Tactics
Ogre.
Just say this phrase, and you will easily be able to pick the initiated out of a
room, because their face will light up with a knowing smile. They will smile.
You will nod. And that is all that needs to be said; you will both go your
separate ways in the world, knowing that there is someone else on earth who
shares your taste in strategy RPGs. Much like a forbidden cult that must use
secret handshakes and conduct their meetings in faraway caves, fans of the
Tactics Ogre series are sometimes hard to find, but can be fanatical in
their devotion. The games are rare, their popularity is barely on the charts,
but the fans are very much around. You will know them by their confident sneer
as you mention that you like strategy games, and their derisive cackle as you
pronounce Final Fantasy Tactics to be the best in the genre. While they
have stayed the course through poor distribution of the games and infrequent
localizations, they have remained true to their beloved series. And finally,
they get rewarded with a recent release, and a prequel in the series, no less,
on a thriving system in the form of the Gameboy Advance.
For the uninitiated, Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis is another
installment in a long line of games in what is coming to be know as the Ogre
Battle Saga. Some came into the fold when a strategy RPG by the name of
Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together was brought over to the Playstation
after being a Super Famicom title in Japan. It set the standard in the series by
not being all that commercially successful, but snagging a cult following. I t
soon went out of print, and is now hard to get a hold of. An Ogre Battle game
was also released for the Playstation, and suffered a similar fate, falling off
of the sales charts, but finding a place in many gamer's hearts. Probably the
most successful game in the series in America came with Ogre Battle 64
for the Nintendo 64, a title some proclaim to be the best RPG that every came
out for the system. By comparison to the other titles, you can still get your
hands on this one and give it a whirl if you want. What made the series so
fascinating was a continuing storyline that was added to in each of the games,
contributing to an epic tale that looks to be as ambitious a story ever
undertaken in a video game series (some series, like Final Fantasy, have more
installments, but their stories aren't connected). Some gamers have even gone so
far as to construct timelines of Ogre Battle history, so you can trace the epic
flow the battles, and the power struggles that they changed.
Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis falls someone in the middle of the
timeline of released Ogre Battle games, coming before Let Us Cling Together.
As far as prequels go, we know from watching the Star Wars movies that the
prequels can be tricky. You must tie together loose ends that weren't made clear in the later installments, while also showing origins for major characters
and showing the evolution of certain important plot elements. How exactly, for
instance, did the mighty Lodis Empire come into its power to begin with, and
just who is that shady knight character who pops up in Let Us Cling Together?
The questions and more get answered with satisfying results in a game that not
only lives up to the name of the Ogre Battle Saga, but manages to raise the bar
just a little bit for the future installments.
In essence, The King of Lodis is like many other strategy RPG games like
Vandal Hearts and Final Fantasy Tactics. The main bulk of the
playing time is built on battles, strategic battles that will take a lot of
character development and even a little strategy to get through. Binding the
battles together is an engrossing plot of war and betrayal that no good game in
the genre can be without. Think of a mix between an RPG and chess , and you're
starting to get the idea of what a game like this is like. For those that have
either played the above games, or the original Let Us Cling Together, you
will have an even better idea, since this installment takes the same formula and
tweaks it slightly for its new console, and to keep things fresh.
You control your main character, a young man named Alphonse. Alphonse is a new,
young recruit into an elite unit of the Empire's knights. He is sent on an
important mission with his comrade, Rictor to the land of Rananculus to
investigate some strange goings-on. Things quickly go south as they are attacked
by an unknown enemy, and Alphonse takes an arrow for Rictor and is thrown from a
cliff. Alphonse manages to live through the attack, but his world his turned
upside down as he falls into the middle of a gigantic struggle between several
regions of the world, where no one is what they seem, and everyone seeks a holy
relic that he gets access to. Eventu ally, even God and Satan become major
players in the storyline, as Alphonse, as the reluctant hero, is thrust to the
front of the epic battle between good and evil. As RPG stories go, this one is
well-paced, full of twists and turns, and contains a huge amount of
well-developed characters that you will actually remember long after you set
the game down.
To break it down here, you will first be introduced to your main character, and
get a little bit of plot for background. You will then be thrust into the
battles, which you will become intimately familiar with. The battles are set
upon a large grid made up of squares. While the battlefields will be scenic,
such as towns and marshes, your characters will be confined to moving among the
squares, and amount of squares they can move is determined by their agility. You
can recruit from a wide array of different classes for your army, of which you
can have eight soldiers on your side in any given battle. The classes range from
wizards, generic soldiers, hawkmen that can take flight, animals, and even
priests who are good at healing your party. Each class has its own strengths and
weaknesses, so you should balance your party out wisely. For instance, magic
users tend to be physically weak, so it would be wise to keep them far away from
the hand-to-h and combat, lobbing their spells at the enemy from afar.
Likewise, physically strong characters like Knights and Berserkers tend to have
low agility, so they can't sneak up on any enemy for a surprise attack, but they
can do devastating damage once they get to him.
Each side will get to move all of their characters in one turn, with the order
being determined by the speed of the characters. In Let Us Cling Together,
all characters moved at the same time, going in order of speed. With this setup
where one side goes and then the other, even a little more strategy must be
used, because you must keep in mind that once you are done moving, the enemy
is free to advance ALL of his troops, and you must stand idly by until your next
turn. Sometimes, the results can be devastating; you can wander unwittingly into
an ambush if you are not wary of this new aspect of the strategy. One thing that
does hinder the updated strategy a little, though, is the pretty poor enemy A.I.
The enemy soldiers are mostly pretty stupid, and don't seem to want to go out of
their way to kill you. Enemy priests will run away from the battle and not heal
any of their soldiers, and they will almost always avoid attacking your
critically injured solider in favor of one with full health. While I did
appreciate getting a break from time to time, it was frustrating to put so much
effort and training into battles where the enemy didn't seem to even want to
win.
Ah, I did mention training, didn't I? Training is a very big part of upgrading
your soldiers in The Knight of Lodis, like it is with other games in the
series. It is import ant that you keep the experience levels of your troops
around that of the enemy you are facing. If you are several levels below that of
your enemy, his chances of hitting you go way up, and the amount of damage he
does to you multiplies, while you r chances of hitting him and doing maximum
damage go way down. So it is vital that you keep your soldiers leveled
appropriately. One way to do this is through random battles. While you don't
journey from town to town in the traditional RPG sense in this game, you do have
a world map that displays the various locales of the game. You simply point to
where you want to go on the map, and journey there, a'la Grandia.
However, random battles can and will pop up while you are traveling to your
destination, and they are laid out just like the story battles you must face
during the regular game. These battles are important for building up your
troops' experience, and for gaining emblems. Emblems are little awards your
troops will get in the game that boost their stats after completing a task. For
instance, one can be gained by blocking an enemy's attack and counterattacking
him, another can be gained by killing a certain amount of enemies in one battle.
Each has their own unique way of boosting your characters' stats, and completists out there will have fun trying to collect them all to make an uber-soldier.
Like I mentioned before, you have the opportunity to train your soldiers
yourself if you wish, setting them against each other in teams. It plays out
like a normal battle, only when killed, the soldiers don't really die, except
that they killer gets the normal experience associate with really killing an
enemy. You can even set the controls to auto so that your soldiers will battle
by themselves and level up while you are watching Spongebob Squarepants.
Well...not so fast there, Nancy. You see, there are the good emblems you can get
that will boost your soldiers' stats, but there are also bad ones. While
training is a good way to round out your soldiers' experience so that you have a
solid team, gaining too many levels in training mode will get you a negative
emblem that will actually hamper your characters. Random battles are really a
more effective way of leveling up your characters anyway, but be wary of not
spending too much time in training mode.
You can also further enhance your characters as you go along by recruiting new
ones, or changing the classes of the soldiers you already have. As you stop at
new towns during the game, you can check and see what new and interesting
soldiers they have for you recruit. They will all come at a price; some are
worth it, others are not. Also, once certain tasks are carried out by your
soldiers, new classes will open up for them to convert to. For instance, once a
soldier reaches a certain number of kills, you can convert him into an Archer or
Berserker, Knight, etc, each opening up their own possibilities for future
advancement. Just customizing your army is a hugely satisfying and fun part of
this game that will soak up many, many hours.
The graphics of The Knight of Lodis, while an upgrade what has been seen
before in the series, do not take full advantage of the Gameboy Advance's
capabilities. The look is extremely similar to Let Us Cling Together,
only things look a little cleaner, and the graphics flow a little smoother.
While the original Playstation title would occasionally hang and suffer from
slowdown while performing the simplest tasks, its Gameboy incarnation has no
such problems pumping out battle after battle. While you can have an army of 10
soldiers in Let Us Cling Together, it is slightly downgraded to only 8
troops for the prequel, probably taking into consideration the limited space
available on the Gameboy screen. What is still there, though, is extremely
bright and colorful, with fantastic spell animations, and an overall smooth
presentation.
The sounds and music in The Knight of Lodis, while nothing that will
stun you with its complexity, is good enough that it does not at all subtract
from the overall experience. After playing some games that push the Gameboy
hardware to its max, like Golden Sun, it seems that this game is
underachieving somewhat. The music is mainly relegated to MIDI blips and bleeps,
but does contain some nice melodies on occasion. The actual in-battle sound
effects are your standard "clink" sounds for swords clashing, and other standard
fare. While it is obvious that some attempt was made to produce some nice tunes
to battle to, especially near the end of the game, it seems that they might have
actually been underestimating the capabilities of the console they were
programming for.
The gameplay aspect of the game, is, well, the entire reason to get this game,
really. While it does have a great story to go along with it, the main reason
you will have to have this game in your Gameboy collection is the addictive
battles and character development. Your characters will develop an alignment
like Chaotic, Lawful, or Neutral depending on decisions you make in the game,
generating one of several different endings once you finish the game. As almost
an added bonus, the game even features what is called a "Quest Mode." In Quest
Mode, you have the option to gain rare items and more money by battling extra
enemies. While your army does not gain extra experience from these battles, you
can set a certain goal for the battle, and the loftier the goal set, the greater
the reward you get when you complete it. For instance, if you think you can
defeat the leader of the enemy army within 3 turns, you will get something nice
for accomplishing that goal, usually a rare piece of armor, or powerful weapon.
You also can go head-to-head with a friend using a link cable between your
Gameboy and another. Wondering just how powerful your army is? Pi t it
against another's army and find out for sure. I never got a chance to use this
option, since I don't even know anybody else who has this game. Very good idea,
however, and something that is sure to squeeze even a little more playing time
out of a game that is already going to give you over 40 hours of entertainment.
Like I mentioned before, the storyline and characters of The Knight of Lodis
are all extremely well-done, and stand right up there will some of the better
console RPGs I've ever played. Alphonse, for instance, goes through a ton of
growth and development during the story that takes place, changing from a meek,
wide-eyed youth to a focused leader to guides his army through sheer will at
times. Add in an interesting love story that develops with Eleanor, a young
woman who cares for Alphonse at one point, as well as many other extremely deep
characters with interesting backgrounds like Rictor, and you've got a story
that sucks you in from the beg inning, and never lets up. I explored many of
the game's options and spent a lot of time leveling up, so I spent almost 70
hours playing this game. However, it was the intriguing story, with its quest
for the relic sought by the fallen angel who only wants God's favor, that
propelled me through the game to its every end.
 
TACTICS OGRE
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Tactics
Ogre
