Ogre Battle 64

"The New York Times says that ‘matt91486’s 50th Nintendo 64 review is a must read!’"

OPENING STATEMENT
During my daily Reviewer’s Chats, or as RuninRuder calls them ‘Matt Chats,’ I was having trouble deciding which Nintendo 64 game to review next. It took a while, but Bobo the Clown finally came up with Ogre Battle 64 for this very important review, my fiftieth on the console. So, read on about the wonders of a game that many consider to be the only good game on the Nintendo 64. I like many more Nintendo 64 games than just Ogre Battle 64, but, then again, I did not make that comment. Anyway, back to discussing Ogre Battle 64!

GAMEPLAY--8
Ogre Battle 64 is by far and away the deepest game on the Nintendo 64. No other game will even come close to making you think as much, and as often, as this masterpiece will. All of the battles progress constantly, in real-time. There are never any times in battle where you can have a complete break in the action to choose what unit will carry out what task. Instead, you need to quickly choose what task you think the unit should do. Time does stop when you tell the units their instructions, but you need to remember to follow-up on each unit, otherwise they will simply sit there, stagnant, and they will soon get their sorry butts kicked out of the land by your opposition. So, it pays to pay attention.

You can customize anything you want to within the unit groups that you can control, from a character’s classes to which type of strategies that they will use in the battles. (I almost forgot to mention that you do not actually control the battles. All that you can do is give guidelines for them to follow, and sit back and watch the fight. This is both interesting, and unbelievably frustrating. For example, many times one of your opponents will have something like eight HP left. And then, your stupid character will attack a character with two-hundred fifty HP left, instead of killing off the character. Thankfully, Ogre Battle 64 measures who wins the battle not by the number of troops killed, but by the amount of damage dealt.

GRAPHICS--8
The whimsical, water-colored, storybook look of Ogre Battle 64 is found in no other games on the console. This makes a game that already popped out of the Nintendo 64’s game line-up stick out even more. The water-colored look of the game leads to rather muted colors, and pastels used frequently, while bright, bold blues and reds make scarce, if any, appearances, and when they are used, they accent very important things. The artists at Atlus certainly paid attention to their teachings about color combinations, because the end result is one of the most striking games around, without using colors that you would normally consider so.

The character designs are fantastic. While most of the games on the Nintendo 64 have cartoonish characters, Atlus opted to go with hand-drawn, realistic looking characters, once more showing off their artistic talent. But, Atlus still selected a more stylized look than the character in Perfect Dark went with, which fits in nicely with the whimsical characters. The end result is something very difficult to describe, but think of the character designs as realistic drawings, with whimsical stylings, but staying realistic. They are nowhere near as complex as the character from a portrait would be, and yet they look as good, if not better.

The environments are the weakest point in Ogre Battle 64 graphically. When going over the mission overview before you head into battle, the map that you look at it is one of the ugliest things to ever appear on any sixty-four bit console, including the Atari Jaguar. Once you get in the actual levels, the backdrops improve, but not a great deal. This is partially do to the fact that the environments are completely flat, and your characters just walk all over them from the overhead view. This greatly diminishes the visual impact that any of this territory could have. If you can get past the utter flatness of the environments, then you will notice the detailed trees and grasslands populating the landscape. If you cannot, you will only notice little splotches of colors scattered around the ground, looking like the Painted Pots at Yellowstone National Park.

MUSIC--8
SOUND--4
It seems that the average score for this game is eight, does it not? Anyway, the music in Ogre Battle 64 is high quality stuff. All of the music is orchestral, with many different types of moods of music around to fill each type of scenario in the game. My biggest problem with the music is that while there are lots of different emotional categories present, there are not enough songs within the categories, which makes you hear some repetitive music. Thankfully, the sound quality of this music is about as good as you can ever get on a cartridge and not a disc of some sort, and there is less distortion in Ogre Battle 64’s music than the music in any other game on the Nintendo 64. Atlus has found away to make the mediocre sound cards in the Nintendo 64 cartridges sound just as good as the PlayStation role-playing games on the market; and that is quite an accomplishment!

The sound effects are nicely done as well, but there are about ten times more repetitive than the music. The variety in them ranges from slim to none, and this puts a damper on any audio enjoyment, because it tends to overshadow the wonderful tunes. Sound effects are really not that important in a game, which Atlus could absolutely tell, but I still would have liked to have seen a little bit of effort shown in this department.

CONTROL--6
You rarely control units in Ogre Battle 64, so this control section really came down to how easy the menus were to navigate. And the answer is that they really were not all that easy to use. Starting out in Ogre Battle 64 is a confusing mess, as the menus really do not help you out at all. After a while, navigation becomes even easier, and once you hit the second chapter, you will be zooming through them like Jeff Gordon at Talladega. It just takes time, so give the game some.

FUN--9
Part of this rating in the fun category is because Ogre Battle 64 is the only game in its genre on the Nintendo 64. So, I was trying to envision if this game was on the PlayStation instead, would it still be fun. The answer I came up with was a resounding quest. The mature storyline, filled with twists and turns, good and evil clashing in epic battles, and vulgar, vulgar, vulgar wordings (If you know the reviewers from GameFAQs, simply think of Fekkot, but twice as apt to use profanity.) is one of a kind on any Nintendo system. The customization also adds a lot to your experience playing with the Person of Lordly Caliber, because generally speaking, the more you feel involved with something, the more fun you will have doing it.

The battles got strangely repetitive after a while if they were not integral to the storyline, so that made Ogre Battle 64 less fun at times. But whenever situations like that occurred, and they do not occur often, I just thought of some tangent to use, like trying to get as many wild creatures to join me as humanly possible, or trying to get through the entire battle sending only one unit into each battle, and just making the rest stick around for defensive purposes. The more creative that you are, the more fun you will be having in the battles in Ogre Battle 64.

CHALLENGE--MEDIUM TO HIGH
As a veteran of the Ogre Battle series, I can definitively state that this, Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber, is the most challenging game in the series. The difficulty curve stays fairly even in its progression, but there are one or two trouble spots that ruin it. As pathetic as it may seem to you, the first of these, about five, trouble spots is the last mission in Chapter One. Yes, I had problems there for quite a while, so sue me. Then, I got along fine for a while, and then ran into another very difficult escapade. For the most part, progression is even and the skill level required slowly goes up, but beware of the spikes on the graph.

REPLAY VALUE--LOW TO MEDIUM
Since the story in Ogre Battle 64 has multiple endings, that was a plea on the part of Atlus to get gamers to play through its magnum opus again. Sadly, it really did not work all that well. After beating Ogre Battle 64 the first time, it took months for me to get the motivation to take a different path through the game. And other than the multiple endings, there is no reason to play through this game again at all. So, this rating is all about if you like changing endings of stories. If you really want to know what happens, bump up the rating a bit. Otherwise, you will be like me and you will just leave it.

PROS
*The best sound quality on any cartridge system.
*Beautiful, water-color character designs.
*A gripping, adult (not as in pornographic) storyline.

CONS
*The sound effects seem like they were added at the last minute.
*Menus take a while to master.
*Depth of the gameplay may turn many gamers away.

CLOSING STATEMENT
Atlus had the luxury of having no competition in its sub-genre on the Nintendo 64, and they could have easily dumped off a crappy game on the system, knowing it would sell well anyway from lack of competition. Luckily for all of us gamers, Atlus selected to release a masterpiece of a strategy/RPG. The storyline alone is worth the purchase. The rest of the game is just icing on the cake. But do not treat it as such.

OVERALL--8

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 11/08/01, Updated 11/08/01