Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen

"First Gem of Yasumi Matsuno and co."

Ogre Battle is a Strategy Rpg for the SNES and the game was also released on the PSX some time later. The game was designed by Quest which is now a part of Square Enix and form the majority of Production Development Division 4. Yasumi Matsuno and his crew's talent first showed here and what a first outing this game is. The setup is pretty simple you are lord of armies that are rebels against the evil empire, right, been there, done that; but wait you must create and manage your own army form your own factions.
Factions are groups of fighters or animals and only the leader appears on-screen when in-battle. You can form a unit of 5 small(humans) fighters or 3 small and 1 big fighter(animals) or 2 big and 1 small.

For the human part you have two main path the Amazon or the Fighter path. Amazon opens up on Cleric, Shaman, Valkyrie etc. most of them have useful healing abilities. The fighter is your basic tank and can range from Ninja, Samurai, Knight, Paladin, Evil one etc. each advancement in class usually benefits you on more hit per battle but obviously you must meet certain requirements before being able to change class. For example one class may require level 10, 50+ of charisma and 50+ of loyal. On the animal side you have Dragons, Wyrms, ghost, Hawkman, Griffin etc. and even though they might take some space in your unit you will want some as they have fast moving abilities that will prove to be life-saving. The setup is very fun and diverse and help keep the game from ever getting monotonous.

Now for a battle in itself you start at one point and liberate towns and temples as you go. While resting at town your party slowly regains health so this is very useful, also at temples is where you can revive any fallen characters.In the field when you meet other units you engage and change to a more close-quarter field and then everything is CPU controlled, each character has a given number of attacks depending if he is front-row or back-row and they whack at each other until one side is defeated or until all actions have taken place, in such an occurrence the winner will be decided by whom has taken the most damage. Once you have defeated all of the enemy unit the boss will come out and once you take care of him the stage is over. Needless to say this game can get very addictive and will take up huge chunks of your time.
Gameplay: 10/10

The graphics are pretty nice but they are not exactly state-of-the-art either. The battles graphics are much nicer with spells animation aplenty and very well detailed. The colors are nice and everything seems alright.
Graphics: 8/10

The musical composition of this game has been made by Hitoshi Sakimoto and he delivered as he usually does. The themes fits in well with the war setup and the rebels army. The music is evocative and very well done. Although for battles that are this long it is to be expected that you grow weary of some but still in the end this is one of the best soundtracks for the SNES.
Sound: 9/10

The story has said earlier is your basic setup of good rebels against bad empire but it actually keep you interested throughout and is a nice addition to the gameplay that in itself can keep you interested for hours on end.
Story: 8/10

Overall this is one game not to be missed especially if you are a fan of Matsuno-san's work (FFT, Vagrant Story, FFTA, Tactics Ogre). In this review I barely scratched the fun you'll have. I did not even talked about cards, the multiple endings, the bonus battle and so on. This game will keep you enthralled fro many hours and it is the kind of game that when you play it you think of nothing else.
Overall: 10/10

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 02/20/04