enhanced by a combination of a superb English script from famed localizer Alexander O. Smith and the addition of voice acting for cutscenes. The World Tarot system from the PSP remake also returns, which acts as an enhanced New Game+: Upon completing the game, you can go back to previous points in the story, exploring different outcomes and routes while keeping your current character roster.
Tactics Ogre: Reborn manages to be both timeless and dated
Yasumi Matsuno’s classic story of war can be a slog
Tactics Ogre: Reborn review: a 90s strategy classic that still holds up today
Say what you will about Square Enix’s ill-fated ventures into NFTs and mildly embarrassing follies with live service games recently. Their commitment to remaking, remastering and generally sprucing up their ageing back catalogue from decades past is an admirable one in my eyes, even if they are making you pay through the nose for them almost every single time. As we all know, though, some have made more successful transitions than others. The dream, of course, at least for me, is the Final Fantasy VII Remake approach for literally everything, no matter how unfeasible, impractical or physically impossible that would be for Squeenix’s enormous game library. Alas, the reality is often a lot more modest. Best case scenario: you’re a 90s SNES game getting a lovely HD-2D makeover like Live A Live. Next on the rung: some added 3D zhuzh a la Final Fantasy VIII Remastered (although even that was by no means perfect).
Mostly, though, it’s your Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster treatment. A welcome update that maintains the look of the originals (albeit with some questionable font choices), but that’s more or less your lot. Tactics Ogre: Reborn, a remaster of the 2010 PSP remake of the 1995 SNES original, falls squarely into the latter camp, but you know what? That’s fine. It’s still a rollicking turn-based tactics game all these years later, and one that definitely deserves to be freed from the shackles of Sony’s long-dead handheld, where it’s lain dormant for the better part of a decade. Besides, I’ll take a fully re-orchestrated soundtrack over slightly fancier pixels any day of the week. You know me.
Gunfire Reborn Launches on Game Pass
Why Tactics Ogre: Reborn is amazing – and how that bodes well for Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7 Reunion
Tactics Ogre: Reborn is a remake of a remake, so to speak. The game – coming to modern consoles and PC – is a lush reworking of 2010’s infamous RPG, Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together. With this new release, Square Enix has taken the bones of the classic game and reanimated them; snatching them from the brink of obscurity and death and making them twitch and shudder in just the right way to make them seem like something altogether new.
The main difference you’re going to enjoy if you’re a returning fan of Tactics Ogre is the way Square Enix has removed barriers to play. In Reborn, there are fewer gates that bar you from playing in certain ways – yes, mages, wizards, rune fencers and similar classes can only use magic, but skills and equipment are more global. This means that gear you loot on the battlefield (and pick up in shops) can be given to your units more readily, and your fights slightly more balanced from the off.
New skills have been added, too. These generally make the game feel more modern, and more in line with tactics games you’d play today. Want to position yourself either side of an enemy and squeeze them, pressuring them into defeat or surrender? Go ahead; a new Pincer Attack skill on your melee units will make that seem like a more viable tactic, and you’ll be corralled into moving units together so they can more readily dish out death.
Tactics Ogre: Reborn is a challenging strategy RPG that takes no prisoners
There’s a particular battle in the first chapter of Tactics Ogre: Reborn that I’ve been banging my head against all week. It’s an uphill fort siege where you’re facing off against an evil necromancer who’s shooting down powerful, magical fireballs at you from above, alongside his never-ending army of undead skelly archers. The challenging terrain alone would be a test of anyone’s mettle in this tough, turn-based strategy game, especially when trying to parse all the different heights of its grid-based map. But having every enemy unit resurrect themselves after three turns unless you exorcise them with a single-use item or the lone Priest you’ve just recruited (who you may or may not have neglected to bring into battle with you) on top of all that? That smacks of the kind of late-game tomfoolery that more modern games of this ilk would normally save until their final acts.
Tactics Ogre: Reborn, on the other hand, likes to make its players sweat early. It was, after all, forged in the fires of the mid-90s SNES era, and looking back at old GameFAQ guides from 2010 (when it was remade for the PSP), it’s clear this fight was just as much of a roadblock back in the day as it is now. Think of it as what yer lad Genichiro was to Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice – a hard, and often gruelling endurance test of everything you’d learned so far, but one that would ultimately set you up for the rest of the game upon claiming victory. I’m still not quite there yet, but having spent six hours noodling around the rest of Reborn’s opening chapter, this granddaddy of Japanese strategy RPGs sure does hold up in the cold light of 2022.