Tactics Ogre: Reborn review – One of the best strategy games of all time gets even better

Ogre Tactics: Reborn It’s a remake of a remake. But that doesn’t make it any less important, even essential, today. Coming to PS4, PS5, Switch, and PC, the strategy title is an exuberant reworking of the infamous 2010 RPG, Tactics Ogre: Let’s Hold On Together who isn’t afraid to plunge his hands into the original’s chest cavity and move the organs inside, restarting the heart with a well-presented, sharp blow from his fist.

Square Enix has essentially removed the barriers to gaming by bringing Tactics Ogre: Reborn into the hands of modern gamers. By allowing your units to take a short tour of the battlefield and collect cards that improve their stats and open up their options, you are no longer confined to a specific style of play with your armies. Letting your defensive classes, say, beef up their sword weapons and get stronger hits? That is feasible now.

It means that your myriad battles, all lasting between 20 and 50 minutes, can proceed more smoothly. By mastering the battlefield and understanding your surroundings (and responding to buff cards that like to appear on the field), you can more quickly and spontaneously respond to enemy threats.

Send a dragon down the flank to catch a Critical Hit+ card, and then watch them skewer the open side of an army, before slaughtering the backline? That’s tactical catnip-RPG. It makes you feel like Sun Tzu. And it’s something that didn’t really exist with the Tarot system in the original. As late-arriving added features go, it’s a stroke of genius.

This more dizzying nature in a Tactics Ogre game also does wonders for the brain. While your left brain fires, calculating all the min/max math you do to make sure your wizard will live to see another battle, your right brain is awash in fiction. Why does moving into this swamp tile give your ninja an attack buff? Maybe it’s because from here you can launch an assault on the enemy’s rear phalanx, right? There is a rock that he hides behind before sneaking up and taking out the stragglers.

In a game as slow as Tactics Ogre: Reborn (not a criticism), it’s good to give your brain room to think about the fictional melee. Especially when the title itself does a good job of fleshing out this world: his throney politics pricks and hooks your bark, drawing you into his intrigue and menace. Game of Thrones, eat your heart.

To further engage you and give your senses even more delicious stimuli to feed on, it has the new soundtrack; an emotional barrage of bombast and triumph that will genuinely have you gripping your Switch in delight as he wakes and swells to match the way you put a rebel insurrection on that tile map of a lake.

I’ve been gaming on an OLED switch, and the character art and pixel-sharp presentation of the game’s graphics manage to tread the fine line of being nostalgic and familiar, yet clean and suitable for modern hardware. It looks even better than it did on handheld on PSP back in 2010, and that’s really saying something, because Sony’s version of this remaster was lush, too.

If you’re coming to this from newer, fancier strategy RPG titles (hello, Fire Emblem: Three Houses fans), you’ll be put off by some of the more granular UI stuff. There are only two camera options in battle: overhead or isometric, and navigating the map when things start to get complicated can be a frustrating drag.

The game is also a relic of an era of routine; kill one of your knight heroes when he’s level 42, for example, and you’ll be forced to recruit his replacement at level 1 (or try to persuade a rival mercenary to join your ranks). I like this; It makes you value every life, and not just fall into the pit of thinking your crew is expendable. It makes battles have weight, consequence, danger. And if you mess it up, you can always start and save. You’ll just lose… wait, what, 90 minutes? Dammit.

If you love the setup and execution of this remaster as much as I do, you’ll also revel in the chance to go back in time and see where the branching narratives converge and diverge. Upon completion, you can rewind time to any important event and choose a different path; see how things would have gone if you had saved that character or executed that one. More granular, you can also do it move-by-move in battle, rewinding two turns to make sure your cleric doesn’t get hit with a blowgun from the entire map (again).

In a world where we’ve seen Square Enix go down with remasters (examples include the lackluster Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters and the atrocious Kingdom Hearts on Switch), Tactics Ogre: Reborn highlights something special: a changing of the guard, so to speak. . that bodes well for the rest of the publisher’s RPG classic.