Why Tactics Ogre: Reborn is amazing – and how that bodes well for Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7 Reunion

Ogre Tactics: Reborn it’s a remake of a remake, so to speak. Coming to modern consoles and PCs, the game is an exuberant reworking of the infamous 2010 RPG, Tactics Ogre: Let’s Hold On Together. With this new release, Square Enix has taken the bones of the classic game and reanimated them; snatching them back from the brink of darkness and death and making them twist and shudder in just the right way to make them look like something completely new.

The main difference that you are going to enjoy if you are a returning fan of Tactics Ogre is the way that Square Enix has removed the barriers to play. In Reborn, there are fewer gates preventing you from playing in certain ways: yes, wizards, mages, rune fencers, and similar classes can only use magic, but abilities and gear are more global. This means that gear you loot on the battlefield (and pick up in shops) can be delivered to your units more easily, and your fights will be a bit more balanced early on.

New skills have also been added. These generally make the game feel more modern and more in line with the tactical games you’d play today. Do you want to position yourself on either side of an enemy and squeeze them, pressuring them into defeat or surrender? Move along; a new Pincer Attack ability on your melee units will make it seem like a more viable tactic, and you’ll be cornered into moving units together so they can dish out the kill more easily.

Once you’re ready to finish off that flying bastard that’s been attacking your healers, you can switch to a finishing move. These are no longer fueled by the redundant TP meter, but by your MP, a universal resource that now takes care of powering up magic, abilities, and finishing moves (making it feel more like stamina and giving you one less thing to to worry) ).

The AI ​​has apparently been reprogrammed, and that’s helpful, because you can make certain characters in your army fight automatically. This means you can have all your archers, for example, auto-target enemies from afar so you can spend your time managing healing and melee units, and speed up less interesting battles to a certain extent. Enemies will use abilities and guest characters will do things a little smarter than in the original game, and that makes this already complicated game even more difficult if you don’t approach your skirmishes with a game plan.

Graphically, there’s little you can do to improve on the pixel-and-blocky aesthetic that was traded on in 1990s strategy games – there’s some anti-aliasing that makes it all work pretty well on your Switch OLED or 4K TV. , and the menus have been zhuzhed a bit to make them more readable and (slightly) less confusing.

By adding Charms, items that allow you to change the elemental affinity of your troops or gift them XP, there are a lot of quality of life changes, here, that make Tactics Ogre: Reborn feel like a game that was released in the last 10 years. . He feels a long way from his own 25-year-old self, in a good way.

And do you know what that makes me think? The other, upcoming PSP remaster, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7 Reunion. Yes, the selling point of both games is different – Tactics Ogre is all about system upgrades, while Reunion is all about those flashy visual developments – but the quality and thought that has been put into this shiny new version of Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together proves that Square Enix knows how to do a proper reboot. Despite the various evidence we have to the contrary.

But maybe this is the beginning of a new arc for Square Enix. Now that the publisher has made a shitload of all of its Western fare, perhaps we can expect more care and attention to be lavished on old Japanese classics. This is a remake and re-release on par with Final Fantasy 8 Remaster, as far as I’m concerned, and I think it bodes very well for the modernized version of Crisis Core that we’ll see crater on modern consoles and PCs. in December of this year.