I hated this game when I first played it fifteen years ago on the PS1. ... It sucked. I was like, how can anyone win this game? Not only that, the graphics were lame for its time (I thought), the music was subpar for an RPG, the story is bleh.




Myoky has convinced me to give this thing another shot after all this time by getting it for the PSP. And while it is certainly no Final Fantasy Tactics, I at least must give Tactics Ogre credibility for laying down the groundwork for the ultra awesome strategy RPG that came later known as FFT. And overall, I think the game is okay now and I at least remained heavily vested in it over the last week while I played it quite frequently. I am close to the end of the game now, it would appear.

... Now I don't really know how much different the PSP version is from where I originally played it on the PS1, other than the fact that they made it a lot easier for you to keep your party members alive this time around. After about ten battles in, I just couldn't continue any further because characters would be lost immediately and permanently upon the first time their HP hit zero in battle, and new ones I recruited could not hope to last long enough in random battles to be properly trained up to speed. The PSP version actually gives you three chances for a character to stay alive in battle before they are permanently lost. The first two times they fall and remain unrevived for so long they simply flee the battle and are rewarded no experience, which is fair.


The story is, I find, actually pretty good, almost as good as FFT I think, and is practically identical to FFT's story plot point for plot point. It definitely kept me wanting to know what would happen next, especially at the end of the first chapter where the hero is betrayed by his friend and becomes the hunted on account of disobeying an order to do something that went against his conscience.
When the real plot was revealed, I was like, "Whooooaaaaa!" And I couldn't put the PSP down for the night! Thus I kept playing to like 2 and 3 in the morning and failed to get a good night's sleep.


But the battle system, as much as I somehow put up with it overall, is like it was tailor-made to cause you to suck at this game, despite the fact that the game is still pretty easy and I have only lost about 10% of the storyline battles without winning on the first try, due to the fact that enemies are kind of stupid and just always have the requirement of defeating only the enemy leader instead of the entire group to win, unlike in FFT where having to defeat only one particular person as conditions for victory was more of an exception than the rule. The problem is that I find it such a roadblock to grow any of my characters. They are given virtually the exact amount of skill points (like job points in FFT) after every battle no matter how far you get into the game, yet the cost of abilities increases according to their usefulness as you'd expect. What's worse, you have only a limited space for equipped abilities, instead of being able to use them all after you've gone through the pains of accumulating the points to purchase them. The abilities also cannot be equipped until the class of the character is at a required level through so much battle, anyway. It's bullcrap. ... But that alone wouldn't be so bad at all. .... Weapons and armor? Those have required levels, too. You want to buy a new soldier and equip him with up-to-date weapons or choose a new class for a soldier in your party, just to help them at least be able to fight at all while gathering skill points for extra abilities like magic spells and status augments? TOUGH. They have to start from ground zero and get to the experience level needed, which would take forever, and leave them extremely vulnerable in battle in the meantime. I don't see how it'd ever be worth it. Thus, the classes I chose at the beginning of the game when I got each of my characters (or whenever it was that that character first joined), I've had to stick with the whole time to keep them useful, and I still haven't fully mastered any of them - there's just too many skills to learn. Luckily, the game seems to have its enemies programmed to be able to be beaten even with basic classes like the wizards and archers I began with. Like, I said, I feel like I suck at this game, yet the enemy sucks just enough as well to make it easy enough to play, but still frustrating to deal with because of the restrictive way in which you have to maintain and upgrade your army.



And by the way, why is it so freaking hard to be able to buy anything to keep up in battle like healing items and magic scrolls by the 2/3 point in the game or so when you just can't get any money for anything as a reward after battle? Again, that's about when I started losing more frequently, and it's like the game is trying to make me not do well.


Anyways, I intend to finish this game either way. There's my rant. I know I had more to praise or complain about, but I'll leave it at this for now. This game kicked my butt way back as a young teenager, and I'm not letting it do that again now. This is the rematch, yo.

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... Screw you, Vyce, you weasely little sh*t. THAT's what you get for slapping me in the face simply because I didn't like war as much as you.

The original TO and its PSP port/remake are vastly different games in how they are played. However, both are flawed enough (in different ways) that they never hit the upper echelons of the genre like FFT. As you said, it has high points but is more a game you sullenly march through rather than truly enjoy a lot of the time. This game is like 2001: A Space Odyssey. You're glad it existed more for the superior works it influenced than for its own merits as entertainment.