Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together

This is a masterpiece - definietely my favourite game of all time. It has something for everyone from total beginners (it was my first SRPG) to really advanced players, such as myself on my double-digit playthrough.

I like tactic turned-based strategy games, and I like RPGs. This is a really good game; but my only issue is that I compare it to the simplicity of Final Fantasy Tactics (which, I swear is the only game that nails the genre 100%). For fans of FFT, this game is for you.

I loved Final Fantasy Tactics, so was excited when I heard about this game. The good: At first, I was very much in love, it has quite a few quality of life improvements over FFT: you can save during a battle (of which some can last over an hour), you can put your archer/caster back to it's initial position if you moved to a bad position but didn't finish your turn (which was a problem for me with archers/mages in FFT), etc The fact that the story branches based on your decisions is also a plus for replayability. The mediocre: It was also nice to be able to deploy over 10 units, but in the long run it makes battles too long without much added use. Story started also ok, but became less interesting and engaging than in FFT. Same with battle scenario's, there is a lack of unique setups in this game, which is a problem when you have to fight a lot. You are also encouraged to level up by grinding extra areas since you might otherwise be underleveled versus the next boss, which I did but that made my end part way too easy without any challenge or difficulty. The bad: Last number of battles was really a slog, extremely uninspired to have several battles facing an uphill enemy which didn't pose a challenge but took 30 minutes to get through anyway per fight. By the end, I couldn't care anymore, even if the final battle was a bit more unique. In short: Good game, but too drawn out..

This game is actually terrible and it is entirely because of the ill-thought out mechanics. FIRST and most important, the leveling system is completely broken. If a character is about one level above another they will do 30-90 damage to their victim, said victim will do 1 damage seemingly regardless of the class or ability they vainly attempt to use. UNLESS you're playing archer, whom just annihilates everything in his path with infinite range and zero remorse. So that's OK right just keep your characters leveled right? WRONG! You can't level your characters you can only level the classes they use. This makes playing any other class than archer, mage and soldier completely pointless unless you want to grind every time you earn a new class and you WILL NOT want to grind. Grinding is incredibly tedious and time consuming. It's really time consuming to try and trigger a random battle and even if you do you probably won't gain any exp for the brand new shiny class you just earned anyways. The AI does everything in its' power to annoy the hell out of you without actually trying to win. After all, one archer one level ahead of your enemies can completely decimate their forces. Trying to level a new class is about as fun as chewing chalk. The AI mercilessly targets your weakest character with really zero strategy beyond that. This makes it stupidly frustrating to level new classes because they will just die instantly and you'll gain no exp for them. This game blows because it takes everything great about Strategy RPG's and spits on them. There is no incentive to play creatively, character building is far too tedious to be fun, and it's also dated because this is a butchered port of a snes game. The worst part is that there appears to be a ton of potential, the skill and spell system appears deep and full of content, but you'll never use it because it's incredibly sub-par compared to that archer. So sub-par, you'll lose miserably attempting to play with them. The verdict is play Final Fantasy Tactics

I was really excited to finally buy this game, getting a PSVita recently. I've beat Tactics Ogre a few times in the past on PSOne. The new systems and graphical changes were refreshing at first, but it all seems like a half measure. The portraits are great, but the sprites are lazily low-rez. All of the new features are things that modern SRPGs not only have, but have advanced upon further making Tactics Ogre still feel 2 steps behind. What killed the game for me is the pace. The game is easily 40-50 hours, but to be honest 20-30 of those hours could be removed if battles weren't so slow. You have low damage, low chance to hit, and the board is flooded with enemies. It can easily take 4-5 hits (assuming you hit with 40-60% chance to hit) to kill one enemy. The trajectory system also drives me nuts. 9/10 maps the enemy is given the high ground, making it very easy for their archers and casters to hit you. Having the low ground you're going to constantly hit your own units. What's the point of having a knight protect a wizard if the wizard is just going to keep hitting the knight in the back? There's also no real alternatives to grind your characters to speed it up. Ultimately I started questioning why I was playing the game when I could play something like Disgaea 4 or Fire Emblem: Awakening instead. Despite the upgrades, the game still feels just slow, old, and a waste of time.