Sunday, December 21, 2008

Ogre Battle

I've moved on from Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, to another game I've never finished. Course, I finished FFTA twice, so perhaps this'll do the trick.

Ogre Battle is an interesting, well-respected JRPG (or very close to). In describing it, virtually everything short of what the player actually repeatedly does is almost identical to any other tactics-style game. Small groups of mostly personalityless troops are sent on a series of engagements in order to stop some evil fantasy bad guys. The most important part of the game is the customization of the individual units, and using them in proper conjunction with each other. Mostly, this is done by picking which classes and formations the units are in.

The major difference is that Ogre Battle is real-time, and affords very little control over the troops during combat - you macro-manage. In a tactics game, you micromanage every little move the troops make. Both of these things end up making the games highly repetetive, which is more than slightly ironic, given that the gameplay is nominally totally different.