Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis

"I WANTED to like it, I really did!"

HISTORY
I am a fan of the Ogre Battle series so I was delighted when this title came out on the little GBA. It is not a remake, it's entirely new for the GBA. While it does retain that trademark Ogre Battle ''look,'' it plays more like Final Fantasy Tactics for PSOne than Tactics Ogre on the PSOne.

GRAPHICS 6/10
The graphics are adequate, but nothing beyond that. The playing fields seem rather drab to me no matter which ones they were, and it seemed like it was ALWAYS raining. There's no sense of sun or daytime, even though when night falls, the sky gets slightly darker, making the playing field even MORE gloomy; you will barely notice. Spells cast are less than spectacular, which is a disappointment. In past Ogre games you could see some pretty nifty magic effects when you cast a spell or threw out a card, but here on Knight of Lodis nothing has more than a sparkler effect except one or two nearly useless spells that change weather conditions. In between battles you will get the storyline progress, and the story is fairly interesting. More on that below. The story cutscenes aren't particularly lengthy and will keep you captivated, as the storyline is one of the strong points, but again graphically not much action. The characters are your typical 2D superdeformed (squat) RPG-style.

GAMEPLAY 4/10
There's a grid-pattern battlefield & your characters take up one space each on the battlefield. There is no ''card system'' like the other games where you can alter the atmosphere. You simply move one character at a time; their movement depends on class & stats, as well as what kind of armor or weapons are weighing them down (or not). After your character moves you have the option of using an expendable item, casting a spell, attacking with a weapon, or doing nothing. There are plenty of strategy games that use this formula & there's nothing particularly special about it, but it's how you use it that makes the game fun. Unfortunately with this game, there's not much tactical thought needed to win a battlefield. At first I wasn't too disappointed with the game, as I figured in the beginning it would naturally be easier. I'm a seasoned tactical battle sim player so I didn't expect too much challenge right off the bat. However, as I progressed, it didn't seem to really get much more difficult and certainly didn't require much strategy. There were 2 techniques I used to win every battlefield: either take several of my characters and gang up on one of the enemy, and pound on them until they died, doing that one-by-one, or move my team right in on the leader and kill him - battle over. Yep, that's it. The crummy thing is that while you're pounding on one enemy, the other ones don't even really bother much coming to their aid; instead they dance around in the same 10 squares and do nothing or throw a spell or arrow at you from such a distance they miss or hardly do any damage. Some of the closer ones may run up and try to help, but the more distant ones seem like they're locked in an invisible zone. The AI doesn't appear to be very smart and outwitting it won't take a player very long, once they sense the patterns.

STORYLINE 5/10
In between battles you will get the storyline progress, and the story is fairly interesting. Unfortunately nothing you say or do effects how the story goes. One of the more fun things about strategy RPGs is how they often have multiple endings and different storyline ''branches'' depending on the decisions you make during the game. Most often you're a commander of an army and, of course it would make sense that decisions you make alter the outcome of the destiny of your characters. Not so here. There's one storyline, it's linear, and nothing you say or do takes you down a different path. Oh there are 3 or 4 different little endings (not much different from one another) that you can get but nothing major. Other than the fact that the story is linear, it's a pretty cool character study of a boy (you) coming of age & coming to terms with how he must go with his own destiny and not be a follower. The characters have depth & are interesting, and many have internal problems that affect how they interact with you throughout the game. Many of them have sad backgrounds & the characters are at least one of the redeeming aspects of the game.

CHARACTERS 5/10
I made a special section in this review for characters because for a strat-RPG they're a vital aspect of the game. A lot of appeal of the Ogre series is in the time one spends customizing one's army and how to allocate items and what classes to upgrade certain characters to. Unfortunately (again) with this game you don't get much of a chance to customize in this department...a lot of characters you get or can get turn out to be utterly useless, since leveling up takes SO long. In other Ogre games I remember having a blast changing classes and using all different characters, and using items to change class or morph characters, but in this game I feel as though I was stuck using one main group that had powered up and left the other weaklings behind. Even the higher-level characters barely had an opportunity to advance to a higher class, and when they did, their stat changes hardly mattered. Even if you take one of your weaker characters into a battle to level them up, they don't catch up very quickly & their movement rate is probably so low they can barely catch any action anyhow. You can, of course, take on practice rounds or by progressing in the game unlock quest battlefields in which to level up on and find items, but it's just more of the same tedious non-strategic battling against the stupid AI. And all you have to do is kill the leader so that can be achieved 1-2-3. I almost resented having to do some extra battles simply because the battlefields are so repetitive (cave snow swamp mountain. cave snow swamp mountain) and once you're 1/4 into the game you've basically seen everything. Overall I was disappointed with the limits I had to work with on my army and there were several characters I would've loved to have used more extensively but they just never got a chance.

SOUND 3/10
The music is REPETITIVE. It drove me insane, I don't know about anyone else. You'd think they could've come up with more than three friggin theme songs for all those different screens, but no, it just cycles through the same boring songs just like it cycles through the same boring battlefield designs. I often had the sound totally off & played in silence or with my own music on. One of the songs didn't grind on my nerves so badly but the other ones drove me mad. The sound effects are nothing great, there's a female ''AH!'' and a male ''AUGH!'' when characters die (same for all of them), and one ''Fight it out!'' voiceclip and that's about the extent of it.

OVERALL 5/10
I enjoyed playing Tactics Ogre TKOL...for awhile. It does have that addictive-something to it, but I think half of the reason I kept going on was because I somehow expected it to get better and not end so quickly. It's a 20-30 hour game depending on how much you goof around with customizing your army & questing, and it was just too damn linear. The ending(s), without spoiling, were less than visually spectacular, and not particularly satisfying, and I did see all of them. I guess what bugged me the most was how repetitive it was and how little strategy was actually required to win. I don't want to say it was ''easy,'' but if you were simply persistent you would win. Unlike other SRPGs where you might have lost a battle and need, or want to, redo it several different ways using different strategies to see alternate outcomes, there was no strategy to this game. No matter what you did, the AI pulled the same moves. If you replayed the battlefield the AI did the same thing regardless, and that is disappointing to me. Predictability pulled this one down, and it had the potential to be such a great game. Hopefully if Atlus puts out another Ogre game on the GBA (and I truly hope they do), they will put more effort into the AI and strategy aspects & make the game less linear. To buy or not to buy? Sure it's worth having in your collection. Despite my disappointment I'm glad to have it and glad to have played it. Buy it, play it, but don't expect much replay value.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 10/23/03