{"id":104067,"date":"2022-10-21T19:46:20","date_gmt":"2022-10-21T19:46:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/tactics-ogre-reborn-is-a-challenging-strategy-rpg-that-takes-no-prisoners\/"},"modified":"2022-10-21T19:46:20","modified_gmt":"2022-10-21T19:46:20","slug":"tactics-ogre-reborn-is-a-challenging-strategy-rpg-that-takes-no-prisoners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/tactics-ogre-reborn-is-a-challenging-strategy-rpg-that-takes-no-prisoners\/","title":{"rendered":"Tactics Ogre: Reborn is a challenging strategy RPG that takes no prisoners"},"content":{"rendered":"
There’s a particular battle in the first chapter of Tactics Ogre: Reborn that I’ve been banging my head against all week. It’s an uphill fort siege where you’re facing off against an evil necromancer who’s shooting down powerful, magical fireballs at you from above, alongside his never-ending army of undead skelly archers. The challenging terrain alone would be a test of anyone’s mettle in this tough, turn-based strategy game, especially when trying to parse all the different heights of its grid-based map. But having every enemy unit resurrect themselves after three turns unless you exorcise them with a single-use item or the lone Priest you’ve just recruited (who you may or may not have neglected to bring into battle with you) on top of all that ? That smacks of the kind of late-game tomfoolery that more modern games of this first would normally save until their final acts. <\/p>\n
Tactics Ogre: Reborn, on the other hand, likes to make its players sweat early. It was, after all, forged in the fires of the mid-90s SNES era, and looking back at old GameFAQ guides from 2010 (when it was remade for the PSP), it’s clear this fight was just as much of a roadblock back in the day as it is now. Think of it as what yer lad Genichiro was to Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice – a hard, and often gruelling endurance test of everything you’d learned so far, but one that would ultimately set you up for the rest of the game upon claiming victory . I’m still not quite there yet, but having spent six hours noodling around the rest of Reborn’s opening chapter, this granddaddy of Japanese strategy RPGs sure does hold up in the cold light of 2022.<\/p>\n
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Out on November 11th, Tactics Ogre: Reborn will be the second tactics RPG coming to PC from Square Enix in as many months, following hot on the heels of the PC port of former Switch exclusive, Triangle Strategy. Given the close proximity of their respective releases, Tactics Ogre has definitely drawn the short straw when it comes to presentation here, as its blown-up pixel art simply can’t compete with Triangle Strategy’s crisp, HD-2D visuals and modern lighting effects. <\/p>\n
It’s nowhere near as offensive as some of the upscaling seen in Final Fantasy VIII Remastered, thank goodness, but many of its character sprites did look quite soft around the edges playing on my 4K monitor. Thankfully, the text, character portraits and battle UI were a lot more legible, but when you can see each individual pixel of its detailed backdrops, you can’t help but feel the game’s age a bit. It’s a shame, particularly when other SNES contemporaries have<\/em> been given the HD-2D treatment (looking at you, Live A Live), and it makes you wonder what might have been in another timeline.<\/p>\n