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Tactics Ogre: Reborn review: a 90s strategy classic that still holds up todayOur final thoughts on this 2022 remaster of the 2010 remake of the 1995 original
Our final thoughts on this 2022 remaster of the 2010 remake of the 1995 original
Mostly, though, it’s yourFinal Fantasy Pixel Remaster treatment. A welcome update that maintains the look of the originals (albeit with some questionable font choices), but that’s more or less your lot.Tactics Ogre: Reborn, a remaster of the 2010 PSP remake of the 1995 SNES original, falls squarely into the latter camp, but you know what? That’s fine. It’s still a rollicking turn-based tactics game all these years later, and one that definitely deserves to be freed from the shackles of Sony’s long-dead handheld, where it’s lain dormant for the better part of a decade. Besides, I’ll take a fully re-orchestrated soundtrack over slightly fancier pixels any day of the week.You know me.
Tactics Ogre: Reborn | Story TrailerWatch on YouTube
Tactics Ogre: Reborn | Story Trailer
Even when you’re away from battle, you’re only able to shop and replenish your item stocks at specific locations, leading to being on the back foot a lot of the time if you’ve had a particularly hard battle beforehand. Similarly, while you have the option to hire additional party members to bulk out our army should one of them fall permanently in battle, you’re also forced to train them up from Lv. 1, resulting in additional grinding via training missions on top of an already lengthy and challenging campaign. In isolation, these things would all seem quite small, but taken together and you can definitely start to see the mould setting in on its 27-year-old tiles.
Approach Tactics Ogre: Reborn with the right mindset, however - one that appreciates its historical quirks for the challenges they bring rather than the crusty restrictions they impose on players - and these defects of age can be smoothed over for some big rewards. It won’t ever have the same youthful sheen as Triangle Strategy, perhaps, but its chunky pixel art is still pleasingly detailed, and its bright, vibrant colour palette is infinitely more appealing to the eye than the usual mulch-coloured battlefields we get in this genre. It’s certainly not lacking in combat scenarios either, moving you from one tightly designed skirmish to the next with the fleet-footed precision of a procession march.
There’s a wide and varied spread of character classes to get stuck into, from your classic warriors to healing knights, magical, spear-wielding rune fencers, berserkers and winged archers, and some characters can even recruit fairies and reptilian beasts. Unlike the PSP remake, however, that new combat wrinkle I mentioned earlier means you’re no longer levelling up certain classes. Rather, you now have control over each individual character, with their level staying the same even if you switch class - a welcome concession for encouraging experimentation, if you can handle all the intense menu management that comes with kitting them out with all new gear, spells, items and finishing moves afterwards, of course.
Still, while you do spend a lot of time rummaging around in its Unit menu screens (even without switching classes), Tactics Ogre does at least do you the courtesy of getting to the action nice and fast once you select a mission, keeping any story preamble brief and to the point. Some battlegrounds do get repeat visits during the course of the story, but for the most part its locations are similarly diverse, with large, open, swampy plains following claustrophobic city streets, upward hill battles, icy mountains, narrow waterways and fiercely defended fortresses to name just a few. Wherever you are in Tactics Ogre, though, terrain height is a key consideration, affecting everything from movement and attack ranges to whether you even have a clear line of sight to your target. Combined with its underlying weather and elemental systems that also affect the potency and accuracy of your attacks, each battlefield becomes its own kind of puzzle to turn to your advantage.
Admittedly, its many warlords, mercenaries and competing factions can all blur together at times, reminding me of the same messy soup of political back-stabbing thatplagued my enjoyment of The DioField Chronicleearlier in the year. I think this is partly because most missions task you with simply “vanquishing the enemy leader” in order to secure a victory, who are named, but otherwise fleeting characters you’ll rarely ever see again. They’re all given seemingly equal billing with the Dukes, Knights and Sers you’re working for in the background, and as such it can be hard to get a sense of how all these disparate groups fit together during a single playthrough. At its worst, it just feels like an endless conveyor belt of battle after battle.
Part of the magic of Tactics Ogre, though, comes from its central tarot system - a neat time-travel mechanic that not only lets you rewind the flow of battle a limited number of turns if you accidentally biff a move in the middle of battle, for example, but upon the game’s completion also lets you revisit key moments in the wider plot to choose an alternate path and make different decisions. It’s not strictly necessary to see the game’s ‘true ending’ or anything, and with single campaign runs lasting upwards of 40-50 hours, you’ll also need to put in a heck of a lot of work to actually get there in the first place. But seeing alliances flipped and mirrored like this, with former party members allies in one timeline and mortal enemies in the next, remains a powerful hook in Tactics Ogre: Reborn, lending it not only a sense of wistfulness for the might haves and could have beens in these characters' lives, but also a broader stage for its overarching tragedies to play out on.
So yes, there are flaws and niggles that come with it being almost 30 years old, but Tactics Ogre: Reborn remains one of the great strategy classics for good reason - and to finally see it come to PC and other modern platforms where everyone can enjoy its densely plotted tactical machinations is well worth celebrating. In another timeline, maybe, we might have seen this receive a more luscious HD-2D makeover (the game’s ‘Lawful’ route, perhaps), but as it stands, this thoroughly ‘Neutral’ remaster still has plenty to admire and sink your teeth into - particularly if you’re planning to play it onSteam Deck, where it works surprisingly well (bar a few touchscreen annoyances on the main map screen), despite not being fully verified yet. It might be a very safe kind of Square Enix remaster, but if there’s one small victory we can claim against the ‘Chaos’ lords timeline, it’s that there’s not a single questionable font choice in sight. Result.
