“I can't just do 50 hours of grid based combat with the occasional cutscene sprinkled in."
PC | PS5 | SWITCH | XBOX SERIES |
HOW I PLAYED: I played on PS5 with a physical copy
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
I just want to start this review off by saying how lucky we are to live in the current era of gaming where developers are bringing us so many old titles and making them playable on modern consoles. The game were talking about today is actually a remaster of a remake of a port that was originally release on the Super Famicom way back in 1995. Here we are in 2025 playing it with updated graphics, re-orchestrated soundtrack and tons of quality of life improvement to make it feel relevant in our current landscape.
The overall aesthetic right away just grabbed me. The game felt like it was crafted with care and good taste. Voice acting was excellent and the story captured my attention.
WHAT WORKED
The core gameplay of turn based combat on a grid was engaging and satisfying. I really enjoyed the artwork in the game as well. The character and enemy portraits looked sick and elevated the experience.
The music overall was outstanding and really added depth and emotion to the adventure. While the tracks themselves were quite short and sounded noticeably looped as a 20-30 minute battle would play, out I still feel like they were a net positive to the experience.
WHAT DIDN’T WORK
In most RPGs you're going to be exploring, checking out towns, talking to NPCs etc but in Tactics Ogre its just cutscenes battle over and over and over. This weighed on me and started to feel like a grind. The battles themselves can be very lengthy at times and do not allow you to escape and simply quit back to the world map.
The game offers a unique mechanic called the chariot tarot which lets you rewind a previous turn up to 50 positions, essentially undoing your previous actions. I'll be completely honest, I never used it a single time in my nearly 30 hours I spent with this game. Its not visible in the UI and after it was briefly explained early in the game I just forgot about it. With that being said, these battles were still a big investment of time. Multiple times throughout my playthrough I quit out the game all the way back to my PS5 menu to restart a battle sometimes spending hours in real time on a single encounter with no actual real progress made in the game. Even if I had been using the chariot tarot system its still a lot of redoing the same bits over and over. This started to become very frustrating.
The story, while delivered with finesse began to really drag and felt bloated. It was just a lot to keep up with; multiple kingdoms, rulers, all these names to keep track of, it was - yeah, just not for me. It got annoying.
At certain points throughout the game you have the option of saving and then recruiting special NPCs. But their AI didn't seem to be graced with self preservation and most of them would recklessly thro themselves in the heat of battle. I couldn't even get close to some of them before thy'd be taken out by the enemy. Man, i must have re-done some of these mission 5, 6, 7 times before I just gave up and let the NPC die so I could progress the story. Even with the ability to rewind your turns this is still multiple hours in real life with zero progress in the game.
WORTH CONTINUING?
I got my joy out of this game. I enjoyed a lot of things about it. My GOAT Hitoshi Sakimoto on the soundtrack fully re-orchestrated was a delight. Likeable characters and great menus and UI wrapped this title into a handsome little package. After looking up walkthroughs on how far along I was into this thing, I wasn't prepared to grind out another 20 hours of unskippable repetitive gameplay.
FINAL THOUGHTS
I'm all about big grand, sweeping RPGs - there's really nothing I like more in a game - but it as to be balanced. I can't just do 50 hours of grid based combat with the occasional cutscene sprinkled in. What I felt at the core of this game was a campaign half the length and a much simpler story. The over embellishment in nearly every single area did not do it any favours.
TLDR: Tactics Ogre impressed me with its gorgeous art, rich soundtrack, and satisfying grid-based combat, but its bloated story, repetitive structure, and overly long battles wore me down. While I appreciated the polish of the remaster and the care put into its presentation—especially the music by Hitoshi Sakimoto and the excellent voice acting—the relentless loop of cutscene, battle, cutscene became exhausting. Mechanics like the Chariot Tarot were poorly integrated, and frustrating NPC behavior during recruitment missions further dragged the experience. In the end, I enjoyed parts of it, but felt the game would have benefitted from a tighter campaign and more balanced pacing.
0 Comments