Tactics Ogre

Now this review will probably summon the wrath of Unpaid Gamers Online because I will contradict their review in some areas. To begin Tactics Ogre is a turn bases strategy game brought to us by Atlus, who started the Ogre Battle series for Nintendo. Frankly, if all of the games were of this quality, I have no clue how it got to be a series!

Graphics...Good or bad the first thing anyone notices about games is the graphics. Now I will be the frist to admit that I have been spoiled with the playstations graphics lately, with RE2 FF7, and Colony Wars. But I feel quite pleased that I still enjoy old style games with okay graphics, like BOF3 and Kings Field 2. That being said, I knew going into the game that the graphics would not be the best out there, but I thought what the hell, I'll try it anyway. I have never been so dissapointed in a playstation game in my entire life. Part of the problem is that I just finished playing FF Tactics, with its bright colorful look, clean sprites, and crisp 3-d battlefields with a changing view. But even if I hadn't played Square's masterpiece, I still would have puked. The game starts off with a long blurry text intro; I know this will sound petty but I like an animated or rendered game intro to set the mood. Instead there is a jerky "cinema" during the credits using the ingame engine that belongs on the Sega Genisis. Once the intro horror is over you start the ugliest looking game I have ever seen. The characters are short super deformed blurry blobs with no personality, and half of them look alike. (Soldier=Archer). The crappy graphics lead to such initial confusion for me that I had trouble setting up my attack plans without getting wasted. Even if you can make out who you want to kill, you get another treat: The view can't change. You are stuck with one skewed view of the battlefield that sucks for every single character. The fact that the game creators managed to make movement for everyone on the screen is a feat onto itself. This presents the problem that in FF Tactics you could pan around to get an idea of elevation, movement and angle of attack. Here, you can forget it. Oh and if you can get past that, various squares on the field have advantages and penalties for attacks, but they are so blurry that you will never know what you are doing anyway! And the spell effects are so pathetic that they must be seen to be believed. It can be argued that Ogre Battle looked better than this!

Sound...Sound is not to important to me so I won't really linger on the topic except to say that the sound sucks too. The music is tinny and the in game effects are dull too. Nothing here is awe inspiring or mood setting in the least.

Control... This is a turn based game not Tekken 3, so the control doesn't make too much of a difference. But even the control was stiff and non-intuitive.

Gameplay... Oh now the fun really begins. It has been sad that good graphics can't make a bad game, and bad graphics can't kill a good game. I was willing to exert the superman strength neended to overlook the graphics if the play was rewarding. No such luck. The game itself has a generic "Fight to your freedom" whining story line with treachery and family ties. Sounds familiar right? That is because it is cloned from FF Tactics! There is nothing innovative in this game, the graphics suck, the sound sucks, the control sucks, and the gameplay sucks! Here are some prime examples off gameplay problems: There are the exact same character classes as in FF Tactics, and even the monsters are the same. Any character can use any weapons, as a result I attacked soldiers and died because they had bows even though they were not archers! This quirk is not explained well in the ,manual, and will take a while to figure out. The next problem comes in with character resurection, or the lact there of. In almost all of the strategy games that I have played, there has been a method of resurection for the characters. You may lose them during the battle and pay to get the back; like in Shining force, or they can be brought back by items and spells during the battle like in FF Tactics. Not in Tactics Ogre. Once someone is dead, they just won't come back! No spell skill or item brings back the dead. And do to the horrible graphics and strange gameplay, excpect the body count to look like WW1 trench warfare. Speaking of skills, there aren't any in the game. In FF Tactics your characters could learn skills and mix and match them until the character could get medival on anyone in its path.In TO you can't learn skills at all. It really doesn't matter because by the time you get get up a level, you will be slaughtered by the enemy due to the graphics and lack of resurection. If be some God given miracle you advance in the game, you will encounter another fun fact: There is a bug that I have experienced along with the workers at my local Electronics Boutique. The bug does one of 2 things: Either it prevents you from restoring the game, or its cleanses your memory card of all data. I got the later, on a card with RE2 and Gran Tourismo saves. I don't think this is a bug.It is really proof of how evil the game is: It can spot high quality innocent saves and due to its jealousy it kills them! So beware of this game for it is pure EVIL!!You can't play it and it will kill your memory card. And for 50 bucks I can think of a hell of a lot of other games to buy. I would even recomend dusting off your genisis and playing Shining Force or Warsong, as even though they are older they are far better than this rubish. If you got this as a gift do two things: Beat the crap out of the person who gave it to you, and then exchange it at EB for FF Tactics or Vandal Hearts. If you must keep it though, it does work well as a coaster.

Graphics...2 Sound......5 Control....5 Gameplay...2 Overall....3

Bad Graphics + Bad Gameplay = Years of therapy for me

-Madgraduate