Tactics Ogre: Reborn - remaster based on 2010 release

[v1rus]

Couple months of release, what you folks say? This or PSP? Any chance this will get old PSP combat modded in/Actually added by the devs?

 

[Abu Antar]

Couple months of release, what you folks say? This or PSP? Any chance this will get old PSP combat modded in/Actually added by the devs?

Imo, it's the worst version of the game.

 

[S.torch]

Couple months of release, what you folks say?

Imo, it's the worst version of the game.

 

[spekkio]

Couple months of release, what you folks say? This or PSP? Any chance this will get old PSP combat modded in/Actually added by the devs?

The best version got released this month:

https://www.romhacking.net/translations/6835/

 

[DJOGamer PT]

Couple months of release, what you folks say? This or PSP? Any chance this will get old PSP combat modded in/Actually added by the devs?

Imo, it's the worst version of the game.

How so?

 

[Abu Antar]

Couple months of release, what you folks say? This or PSP? Any chance this will get old PSP combat modded in/Actually added by the devs?

Imo, it's the worst version of the game.

How so?

All the changes are for the worse. Less active abilities, level caps, messing around with HP, smudged graphics, removed class...

It's worth playing if you can't get any other version of the game.

 

[Rafidur]

Level cap is good, number of abilities is... debatable (since you always took some like anatomy and movement+).

The rest is garbage. LESS content, a load of bugs like some stats/weapons that do nothing, crap balancing, the asstarded card system...

The KB + Mouse UI is also utter crap.

 

[notpl]

This version cut out a lot of utterly pointless bloat and made boss battles actually challenging, a first for the SRPG genre in general. PSP version was a tedious grindfest where it was almost impossible not to end up so overpowered a few hours in that you started one-shotting everything in the game and the SNES version isn't worth talking about except as a historical relic.

 

[OSK]

I saw on the store the reviews for this game were mixed. When I checked to see what people were saying, I saw this gem of a review:

Mechanically, the game is sound.

What will make or break this game for you is the level caps...particularly in late game. You are locked in at level 25 for what seems like forever, while the enemy is above you...and its a grind.

For context, I don't play these games for a chess match. I usually grind, power level and then smash. One can't do that here because of the level cap. The game isn't insurmountable because of this...its just 'I don't like it'. It really spoiled the game for me.

Had I known that element, I would have skipped the purchase. I last played this properly on PSone...it never had this. I could be wrong, but when I dabbled with it on PSP, I didn't recall this. I truly find it absurd to have level caps on a tactics RPG game. One literally can't go any higher for about 15 battles. I've never seen anything like this. Square literally wrecked the game with one stupid move.

Don't get me wrong, they COULD patch it out if they wanted to, so it would be an easy fix, but...I'm shocked they would think this is a smart move.

What the fuck. Why would you play a tactical game if you didn't want to use any tactics?

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Level caps are usually super gay.

 

[Mauman]

I saw on the store the reviews for this game were mixed. When I checked to see what people were saying, I saw this gem of a review:

Mechanically, the game is sound.

What will make or break this game for you is the level caps...particularly in late game. You are locked in at level 25 for what seems like forever, while the enemy is above you...and its a grind.

For context, I don't play these games for a chess match. I usually grind, power level and then smash. One can't do that here because of the level cap. The game isn't insurmountable because of this...its just 'I don't like it'. It really spoiled the game for me.

Had I known that element, I would have skipped the purchase. I last played this properly on PSone...it never had this. I could be wrong, but when I dabbled with it on PSP, I didn't recall this. I truly find it absurd to have level caps on a tactics RPG game. One literally can't go any higher for about 15 battles. I've never seen anything like this. Square literally wrecked the game with one stupid move.

Don't get me wrong, they COULD patch it out if they wanted to, so it would be an easy fix, but...I'm shocked they would think this is a smart move.

What the fuck. Why would you play a tactical game if you didn't want to use any tactics?

I thought it was tactical to train better fighters.

Whodafunk?

Regardless, there are a LOT of artificial difficulty enhancers in this game. How is it tactical for enemies to have enforced higher levels than you? How is it tactical for the game to supply bullshit magic stat cards to the enemy while making you have to run around like a fucktard to get them? How the fuck are the bullshit magic stat cards tactical to begin with?

For everything right the game did over the psp remake, it seems like it did two things wrong.

And just to remind everyone here, the devs for this port were so incompetent, they couldn't even figure out how to reskill one of the classes (Rogue)*. So their plan of action was to COMPLETELY DUMMY IT OUT FOR THE PLAYER. Enemies can still have them though, if only to remind you how much of a massive cuck you are if you play this version.

*I had one on my final team and he was VERY useful. It wouldn't have been THAT hard to figure it out. Fucking lazy bastards.

 

[OSK]

I thought it was tactical to train better fighters.

Whodafunk?

What? You don't need tactics when you create a bunch of over-leveled super characters that can just steamroll the game. What's the fun of that?

How is it tactical for enemies to have enforced higher levels than you?

Depends. Is it a situation where only one or two of the enemies are higher level and the rest aren't? Then it's about threat assessment and prioritization. If all the enemies are higher level, then it's just artificially inflating difficulty. It's a crutch for poor AI and level design.

How is it tactical for the game to supply bullshit magic stat cards to the enemy while making you have to run around like a fucktard to get them? How the fuck are the bullshit magic stat cards tactical to begin with?

That is a bullshit addition. I'm guessing it was added to try to force you to advance your characters instead of just waiting around for the enemy to waste their turns coming to you while you turtle up. The randomness ruins it though.

 

[Damned Registrations]

If all the enemies are higher level, then it's just artificially inflating difficulty. It's a crutch for poor AI and level design.

It's definitely this one. I really tried to get into the game but... it's just broken on so many levels. The AI is shit, the enemies are stat bloated nightmares, the game mechanics are completely opaque, needlessly complex bullshit that is broken in places because the devs didn't know what they were doing. The character tweaking is lame because you get like 4 skill slots and 3 of them are filled with the obvious best in slot shit every time, and 70% of the skills are totally useless shit anyways like '50% chance to resist poison' or whatever. They took out the class system so there's no more reason to experiment to try unlock new classes, you just unlock them as the story progresses and you kill the right targets. There's a really shitty crafting system too. I could go on. It's just a terrible game with a ton of unpolished ideas in place of polished ones from the earlier generation. Play a romhack instead. I have't tried it myself but there's no way it was worse than this clusterfuck. The only thing this version has going for it is the voice acting is pretty nice and some QoL in the interface.

 

[Lord of Riva]

Level caps are usually super gay.

only level scaling is worse. It's in the same vein though.

Why control the player level, have him be underlevelled or overlevelled as much as the player want and adjust the difficulty based on where the player should be by just facing any encounter without grind.

 

[R@tmaster]

Why control the player level

PSP version had a lot of optional fights.

 

[TheImplodingVoice]

Level caps are usually super gay.

Are you salty that you can't just "Archer" or over level your way through the game? God forbid someone actually has to play a game for a change.

The game isn't called Ogre. It's called TACTICS Ogre

 

[Lord of Riva]

Level caps are usually super gay.

Are you salty that you can't just "Archer" or over level your way through the game? God forbid someone actually has to play a game for a change.

The game isn't called Ogre. It's called TACTICS Ogre

A game does not have to be hard to be a game.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

As if leveling and character advancement isn't gameplay.

Nevermind difficulty, its a question of sitting through an hour plus long battle and getting nothing out of it. Talk about a fun killer. And its not like there aren't dozens of srpgs without restrictive level caps that still manage to be plenty hard.

In any case, because you cant level and the classes are bad, the only tactics decisions that appear to matter in this tactics game about super tactical erudite galaxy brain war strategists is... pick up the power ups that magically pop into existenece.

Such tactics, much strategy. Wow.

 

[jungl]

Combat in reborn is still more fun then original. There is a lot of division on design decisions like level cap it goes to show not every fan of game is the same. Someone may like rts games for the ai bots, single player campaign or the multiplayer. Same deal with rpgs.

 

[OSK]

Here's some of my impressions in the form of some random babbling.

The only other version of this game I played was the Playstation version, but that was so long ago it's hard for me to compare them. I'm currently part way through chapter 2 and enjoying myself. The game seems easier than I remember, but I don't know if the game is easier or if I'm just better at these kinds of games now.

Archery and healing magic seemed to have been nerfed, and it seems like there's some HP bloat as battles seem to take longer than I remember. Archery definitely needed the nerf. I remember archers being roving death turrets in the original. Now archers are really only good against softer targets or if you soften enemies up with some debuffs. I like the change. Accuracy seems way higher as positioning doesn't seem as important? I guess that might be why there's HP bloat. The new recruiting system sucks. In the original I had an awesome Lizardman that carried me through the game, so I wanted to get another one. But you can only recruit Lizardman with Wizards, which means I need to place my squishy Wizard next to a Lizardman that can OHKO him for a ~30% chance to recruit. This was the only time so far I used the new feature to rewind turns... which is kind of lame, but it's optional. The AI is nothing special, especially after playing Fell Seal. But I do like the combat, especially the Recovery Time system. I like the sort of soft zone of control some melee units get. More of these games need that.

I think my biggest complaint is the level of randomness that was introduced. The random buff cards are a terrible idea. But beyond that, there are so many abilities that only trigger randomly. Either scale them down and have them always be in effect, or give me the ability to trigger them when I want to. Oh, and the mouse and keyboard controls are terrible. I remember thinking Fell Seal was a bit awkward with mouse and keyboard, but it's leagues better than what this game is doing. Play this with a controller.

I don't care about the level cap. In the original, I was always under-leveled because grinding is a chore and I liked rotating through a large, diverse roster and picking the best units for the battle. This game actually added a bunch of welcome mechanics to make leveling up characters a lot easier, which I appreciate.

Overall, a mixed bag, but the core game is still good. I'm just hoping the randomness doesn't make the latter half of the game terrible.

 

[Perkel]

Random buff card is retarded idea beyond retarded idea. It is like someone would place BMW X5 09' in between horse charge in ancient egypt.

 

[AdamReith]

Random card thing was the deal-breaker for me as well. Hard to tell what they were thinking with that one.

 

[Zero CHAR]

So, Reborn is bad? I like the Ogre Battle games, so I wanted to continue the series with Tactics Ogre, should I play the PSP release?

 

[Mauman]

So, Reborn is bad? I like the Ogre Battle games, so I wanted to continue the series with Tactics Ogre, should I play the PSP release?

That's a complicated question.

Any version of Tactics Ogre is a great game because Tactics Ogre is a great game. All versions, however have some kind of issue. The original lacks the new stuff (and is pretty simple, but still good), the psp version has some questionable design choices, and so does Reborn. I'm of the opinion that for every mistake that Reborn fixed, they made a worse decision in it's place.

You may want to look into the mod overhauls for the psp version. That might be the best version to play. That being said, I'd say it's something you're going to have to look into yourself.

edit - my personal opinion though, if mods are out, is to play the psp version with some sort of cheat that lets you bypass the crafting chance of failure.

 

[FreshCorpse]

So, Reborn is bad? I like the Ogre Battle games, so I wanted to continue the series with Tactics Ogre, should I play the PSP release?

It's good. The party level cap complaint is bizarro screeching from people who want it to be a classic grindable JRPG rather than an actual tactics game.

The buff card whinging makes slightly more sense but is still wrong because the battles (especially boss battles) are clearly balanced around the bosses starting with stacked buffs - outside of boss battles, buff cards barely matter. The only part of this objection that makes any sense is that random cards being dropped on the battlefield are somewhat ugly and make no sense in the setting. Which is true.

I would add one other objection which is that the pace is a bit slow. Many battles take 30m+, which feels a bit much at times.

I've put quite a lot of time into this and get the system. I've looked at the differences between this release and the PSP (which I have a bit of time in, but much less) and the changes broadly make sense to me as enhancements. Some of them are major - like nerfing archers which clearly became an abused exploit for the later battles.

When I'm travelling, this is pretty much the only game I play.