Duke Reivier's Grand Game Emporium

 So I finally beat Tactics Ogre: Reborn today. Well, more accurately, I saw my friend beat it. And by "beat" I mean "get through a huge ass dungeon, fight through the last few villains, and then get totally walled by the final boss, who has an absurd amount of HP and can out attrition any player not prepared for him". Reborn on the whole is a good game, and a good remake of a now ancient game, but I really can't forgive some of its design decisions. It really feels like a half finished project where the developers were mostly on the right track but couldn't really implement everything they wanted, or test how their changes worked in practice. In that regard it's honestly rather frustrating, as there are glimpses of potential greatness that's held back by all the awkwardness and lack of polish. Still, I will not be too harsh. It is still Tactics Ogre, and it does cure several major flaws of the PSP version, and it does preserve a lot of what made the ...

Just got done playing through Chapter 2 of this on the Chaos route. I still think this is a solid remake, but there are flaws that are starting to get dangerously prominent. The battles from Ashton to Tanmas were largely fine, and honestly I enjoyed the battles where the enemies were better geared and so presented a decent uphill challenge. While the challenge escalated afterwards, it did so in a pretty awful, inelegant way, by adding way more meat than the situation called for. I was forced to switch Denim and a warrior to two handed weapons to get sufficient damage, which isn't a good thing, as the game had not ever indicated the team's damage falling off before this. What really soured the experience was the Vice fight. After a tense, grueling battle in front of Amorika's gates, I was greeted with a uber fast enemy that not only tanked everything, but also got in meaty swings, including an extremely dangerous finisher that often struck Denim for more than 2/3rds his heal...

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 battle...