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Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together Review for PlayStation Portable (PSP)

Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together Review for PlayStation Portable (PSP)

Tarot’s Hand

Tactics Ogre opens in a space outside time, with what one assumes is an omnipotent presence questioning the player. As with many RPGs, you must provide a name and birth date. From here, against the white backdrop of this given eternity, tarot cards dart and dance, face down, before your eyes. As the cards are revealed, Fate asks you questions. “A fire engulfs your home. Whom do you save from the flames?” Fate may ask you. “Your reckless plan has ended in disaster. What has it cost you?” It probes.

Though you’re given three multiple-choice answers per question, no one response is likely to leave you completely satisfied, much less fulfilled. In the case of the fire, do you let your parents and child burn to save your beloved? Has your ill-guided plan left you guilt-stricken from the deaths of your friends and loved ones, or led to your banishment? Even when the tarot presents you with an opportunity, the benefits may be ambiguous. Do you ask a sage for the key to winning hearts, wealth, or victory? As in life or war, the answers to one’s fortune are never clear-cut. As it happens, the uncertainty inherent in faith and war is integral to the nuanced arc that plays out across Tactics Ogre’s narrative stage. Luckily, the game’s script, completely overhauled to match the tone and theme of the game’s original Japanese version, is more than up to the challenge.

Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together Screenshot

Backstage power plays and the ambitions of corrupt nobility may be familiar ground to fans of Final Fantasy Tactics and Yasumi Matsuno’s medieval world of Ivalice, and in some ways, the world of Tactics Ogre bears a great many similarities. However, if Final Fantasy Tactics’ narrative actions smacked of Titus Andronicus (read: the lust for power and personal gain results in the violent deaths of nearly the entire cast), Let Us Cling Together is a case study in the subtle and multi-faceted nature of war. Even the broader strokes of Tactics Ogre’s narrative paint a tale of political ambition and consequence that is more morally gray—and perhaps more consequential because of it—than its chocobo-inhabited cousin. Fate, too, plays a central role here in the path you choose to walk.

Swept up in the middle of a full-scale war between disparate nations, you are forced into making a great deal of hard choices that can drastically alter the game’s narrative. This is thanks to the uniquely open-ended way relationships are handled among characters, almost to the point of trickery. Say a self-serving lord is cast as entirely wicked; you may reach a later point in the branching path of Tactics Ogre’s story arc that presents you with a different set of circumstances, bringing a new dimension to a character whose name the game had already convinced you was synonymous with spitting acid.

Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together Screenshot

Yet Tactics Ogre allows you to choose for yourself whose presence you want to have in its war. Everyone from the highest figures of power to the basest mercenary has their own perspective and role they choose to play. No one is free from the undercurrents of varying motivations, no matter how valiant or ignoble, and it’s never really clear what unexpected consequences one decision might have over another, particularly given that they usually appear in conversations between battles. However, choice can affect a great many factors on the battlefield as well—characters can and will die unless you have enough of the right skills to prevent fate from cutting their strings.

Of course, Tactics Ogre is a strategy RPG, and despite the uncertainty endemic throughout its Middle English-inspired script, if you spend the countless hours required to meticulously build the units of your army, victory is possible. It won’t be a cakewalk, though, and those of you who are used to Final Fantasy Tactic’s gameplay principles are going to have some fundamental re-education to clamber over, despite overall similarities in presentation and interface. First, the good news: levels are gained by job class, not by individual unit. Say you have three archers: Their archery level will all be the same at any given point in the game. However, this comes at the cost of abilities. Weapon and armor types (as well as certain types of spells) are understandably restricted to particular job classes, but special abilities—the lifeblood of any job class-based RPG—aren’t earned in a traditional manner. In Final Fantasy Tactics, every move a unit made would gain them job points that could then be spent between battles to unlock new abilities within a given job class (e.g., a wizard could spend their accumulated points to learn new spells). In Tactics Ogre, you must learn new skills to even access different types of battle actions, as well as unlocking secondary boosts (like an increase in strength or the ability to wade through water).

Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together Screenshot

Let’s say you have a warrior whom you eventually want to be able to use special one-handed sword-related actions on the battlefield. In order to accomplish this, you would have to learn the “one-handed sword” skill and equip it. Though you can still use weapons without their accompanying skill equipped, you don’t gain the weapon experience needed in order to progress your skill level and gain new battle actions without it. If you want to make your warrior counter-attack, that requires learning and equipping the counter-attack skill. Going back to the wizard example, any mage entering battle without the various prerequisite elemental magic equipped won’t be able to cast anything. (Units also have to individually gain the ability to cast new spells from consumable grimoires, a la Vagrant Story.)

Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together Screenshot

The kicker is that the game only allots any given character ten slots for both primary and secondary skills. Unlike Final Fantasy Tactics, which allowed you to max out as many job classes as you wanted, Tactics Ogre more or less forces you to choose the job classes you want to use. The upside is that the larger battles here can include a party of up to twelve members—and stick with them. Since the design does not reward switching job or weapon classes, this makes maintaining a good balance of magic, melee, and range-based combatants vital to survival. You may find yourself winning some battles with ease, as the design here has a built-in system of strengths and weaknesses between classes. However, if you’re expecting to steamroll your way through the competition in the same way it was possible to do with Final Fantasy Tactics, you may have some problems.

Still, if you did enjoy Final Fantasy Tactic’s gameplay, you’ll feel right at home here. Battles are presented in the same isometric style, and though it’s a bit disappointing that maps are not fully rotatable, the option to switch to a top-down view can be invaluable in close quarters. Fate over your own actions—governed by a spin of “the Wheel” as characters in the game refer to it—is also present even in battle: thanks to the game’s “Chariot of Fate” system, you can rewind the flow of time up to fifty moves in order to change the outcome of a battle without penalty. Best of all, this feature is completely optional, and even if you do choose to use it, you can expect a significant challenge. Understandably, Tactics Ogre is not for the faint of heart when it comes to the genre.

When held up to Final Fantasy Tactics, the number of similarities between Ivalice’s debut outing and Tactics Ogre are fairly staggering. That’s probably because Matsuno created the world of Tactics Ogre before he envisioned the world that would eventually provide the setting for Final Fantasy Tactics, Vagrant Story, and Final Fantasy XII. The few degrees of separation that do exist in Tactics Ogre, however, do set it apart in some ways. Despite the size of Ivalice’s overall mythology, Tactics Ogre’s narrative is more ambitious, and in some ways perhaps more robust, given the variation of events and the overall moral ambiguity. You can also go back and play through the entire timeline after you finish the game, changing the outcome of various situations and then bearing witness to their consequences. For these reasons—and I say this despite the Final Fantasy Tactics remake War of the Lions being one of my favorite games ever—Tactics Ogre may even be superior to its Final Fantasy-branded counterpart. However, if you’re a fan of any Matsuno game, you’ll be in heaven here. From its open-ended gameplay and deep strategy to what may be Square’s best quasi-Shakespearean translation to date (not to mention the gorgeous artwork and music of Matsuno regulars Akihiko Yoshida and Hitoshi Sakimoto), there’s very little not to like here. Tactics Ogre may be the last great PSP game, but if so, I can’t think of a better way to bow out.

RATING OUT OF 5 RATING DESCRIPTION 4.0 Graphics
The remastered battle graphics are showing their age a bit, but Akihiko Yoshida’s superlative artwork and some new FFT-style effects make Tactics Ogre still very approachable. 4.3 Control
If you’ve played Final Fantasy Tactics, you can play this. 4.8 Music / Sound FX / Voice Acting
Once again, Hitoshi Sakimoto provides another evocative set of tracks. Battle effects have a nice crunch to them. 4.8 Play Value
For fans of the genre, this may be better than Ivalice. Simply outstanding. 4.8 Overall Rating – Must Buy
Not an average. See Rating legend below for a final score breakdown.

Review Rating Legend
0.1 – 1.9 = Avoid 2.5 – 2.9 = Average 3.5 – 3.9 = Good 4.5 – 4.9 = Must Buy
2.0 – 2.4 = Poor 3.0 – 3.4 = Fair 4.0 – 4.4 = Great 5.0 = The Best

Game Features:

  • Play a fully re-translated version of the original Tactics Ogre, never before seen in America.
  • Over forty hours of gameplay.
  • Revisit past events and witness different outcomes with the World Tarot.

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