Ogre Battle - The Beginning of an Overrated Legend

[Dracos]

Ogre Battle is a game by Quest that came out in the mid-early 90s.  It was hailed at the time for being a great strategy-RPG, possibly the best of its kind on the SNES.  It got a following.  Heck, it even interested Square enough they they bought the company later on and had them do their Final Fantasy Tactics series.

It wasn't, as the name may hint, a game about ogres at all.  Instead it was a tale of rebellion and revolution.  A man gathering the hopes and dreams of a nation and bringing an army to not only free his homeland of Zenobia but to crush the empire that had enslaved it.  It was a story of people striving for justice and for freedom, the type of thing that seizes the imagination.

The game starts off really on a very strong foot in that regard.  You get to name the leader.  Pick a gender.  Then generate their 'personality' sort of via a selection of Tarot cards.  It was a very neat aesthetic the game had and a pretty fun way of generating one of the four hero start teams.  This is all orchestrated by Warren, who acts both as a game starting tutorial, a character generator, a wise mentor, and someone who gives you a chance to earn the people's trust and show them that you have what it takes to fight against the Zetegina Empire.  The game deserves kudos for a strong start and it's one I've played many times.

The game mechanics introduced at the beginning are both simple and complicated.  You and the enemy each have one home base that if conquered, ends the map in defeat for that side.  Alongside this home base, you've got a leader each (You for your side, and the enemy boss character for the other) whose defeat ends the map.  Each map has a variety of towns and temples which each army fights for control of.  Capturing a town lets you recruit in it, use town resources, and pull tribute to fund your army which must be paid each day they're in battle.  Your army is separated into units of 3-5 characters which you can send out up to ten units at a time each map.  Each unit though has to be paid for and has a cost depended on the power of the characters in it and their levels.  In addition, there's hidden towns and items to find in each level to encourage exploration.  The basics, in other words, are pretty solid and you can see at a glance where this game got its reputation as a strategy game.

The tarot cards stay around adding a nice bit of flexibility.  You can draw one each town liberation and they not only have an effect on the unit in question, but can be stored for use in battle, the entirety of your in battle ability to help your troops out.  Each unit gets constructed, guided out, and can be given some minor tactical orders to decide how they'll target in battle.  You can also equip each character with a single item to improve their fighting and customize the character to be different from similar level ones.  Each character also reacted differently based on what row they were in, using different attacks that could be checked from their status screen.

That though is about the end of where I can be positive about it.  It doesn't stop the mechanics there, you see.  There's this reputation bar that's you have to keep high for the best ending (and most of the special characters and events) that's a real royal pain to do so and often extremely counterintuitive on doing so.  Defending towns with strong units can often drop your reputation and will drop that units alignment and charisma, which you need to control precisely in order to do the necessary class upgrades to compete towards the end of the game.  Good units need to be weak.  Bad units need to overpower their enemies.  Multihit attacks are frowned upon, except when they're not.  Saving towns is good, except when it isn't.   The game provides a mountain of often contradictory and nonsensical info in its mechanics beyond there which in the past has resulted in me quitting several times about ten chapters in (1/3rd through the game as I now know).  It's quite possible to see insane effects like a party of liches with near max alignment and charisma with the party of paladins having all zeros across the unit in both charisma and alignment.  The situation both encourages meticulous micromanagement on the character and unit level, drawing away from the strategy that is the game's best feature, and a sense of extreme randomness behind actions.  I don't think this was for the better of it and while I've read the strategies on it, it always left me with a sense of severe powerlessness when playing the game that really detracted from the enjoyment.

The items are awkward to assign and use.  The interface is just generally not very good for it and tends to take significantly more keystrokes to do a given operation than should be necessary.  You also can't know how good something will be without trying it, and beyond that certain stats are hidden, making it even more difficult to make an intelligent decision.  In practice, it results in either exhaustive testing to figure out what things do what, or simply flinging semirandomly to open item slots among the units knowing that pretty much every item will give some small benefit at the least.

Special characters are generally pretty neat and do include a handful of character types you can't otherwise get.  That said, their communication is sadly left to a minimum and they pretty much let you do whatever you want without question afterwards.  Yes, it's good strategy to turn Warren into a lich, but there just felt like something was wrong in there being zero protest about it.  The ali and cha based upgrades hurt a bit as there was little room in some categories for alternates.  Wizards had to go and become evil undead liches if the wanted to keep up end game.  Mages didn't really cut it and there wasn't any light based advancements for them at all.  Knights needed to pretty much go good or be totally worthless endgame.  Was it hard to achieve this?  Not horribly, but it wasn't enjoyable and really left the while thing feeling less a strategy game and more a micromanagement one.  Especially given that some of the levels aggressively used certain aligned characters which meant that without knowing ahead of time, you could see your holy aligned knights drop their alignments quite quickly down to pure evil.

The dialogue is minimal throughout, even on what should be very long dramatic scenes.  It's also often overdone with reactions of on treachery and honor and all, characters who switched sides extremely early in the game complaining that despite aiding you all the way through, that they are still unforgivable people for folding to the empire in the first place.  These people aren't nearly as alive as they could've been which gets worse as the game goes on, from lively characters towards the beginning to pretty much meaningless faces by the end.  The worst down this line being the ending, which even at its best gives just a bunch of talking heads over the same fireworks backdrop they'd used some thirty times previous.  Extremely disheartening, especially when combined with the fact that the dialogue in it is both minimal, weak, and doesn't even utilize all those myriad of special characters that you've gotten.

The game also pulls a stunt that just left me a bit speechless.  The entire game prior to the last level, there's the concept in play that the enemy can be worn down; that by playing defensively and slowly spreading out over the map and meeting the enemy as it comes, you can eventually merit yourself a clean shot at the boss.  The final stage changes this rule.  I'm unsure of whether it is truly infinite units or simply 2550 as certain faqs report, but in any case, there are more units in the last level than can sensibly be killed for a clean shot at the bosses (It also breaks the rule with one leader by having three bosses instead of one, which screws people over that made the mistake of sending their leader in to start the big dramatic battle).  This means anything but an all out straight forward assault is doomed to failure and defeat.  It's really irritating and directly against the 'lessons' it trains into you in other levels, where that's precisely the opposite of the idea tactic.  Bad form.

Additionally, getting the best ending and/or all the characters is almost so incredibly random and contrived as to be totally insensible.  You need to collect the twelve zodiac stones, but realizing this is both a bit of a leap itself, and something awkward to put together.  Once you've collected them though, the game promptly drops them as anything of import, leaving them to do absolutely nothing.  There's three mystic items you need to get, but do they do anything?  Not really, outside the brunhild sword unlocking the chaos gates very early in the game.  Once they're in your inventory they just sit there.  Aside from the brunhild sword, you can't even just equip them.  Instead it's just necessary to have some 16 item slots full with this stuff until the end of the game.  There's no use with the last boss.  They're not mentioned in the ending.  There's a hugely anticlimactic sense to the whole deal that robs any feeling of accomplishment in acquiring all the stones.  Heck, the goddess who tells you to do so (provided you've done the convoluted unlocking sequence) doesn't even appear to congratulate or mention them if you go back to her.  The various characters mostly stop speaking and commenting as the game goes on, meaning that the more characters you have, the less each of them seem at all there.

Overall, I was left sort of disappointed at the whole thing.  The game is overrated.  It's an okay tactical/strategy game that's buried under a morass of overcomplicated and oft contradictory mechanics, with a weak story, and some nasty 'you should be playing this with a faq by your side' crap.  Its good starting aesthetics and style quickly get burned out as they neglect to bring them back around.  In the end, it's disheartening, and makes you wonder what happened to that strong start that it had.

Dracos