Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together (PSP) Review

Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together for PSP is a remake of the original Tactics Ogre released in late 1995 on the Super Famicom. Claims that Tactics Ogre "invented", "innovated", or "is the grandfather of" the tactics genre are false. Series such as Front Mission, Fire Emblem, Super Robot Wars, Langrisser, Daisenryaku, X-COM, Shining Force, Nectaris, Jagged Alliance, Panzer General, Famicom Wars, and well over 200 other turn based tactical level video games were released earlier than Tactics Ogre, and did just about everything first. Nothing important about Tactics Ogre's game play was particularly new or innovative in 1995, let alone in 2011. So how well does this remake stand up to the sleek, efficient, and well designed modern tactics games of today? Not very well. Tactics Ogre fails in its combat pacing, tactical variety and content, strategically meaningful depth, user interface, and difficulty.

Tactics Ogre's campaign is sorely lacking in tactical variety. Almost every mission is completed by killing the enemy leader with a few token trash mobs strewn about. Almost every map is a hill gradually rolling from bottom to top with a few randomly placed obstacles. The strategy for almost every mission in the game is to build up your units TP meter, which allows you to use powerful special attacks, then dump TP attacks on the boss while working to negate their own TP abilities. It gets worse later as even trash enemies start using TP skills, so it's always in your best interest to finish the mission quickly before someone gets one shot by a TP skill. You'll end up sniping off countless bosses and watching their allies fade into nothing as the battle automatically ends. That's literally the extent of the games strategy in almost every mission. Almost all of the games depth - its physical attack and element types, skills, stats, statuses, spells, races, tarot signs, terrain, height, directional facing, finishing moves, battlefield conditions, and etc. can be soundly ignored in favor of a few simple strategies that are repeated ad nauseum.

Tactics Ogres depth is strategically meaningless in the face of TP attacks. For example, in one Chapter 2 mission you're (optionally) tasked with defeating a fleeing enemy with above average stats. Is there any use for all of the debuffs and dozens of items/spells you can pile on him? Nope, he's practically immune to all of it and takes almost no damage from spells. The only strategy is to surround him and beat him down before he gets enough TP to unavoidably one shot one of your units. The only guide I looked at suggested skill and level grinding to unlock your own TP consuming attacks to accomplish this. It's a similar story for most bosses you'll run into. In the same mission, you're tasked with taking out a bunch of priests who will constantly heal each other. Yes, I really wanted to watch 10 priests slowly cast Heal on each other over and over for the next 10-15 minutes while I slowly kill them, thanks.

It doesn't get any more difficult or complex further into the campaign, either. You'll be cruising through chapter 4 using the same TP building and dumping strategies that won you battles in chapter 1 against similarly generic and easy opposition. Even if you avoid all random encounters, the main story content is so repetitive, uneventful, and full of filler battles that you might feel like the whole campaign is a bit of a chore. Being a port of an older game doesn't excuse it from being criticized by today's standards, either. A quality tactics campaign will have interesting things happening in each scenario, whether it's reinforcements, varied objectives, mission specific AI scripting, a wide variety of terrain, etc.

Much of TOs depth is needlessly convoluted, contrived, and confusing, on top of being mostly useless in favor of TP skills or damage boosting skills. Learning and casting spells is a convoluted process involving scrolls, skills, and "arcanas". Making one skill per enemy race and status effect only serves to intimidate players with a long yet almost entirely useless list of skills. The insistence on naming every spell some sort of pseudo-latin gibberish is particularly ridiculous. It feels like an attempt to browbeat and befuddle the player with similarly strategically meaningless options that have little applicable effect on the game. Many times the shop and crafting list will flood with items and gear for classes you can't even use yet. It's telling that mid way through the game the developers give up and hand you spells that cure all buffs/debuffs instead of creating an individual spell for each effect. The "Tactics Ogre is so deep!" emperor has no clothes.

The developers require the player to grind to experience most of the games famed "depth". Classes all level up at once, but you can't level a class if it isn't used during a mission, and new classes start at level 1. Since level 1 classes tend to be very weak beyond chapter 1 you'll have to cripple your team or start grinding if you wish to bring a new class up to speed. This means any new class you get past chapter 2 is going to be a dead weight on your team unless you spend time grinding. In addition, any new characters you get won't have the same skill point base or optimal build that you've developed with your older ones, putting them at a significant disadvantage. it's actually more efficient to stick with your initial roster that you begin the game with. Playing Tactics Ogre "any way you want" is only possible if you're willing to put in the hours grinding new class levels and new recruit skills.

Random encounters are frequent and encourage the player to grind, although in what I can only call a minor miracle of design decisions, you can avoid fighting them and run away. Optional areas exist solely to pit players against randomly generated enemies with no other purpose than a boring grind. Clearing these areas even once will over level your party for the next story battles. Recruiting units is a boring, repetitive grind consisting of surrounding a weakened enemy and spamming the recruit skill until they yield. The only positive point is that you can still dominate the game without grinding or getting into random encounters, owing to the games easy difficulty.

The AI is incompetent, coded to run forward recklessly and hit the target that they'll do the most damage to, with no regard to focus fire or even the simplest of strategies. Even worse, the game constantly saddles you with uncontrollable, badly behaved AI allies. Your guest allies will ignore your own breakable crowd control such as sleep and won't exorcise undead. In one mission, I successfully slept a hostile enemy that you're supposed to leave alive to recruit later, only to have guest/NPC Catiua attack her and wake her up. This led to the hilarious solution of attacking guest/NPC Cautia with one of my own units so she would prioritize healing herself instead of attacking the sleeping target and breaking my CC. Trying to save potential NPC recruits units that prefer to run away from you and not heal themselves is ridiculous as it's completely random as to whether they'll survive long enough for you to rescue them. Not that recruits are particularly valuable since they'll almost always have a worse skill set than what you can build onto the troops you begin the game with.

The pace of combat is slow and tedious for no good reason, with no way to skip any animations. There are additional, intentional delays when the AI targets something or moves or performs any action at all. These delays aren't the PSP slowing down or processing AI code, but pauses deliberately designed into the game so that slower players can follow what's going on. Any experienced tactics gamer will be bored to tears watching the poorly animated, low-res sprites target something, slowly use an item, cast a spell, or make an attack for the umpteenth time with no way to skip it. As a result, Tactics Ogre's combat progresses at a slugs pace and it is irritating for players who don't want to sit through it. As badly designed and boring as the rest of the game is, the sluggish combat pacing is what will irritate skilled and experienced tactics gamers the most, as it's an unbearable, complete waste of time and drags down my score for the game. There's really no excuse for unnecessarily slow and turgid combat in today's tactics games when you have modern tactics games where you can skip as much or as little of the combat animations as you like.

Moving on to the user interface, it's outdated and lacking features. There's no L/R function to switch between viable enemy or allied targets in target selection mode. There's no way to rotate the camera to anything but an overhead view - a huge issue for an isometric 3D game. The menu tree is a UI disaster. Instead of a context sensitive cursor that intuitively speeds up the battle flow by allowing you to move, attack, etc. without going into a menu, you'll have to have to select move, attack, or wait every time. A common series of actions like moving then waiting takes 4+ extraneous button presses due to the poorly designed menus. Abilities, skills, and items are inexplicably split up into different trees for no particular reason. Multiply that by the tens of thousands of times you'll have to navigate the menus to perform the simplest action and combat becomes an unnecessarily laborious chore. Compared to the refined, streamlined control afforded to players of modern tactics games, Tactics Ogre is left languishing somewhere back in the gaming stone age - around 1995, to be precise.

The shop and party management screens are similarly cumbersome and borderline useless. There's no way to see a spreadsheet list of character stats, instead you're forced to view one stat at a time. You can't check whether your classes are at a given level to wear a piece of equipment or learn a spell from inside the shop, nor can you compare shop items and currently equipped gear. The description text in the shops scrolls by at an agonizingly slow pace. Having to jump back and forth between the shop and party management screen when you're trying to outfit 12+ units is tedious, to say the least. There's no indication of what's new in a shop as the story develops, forcing you to scroll through absurdly long item lists hoping that you spot what's new mixed in with the old. This of course ties in with the attempt to befuddle the player with long lists of mostly useless items, gear, and skills. The only saving grace is the auto-equip button, which kept me from going nuts trying to deal with the interface.

On to the battle preparation interface, there's no way to preview the upcoming battle during preparations or see how your unit placement grid relates to their positions on the map, nor can you save during the placement grid screen. You're unable to change the battle party grid on the world map. You can't save during preparation while doing a series of linked missions inside a fortress, forcing you to do your party management all over again if you want to restart. There's no button to immediately remove every person on the battle party grid, instead you have to do it manually. The skip cut scene button(s) are annoyingly inefficient. You'll need to use it multiple times times just to get through what should be a single cut scene. Post-battle results features an annoying flag waving around maniacally, a perfect way to distract someone actually trying to read whatever info the game is trying to present.

The crafting system is tedious, obtuse, and needlessly time wasting. First, you can't check the stats of anything you want to craft, so you won't know whether it's worth the time and effort. Most materials needed to craft items are found in the store, which then need to be synthesized into more refined items. Why bother making the player combine base items into refined items when they could just sell the refined items instead? Although there are certainly some materials that are only obtainable from random encounters (read: more grinding). After an eternity of pointlessly and repetitively clicking and watching a little jar shake around turning your store bought materials into refined materials and combining those refined materials together to finally make an item, you'll usually find out it wasn't even worth crafting in the first place. Even worse, there's a chance your crafting effort will completely fail. You can save/load until you succeed, but then why bother with a sadistic failure rate in the first place? I think the developers have been playing a few too many Korean MMOs, as this sort of nonsense only appeals to gamers for whom grinding, spending hours crafting, watching progress bars, and item failure rates are a way of life.

An autosave system going by the gimmicky acronym of "chariot" is present in TO, along with unlimited quicksaves that completely negate the purpose of the autosaves. The quicksave and autosave features reduce the games difficulty for several reasons. First, it's worth noting that Tactics Ogres quicksaves and autosaves preserves the RNG (random number generator) table that is used to decide if an attack hits, misses, is a critical hit, etc. If you were forced to replay the mission, you would have to deal with a different RNG table, which would cause different events to occur, forcing you to alter your strategy. Reloading from the same RNG table avoids this challenge as you only have one RNG table to worry about. You can reload multiple times to figure out the RNG table, then act in a way that is best suited to whatever the numbers are. It is in a sense no longer random as you know what the numbers coming up are, even if you can't directly control them. The players execution skill, which is their ability to consistently perform actions without making a mistake, is completely nullified with unlimited quicksaves to make up for unlimited mistakes.

There are a series of meaningless "titles" added to the remake, most of which are vapid "gimmie" awards for the ADHD achievement/trophy generation and have little or no relation to the players skill level. The ever present level and skill grinding makes any sort of challenge completable by patience instead of skill. Some of the titles are more a reward of patience than skill, such as "Finish the game without using autosaves and without ever retreating." Retreating from optional battles simply means the player doesn't wish to bore themselves by plowing through easy and tedious random encounters. Furthermore, fighting every optional battle ends up making the game easier to complete due to higher player stats. It's ironic when it takes more skill to deliberately avoid getting an "achievement" than it does to earn it. Like most RPGs it's so riddled with flaws and loopholes that allow the player to avoid difficulty that it is useless as a measure of player skill. Using or not using autosaves is meaningless as you can use the provided quicksaves to achieve the same effect and still get any related titles. Tactics Ogre is useful as an emotional experience only.

Speaking of emotional experiences, I haven't touched much on the plot. It's your standard fantasy tale liberally borrowed from the superior western mythology and fantasy classics that set the standard for the genre, with the typical added melodrama, ham fisted moralizing, evil villains, false dilemmas, the "violence to end violence" motive, the teenaged cast, saving the world plot, etc. The faux-olde English translation seems like a desperate attempt to give the plot some sort of authenticity and hide its JRPG trappings, but it's all there for anyone who sees past the medieval fantasy veneer. While it's better than your typical JRPG dreck, it's clearly a JRPG at heart with many of its standard cliches. Suffice it to say, there's a reason Tactics Ogre's story isn't regarded outside of anime/JRPG circles as some sort of masterpiece.

The music has a few catchy tunes, but it quickly gets repetitive. The one or two minute battle loops are repeated so frequently that I quickly tired of them and wanted to play my own music. There's no option to turn the music off, so the only option is to mute the game entirely. The terrain being in 3D is not particularly useful since you can't freely rotate the camera. When the PSP is capable of 2D graphics of the sort found in Super Robot Wars Z2, games like Tactics Ogre look like barely touched up SFC games in comparison. Oh wait, it is a barely touched up SFC game, my bad.

Tactics Ogre is more oriented towards people who like easy, simple, repetitive, and grind-happy "sandbox" style games such as Disgaea, Final Fantasy Tactics, or other traditional RPGs. Tactics Ogre's customization and combat is mostly designed for players who want to spend dozens or hundreds of hours grinding up a dream team of ninjas, faeries, dragons, and busty witches then steamrolling the campaigns meager opposition. It's more like a traditional RPG slapped on a grid that rarely takes advantage of the increased strategy and skill that a turn based tactical level game can offer. Gamers who want fast paced, varied, strategic content that takes advantage of the medium should look elsewhere.

If all turn based tactics started playing like Tactics Ogre (and by extension, FFT and Disgaea), the turn based tactics genre would be almost entirely pointless, and all we'd be left with is a lot of RPG-esque, grind heavy sandbox mush. For that reason, Tactics Ogre is a series that would be better off as a traditional RPG, instead of making a mockery of the turn based tactics genre. Tactics Ogre isn't a completely awful game, just below average game by today's standards, riddled with problems that make it a barely tolerable experience at best.