About a year and a half ago, I asked my wife (then-fiancée) for a PS Vita as my big Christmas gift. We had a lot of travel planned for 2013, and I wanted to play Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions and possibly see what the Dissidia nonsense was all about. Then, about two weeks before our wedding, I discovered a title I recognized from my past on PSN -- Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together. Many moons ago, I really enjoyed Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen on Super Nintendo. Unfortunately I never actually found a copy to buy, which is a bummer because they now go for over $100 (way more if it includes original packaging) due to a limited number of copies released in the United States. So I just rented it from Blockbuster about a dozen times instead. And later in my gaming career, of course I fell in love with Final Fantasy Tactics. Therefore I figured Tactics Ogre would be the perfect combination of those two games. I bought the PlayStation version, and after playing through most of the game I came away feeling very meh about the whole experience, mostly because of the way classes worked and the 100-floor "optional" dungeon (nothing is optional in RPGs). But my attitude changed this past year after finding a Let's Play thread about the new-ish PSP port on Something Awful forums. Square Enix brought back the original production team to clean up some of the shoddy mechanics and add content for the new release, and after toying around with it more than I'd care to admit (especially on our honeymoon, there are long train rides in Europe, don't judge me) the game reignited my interest in the entire Ogre Battle series. Flash forward to a few months ago, when the ease of NHL 14 and my reluctance to join my friends on Final Fantasy XIV led me to fire up the ol' SNES emulator and play the original Ogre Battle once more.
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| A revolution in under a year? I guess it helps to have dragons and magic. |
