Square Enix is having an amazing year for strategy RPGs. They began 2022 with Triangle Strategy, then The DioField Chronicle, and now a remaster of a classic. Tactics Ogre: Reborn is doing well in reviews for technically being over two decades old.
Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, the original name, was released in 1995 on the Super Nintendo in Japan. It went to several platforms after that before finally getting to the Switch and other modern consoles today. How well does Tactics Ogre: Reborn hold up in this new form? Let’s break down the pros and cons of this latest RPG remaster.
8 Best: A Classic Tactics Game Returned
Most strategy RPG fans probably played this game when it relaunched on the PSP. It was a great updated version of a classic, and it’s great to see it return in 2022.
Choose units, move them around, earn experience, build up classes, and the rest is history. The Switch version is the perfect companion game for when trying to multitask, like catching up on shows or something like that. Some things feel dated about the gameplay, but overall it is a solid tactical RPG.
7 Worst: The Class System
Tactics Ogre: Reborn feels like the blueprint for Final Fantasy Tactics in many ways. The director, Yasumi Matsuno, would go on to perfect his ideas in that game. The class system, for example, has its ups and downs. There are tons to choose from eventually, which is nice, but they don’t feel different. Spells are bought, not earned in a skill tree, and passive abilities have a chance to unlock with any class. The leveling-up system for classes is a bit too chaotic for a strategy RPG. In many ways, it kind of has similar problems to Final Fantasy 8’s various systems.
6 Best: Voice Acting
Adding voices to a previously text-based RPG is presumably no easy feat. Square Enix could have stuck with a voiceless story, but they went above and beyond this remaster in this regard, at least. While not the strongest cast, the addition of voices makes Tactics Ogre: Reborn a bit easier to get into.
Players can choose to have these dialogue cutscenes play by themselves with an auto-text feature. Thankfully, these conversations are snappy, with no sentence lingering on for more than a second or two at max. This is an improvement over the length of dialogue checks in The DioField Chronicle, another strategy RPG from Square Enix’s 2022 roster.
5 Worst: The Story
The narrative in Tactics Ogre: Reborn is not so much bad as it is overwhelming. The story begins with Denam, Vyce, and Catiua trying to rebel against an oppressive kingdom; they wish to save their land and create peace. They meet mercenaries and countrymen from neighboring nations to aid them in their quest.
Cities, people, countries, organizations, and so much more are named in such a short amount of time. It’s hard to keep track of it all, even with the aforementioned addition of voice work.
4 Best: The Music
There’s another piece of this game’s audio that deserves some praise away from the voice work. The music is a good accompaniment to some of the more dramatic scenes on top of the battles players will wage. It’s the kind of soundtrack that will feel all too familiar without any one track standing out. It was co-composed by Hitoshi Sakimoto and Masaharu Iwata, who also worked on Final Fantasy Tactics. The quality is for sure there as far as RPGs go, even though it might not be the most listenable outside of the game.
3 Worst: The Graphics
Square Enix helped create an aesthetic when they released Octopath Traveler. They coined this design choice as HD-2D. The backgrounds were pre-rendered and in 3D, while the characters were sprite based. Other games have gone on to use this design choice, like fellow tactical RPG Triangle Strategy.
It’s a shame Square Enix didn’t use this process with the remaster of Tactics Ogre: Reborn because what they did is bad. The characters and backgrounds are smoothed over like they used an automatic filter on a phone app. It feels lazy, especially considering Live A Live got remastered this year, and that was a SNES game that got the HD-2D treatment.
2 Best: Time Travel
One of the coolest things that set this game apart from other RPGs is its time travel adjacent system of tarot cards. Players can use the wheels of fate, as it were, to go back ten turns in combat. More importantly, they can go back in time and jump to branching off points in the story.
There is a diagram showcasing events and branching paths in the menu, thus eliminating the guesswork players can have in an RPG with dialogue choices. The replay value for Tactics Ogre: Reborn is out of this world.
1 Worst: The Level Cap
As fun as the combat is, the level caps make it hard to enjoy sometimes. The level caps don’t give players a lot of room to play around in. Story missions will unlock higher-level caps, but these increases are minimal, like three to five levels. Without difficulty settings, these level caps arbitrarily make the game harder, seemingly for no reason.
Of all the things that should have been updated in the remaster, eliminating the level cap should have been the number one priority, way ahead of voice work and graphical tweaks.
Tactics Ogre: Reborn was released on November 11, 2022, and is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.