Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen

"Blood, Pain... Oh yeah, the Game..."

I hate games that try to pass themselves off as something they're not.

Personally, I have little trouble seeing how people are giving Ogre Battle such a high score most of the time. There are a great many of things to be said about the game: it's detailed, it's tactically thorough, it's expansive. It has a sappy Final Fantasy plotline, and you know how much you crave those sappy Final Fantasy plotlines (note the intentional use of the word 'you' in aforementioned statement, as opposed to 'I,' and you'll see a good portion of the reason behind the low score I've given this game... which I'm not going to focus on again).

However, I'm not out to simply bash a game without reason. I'll present my reasons below, save the one I've already touched on briefly, but I will say this: I am not an algebra nut. I'm a roleplayer who prefers the creativity of 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons over the constraints and the ''I need a math tutor!'' rules systems of 2nd Edition. I don't enjoy long periods of tedium, I dislike a lack of control, and I bear a special hatred in my heart for games which pour mountains of detail and focus into a single element of their game... in Ogre Battle's case, alignment... and wind up with an utterly poor and unrealistic view of it. If you're a math nut, a details freak, or you don't give a hoot about reality, then you're probably going to love this game... a word to the wise amongst my fellow roleplayers, however; don't get suckered into this game by its frequent and grossly misleading label of 'Strategy/RPG.' I've yet to figure out where the RPG comes from, as there simply isn't anything resembling roleplay in it. Diablo II is the King of the RPG Concept compared to Ogre Battle.

Now... Alignment... This was my major peeve with the game. If I'm going to have to spend three hours with one unit fighting just-so in order to lower the alignment of this one particular character in that unit (who, inexplicably, has a higher alignment than the rest of the unit, which has been together since the beginning of the game) so I can qualify him for a certain class, I want alignment to be handled in a realistic manner. I want it to be done well. Ogre Battle, in addition to focusing on alignment to piddling detail (this is on a par, in my opinion, with sitting around the dining room table at a roleplaying session and focusing on your characters' eating habits, bathing preferences, and going to the bathroom), completely makes up its own concept of morality; it is evil, for example, to regard sacrificing a person as being worse than stealing from them. It is evil to wipe out the commander of a unit, on the field of battle, before he can reach his home base, return to the field with a fresh unit, and annihilate your own badly-weakened position. It can take hours of fighting to eliminate all of your enemy's units without these wash-up tactics... and you'd better be careful! Fight too much, and your characters' levels will increase. Yes, that's actually evil too, because now you're fighting people who are a level or two lower than you.

God forbid that you should be of higher level than the murdering, raping, torturing boss when you kill him, or you're really in trouble alignment-wise. No Paladins for you, mister! You've earned a time-out! Go to your corner!

So how do you build the exact army you want? Hours and hours of fiddling, meddling, ''What alignment is that unit right now, again?'' mind-numbing activity, and probably several retries.

On top of it all, your main commander can be the most evil, ruthless, ghost-conjuring freak of nature the world has ever seen... and provided that your knights conduct themselves well, you can wind up with a beloved Paladin leading every one of your units. The alignment of each unit, besides being ridiculously determined to begin with, has no influence on your other units, and having a Lord with the highest possible alignment and half a dozen units comprised of vampires and liches is very much possible.

After alignment, there are two other things I have a slightly lesser problem with each. The first is combat.

You call this combat?

Combat is a mini-movie; you can interrupt combat to change your characters tactics, but otherwise you have little control unless you go through the trouble of changing tactics over a dozen times in a given fight in order to focus your characters' attacks on a given enemy (i.e. the leader, the weakest enemy, the strongest enemy, and so forth). There's no way to focus specific characters on specific opponents, and overall you have little to nil control over combat. Not only that, but your units' ''artificial intelligence'' needs to be returned to the assembly line. They don't have much.

Combat ends when one side is annihilated, or after a certain length of time (or perhaps amount of damage) has gone by (I'm still not sure as to which it is), at which point the side which inflicted the most damage is considered the winner. Fair enough, except there are too many things which aren't taken into account with this. Your leader, for instance, can use tarot cards in battle (where the Japanese got their funky ideas about what tarot cards are, I'll never know), which is one of the three things you can have a unit do most of the time (focus on a different enemy, use a tarot card, or flee). Some tarot cards inflict truly mind-boggling amounts of damage, but this is not counted in the combat results. If you hit two points of damage on an enemy, they hit three points on you, and you proceed to hit 1,395,478 points of damage on them with a tarot card, guess who wins?

Also, some units, instead of attacking, heal you. Keep a Cleric or a Shaman in the back row of your unit, and he'll heal characters who get injured. That's all well and good--he does it instead of attacking, so don't have too many of them doing it--but why isn't it counted in the combat result? Either as damage inflicted for you, or points taken away from what the enemy's done? It's possible to wind up with the enemy squad reduced to one half-dead individual, not the leader... who's already toast... and not their powerful tank... who's a melted pile of slag. You've got your entire squad, and everybody's more than 75% of the way to full... but you lose, because the enemy actually inflicted more damage, and a healer's healing doesn't count for jack.

Losing units suffer one of two things, in a combat; if their leader is lost, they retreat to their base, and nothing you can do will stop your own units from doing so unless you have an item handy to revive said leader. You can intercept and wipe out a retreating enemy, but there goes your alignment. The alternative is that the unit 'falls back' a couple of inches on the map screen, which can mean the loss of a precious city or town. The losses incurred by a lost fight can be considerable, and as such I think a better job should've been done with regards to combat resolution.

Finally, there are hidden treasures to be found... great! And hidden cities. WHAT??? Yes. The absurdity of this is even pointed out by an ''NPC'' (a voice emanating from a ''liberated'' town) in one map which has an abundance of hidden cities and temples (''There are cities all over the island. What do you mean, you can't see them?'') Now, I haven't gone too deeply into the backstory of the game. I don't know if there's some explanation for this; perhaps the leader is cursed with 20/80 vision? I'm not sure. I do know that there are visible towns and temples on each map, and capturing them for one reason or another is a Very Good Idea (access to recruits, shopping, and tributes to maintain your armies. Very good). However, in addition to the occasional buried treasure item that can only be found by walking across the square it's on, there are hidden towns and temples, and you can pass right by them and never know they're there. In some of the earlier stages it's easy enough to go after them, but in the later stages combat gets too intense for that kind of a distraction, and you miss out on everything from plot elements to valuable items to powerful allies bringing you extra units.

Oh, by the way... when liberating a town, watch the alignment of the leader of the unit doing the liberating. It'll influence your reputation, as will receiving certain tarots; you get a single tarot card each time you liberate a town or a temple, even if it's one you've already liberated that's since been recaptured (I mean, if they've got a store of these things, why don't they just hand them all over at once and be done with it?) and some of the random cards drawn negatively affect you on the spot. Some positively affect you. It's just Yet Another Thing To Worry About.

GAMEPLAY: A big, fat 0. The game could've been fun, yes, but the piddling attention given to alignment, the poor job done with it in the end anyway, and the infuriating frustrations of getting just the right units, finding hidden cities, and so forth, really takes away the fun of the game. I found myself getting irritated more often than not, and it'd ruin the entire experience. Controls are a pain in the butt... I've lost count of the number of times I've had a unit flee when I really didn't want them to, because I wanted to change tactics and didn't realize I was out of tarot cards (when you see the control layout during combat, you'll know what I mean). You spend more time on the unit screen between fights trying to customize and perfect each unit than you do in the actual combats. It's simply a pointless exercise in algebra as far as getting everything right is concerned.

STORY: ''Four warriors set out on a quest to rid the world of...'' Whoops, no, this time it's one, and he has an army. Otherwise, it's the Same Old Thing, complete with the occasional giggly-cute female villain who begs to be forgiven and promptly gets a crush on you. Is that a witch, or a Japanese schoolgirl? What you do early on in the game affects the way a few NPCs react to you later on, as does your alignment, which I suppose is the so-called ''RPG'' element certain people have been raving about (here's a hint, forgive the schoolgirl).

AUDIO/VIDEO: At the moment, my SNES is having problems... I can't offer any feedback on the audio. The video, however, sucks. The combat sprites are ok... but the combat movies are annoying, so who cares? The overview map is decent in and of itself, I suppose, but the units moving around on it are a joke (picture monopoly figurines sliding across the game board, no animation whatsoever). Occasionally, you get the somewhat superior image of a major NPC... but there's no animation involved there either.

REPLAYABILITY: If you don't like the game to begin with, no. If this is the sort of thing you like, then yes, it's definitely worth replaying. Shell out the bucks and buy it now. If this level of tedium and math-oriented detail appeals to you, there's enough variation in the possible course of events (albeit only one ''right'' course) that it's worth playing a few times more... and I know people who've played it for years and have yet to beat it anyway.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 08/14/03