Tactics Ogre Reborn Impressions - 1

So I got through Chapter 1 of Tactics Ogre: Reborn today.

It was fine. Arguably good, even.

Let's get the negatives out of the way first. I was personally disappointed to see the combat being heavily skill based again. There was a certain simplistic charm to the combat of the original, and while I get why they added skills to make it seem more appealing to a modern audience(who likely have experienced Final Fantasy Tactics and thus have their expectations shaped by it), it does take away from it.

This version also uses the pseudo Shakespearian, theatrical script of the PSP version, with some mild edits. I'm personally not a big fan of it, I like purple prose but sprinkling it everywhere just makes the dialogue feel a lot less natural and thus a lot less emotional than the original.

I also felt like most fights were too easy. Now, granted, this is the very first chapter of the game, it's supposed to ease players into it, and even in the original these weren't hard battles. But given the abundance of healing items, revives, and the altered nature of deaths, the mild sense of dread and danger that existed in the original design was gone, and I often found myself blindly rushing enemies down because I got bored.

Now for the good parts.

The voice acting is overall a bit mixed, but certainly very enjoyable. It adds some gravitas to the dialogue and makes the scenes more stirring and impactful, despite the stiff script. This is probably the best and most prominent change from the original.

Moving on to gameplay, granting levels to characters rather than classes is a huge step forward. The latter had all sorts of issues, the most damning one being that it didn't actually solve the problem of characters taking up other classes being bad at them, despite being created for that very purpose. That problem here is resolved by characters simply changing their stats to match that of the new class, as if they had spent levels in it. A fairly elegant and intuitive solution.

While fights were generally rather easy, two of them actually stood out as challenging and enjoyable. Ganb's confrontation at Zodo Marsh is now actually legitimately dangerous, and it's all mostly due to his griffons becoming quite tough. I loved that, beasts are supposed to be tough creatures in universe that can pose a major threat to regular human armies and require enormous amounts of effort or dedicated fighters to put down.

Second, of course, was the iconic Battle of Baramus. This fight actually kept me tense, with two of my characters dying and the party getting fairly beat up. It especially helps that the enemy team can no longer be flanked as easily, and so must be faced head on, with careful positioning, unit selection, and damage spread.

I also generally like most of the rebalance done to the classes. Archers now have their damage reasonably cut down by armor, putting them more in line, while the generous arc for bows still keeps them useful for sniping weakly armored ranged units and whittling down more armored targets at a safe distance. Knights now actively block passage past them and have considerably higher defense than other equivalent classes, making them effective tanks. They can also use healing spells to either extend their own lifespan, or help keep the rest of the team alive.

Rune Fencers and Valkyries also get access to healing alongside basic projectile based spells, making them actually flexible warriors. I must admit, though, that healing spells being accessible to so many classes does contribute to battles feeling too easy, though hopefully, with enough damage on the enemies, that will stop being an issue.

Wizards now get both status spells and attack spells. This is a good change, though there's little incentive to using the statuses as they have less range, tend to miss, and are often worse than simply killing off units. This could easily get out of hand, and it did in the PSP version, but there's a very important change reining them in - all characters can only equip four spells. This does a lot to create interesting choices and limit the power of spellcasters, something which was sorely needed considering the power of some spells, especially late game ones.

The skill system is not as bad as I feared, there's usually only about three skills worth equipping, and one of them is invariably the weapon skill being used. I like that they got clever about this with the wizards, and made their weapon skill raise the power of their spells too. Many formerly weak or situational active skills were turned into automatic skills that automatically activate randomly during their turns in battle, and while I'm generally not too fond of added randomness in a strategy game, they seem fitting enough for these, as they rarely change the course of battle.

I was also skeptical of the greatly bloated HP counts, but this isn't really a problem - past Krizar, damage actually keeps up quite well against them, letting for good pacing in fights, unlike the PSP version. I still miss how fast paced and brutal fights from the original felt, but what we have here is a decent compromise.

Overall, I would rate this solidly, so far this is a solidly crafted and reasonably pleasant experience, despite the rather blatant drawbacks. Let's see if that holds!