Tactics Ogre: Reborn Review (Hayden)
Summary: if you’ve never played the PSP remake or original, I still recommend this, although maybe on sale. $50 isn’t bad for what you get, but it’s just the principle of this being a re-release of a remake that is 12 years old. If you have played the originals, just know they’ve made a lot of big, sweeping changes to a lot of the systems and mechanics and jobs etc etc, and most of them frankly lean more towards WORSE than better, but are counterbalanced by a huge increase in quality of life changes and cutting down on grinding or “de-bloating” the game.
I’d still give it a 7/10 so far. I’d put the Let Us Cling Together PSP version as like a 9/10 though.
Some more in-depth points:
Sprites / Graphics - The sprites look like they got processed through a filter or something and you can’t turn it off. I think they look way worse now. The levels actually look better and translated over fine I think, but the character sprites are goofed.
Voice Acting - Voice acting surprisingly good, gets better as the game goes on. I don’t know why they previewed the voice acting with one of the worst clips in the game, with Dark Knight Lanselot being really condescending/whimsical sounding. I have to admit it sounded a little bad at first, and part of that was getting used to the main trio’s young voices. But I feel they got more comfortable with the voice acting as the game progressed or something because it’s very good. 100x better than Triangle Strategy
New Card System - The new randomized buff cards on the battlefield I don’t like at all. I feel they are far too powerful, and getting certain ones or a combination can lead to one of your characters becoming completely broken. The kicker though is that it works for enemies, too. I have had so many of my characters just one shot by a Finishing Move critical from enemies because they have a couple card buffs. They also make the story bosses cracked out by just having them start with 4 card buffs off the jump. Admittedly, I’ve also done the same to them. It also creates completely broken combinations, like having your Berserker (Xapan for me specifically) get the critical + physical up ones, and then have him get the Berserk support skill to pop at the start of their turn. Then pop Sanguine Attack and watch him cleave MULTIPLE units and kill them all in one shot, oftentimes overkilling them by doing over double their health in damage. (Example: https://streamable.com/01pzld )
I'm okay with single player games being imbalanced, but DEAR GOD. I just feel that the cards created huge power dynamics in the middle of a match, which just feels so weird. Like… are my characters strong, or are the cards strong? I would have much rather them have been small buffs.
Level Cap / Union Level - The party level cap is weird. It does two things that can be kind of annoying. The first is obvious, you can get level capped for a long time and you start to feel like you’re getting nothing out of a lot of story battles because you literally gain nothing. I remember, specifically union level 19, I must’ve been stuck at this for a good 5+ hours in Chapter 2. The second thing is that they make certain fights harder by just having you be at a level disadvantage. Sometimes a huge disadvantage if there’s a boss there. But I do like that it means you can’t try to mega-overlevel for encounters. It just feels weird to be artificially gated. I also think that as soon as your union level goes up, all the enemies for the story battles go up to that max level. I also think some people just like grinding their characters to be gods, and even though I personally don’t like to do that, I’m sure a lot of people did, especially if you come from FFT.
Despite all this though, I have still yet to get a single game over on my playthrough, and I'm at the final dungeon. So it may be harder for some people, but it's still not THAT hard. To be fair I have played the game before and am aware of how it works and stuff.
Complete Skill Rework - They completely redid how skills and spells and stuff worked. There’s so much to mention here I don’t think I can even go through it all. Just know they took a lot of stuff out and oversimplified a lot of things, and even removed things like the TP meter entirely, and have support skills just be a RANDOM CHANCE TO PROC AT THE START OF YOUR TURN. This is a garbage change, and frankly I think most of the changes are downgrades to the PSP version and even the original version.
This also feeds into:
Class Balance Overhaul - They made it so archers aren’t busted anymore by making them do almost zero damage to certain armored classes. A lot of just numbers changes, like I think that everyone on average has more health. It’s funny because this is basically required with how bonkers the damage gets with the new stupid random card buffs you pick up.