Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen

"Unique in many ways, but fails in others"

Ahh yes, Ogre Battle. I played it through twice several years ago, sold that copy, and recently got a new one on Ebay. Ogre Battle has some unique aspects to it. Mainly, the idea of unit alignment. If a character kills something of higher alignment or lower level than itself, it's alignment will go down. Lower alignment or higher level, it's alignment goes up. You also have a reputation meter which goes up when a high alignment unit liberates towns, or down when a low alignment unit liberates towns.

The game is not very challenging to beat, but it is tough to beat correctly, with a full reputometer and with certain special characters and items. It's very easy to miss these characters on a casual playthrough (i.e. Tristan or Debonair).

Basically, with each map, you start with your rebel base. You deploy as many as 100 characters on the battlefield at a time in groups of 3-5. You try to liberate towns on the map so they can pay you tribute while ensuring they don't get recaptured by the evil empire, which hurts your reputometer. Your units will encounter empire units and enter combat. Inside of combat, each character has a certain number of attacks they will perform according to a general strategy you can change during combat. The "winner" is the one that did the most damage and the "loser" get pushed back. All damage from the fight stays, so eventually if the units keep fighting, one will die off. Basically you play a map until you kill off all the empire units, then head to the enemy base and fight the boss.

Sound 6/10: The music is not awful, but not great. The main problem is you'll hear about two seconds of main map music, then go into battle again. The battle music gets old pretty quick.

Graphics 5/10: Yeah, not very good. The animations are smooth, but you'll turn them off to get through combat quicker anyway. I know the PS1 is a dated system, but I also know this game didn't really push it's limits.

Story 6/10: There's minimal story here, and the dialog is very dry. Not too entertaining. There ARE multiple endings however, and they are very different from one another.

Gameplay 8/10: For some reason editing your units, and messing around with different unit types never gets old. The downside is, the combat gets very very repetitive. You'll be able to make a team that can kill any unit it comes across, and then it's really only a matter of time to wipe out the enemies while chugging cure potions between combats. The other bonus here is the large amount of hidden cities, items, and characters. You really have to pay attention to what the townspeople tell you so you don't miss anything.

Overall 6/10: I hate to give it such a crummy grade after all. For it's time, it was a very revolutionary game. The repetitiveness of combat is hard to overlook though and the lack of good sound and graphics make it difficult to play.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 07/20/09

Game Release: Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen (US, 07/31/97)