I picked up Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together a while back, because I love me some tactical strategy games. Two years ago I committed to finishing Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions, and burned my way through it over the summer months. I figured I’d do the same for Tactics Ogre this year. So far, not looking so good.
It’s mostly just that I’m not setting aside any time to play it. I started playing maybe three weeks ago and generally just pick it up during my lunch hours at work. Yeah, that’s an optimal time for handheld games, but when each battle can take anywhere up to half an hour, it makes progress slow. Especially considering that I can spend just as much time between battles tweaking my army’s equipment and skills. Playing the random encounter battles only serves to slow story progression even more. It’s definitely a game that requires a big time commitment.
So far, I’m enjoying TO almost equally to FFT. The big difference is that FFT makes life a little easier for players in several ways. The most obvious one regards skills. In FFT, each class has a skill set, and once you earn enough JP (Job Points) to buy any of the skills within that set, they’re free to use. Permanently ingrained in your character. You walk into battle, and as long as your dude has the Black Magic skill set equipped, he can use any Black Magic he knows. Passive skills and reaction skills are a little more limited, but your abilities are all good to go.
Tactics Ogre is similar, but more complex. You still buy skills, but each unit has a certain allotment of skill slots in which they can be equipped. You can use your points to buy more slots, but they’re expensive. And all skills must be equipped. Passive abilities, stat boosts, counterattacks, usable skills, etc. all take up a valuable slot. It’s not a bad system by any means, but it means you have to grind twice as much so you can buy the skills and the skill slots to put them in.
The other little difference is in attack magic. So far in TO, all the healing and stat-/status-affecting spells I’ve seen just happen where they’re casted. All spells work this way in FFT. The target tiles are highlighted, and the fireball appears there. But attack spells in TO are projectiles, and therefore need a clear path to their target. I’ve fried the heads of many of my own allies because it took me a while to get accustomed to this rule and how to determine the trajectory of the spell (though there is an ability that makes said trajectory visible).
Fortunately, the game also includes a rewind feature called the Chariot Tarot, which can turn battles back by up to 50 turns. While FFT is easier overall (and can be broken much easier), the Chariot system makes life more bearable because you can rewind and basically try to get things right if a battle goes south. Mostly I just use it when I wang one of my own guys in the head with a spell.
None of this is to say that I’m against the game though! I like that it’s challenging but not brutally so. If you do FFT right, the challenge level goes out the window pretty quickly. There are one or two sticky fights, but really as soon as you get ninjas you’re golden. And then when Cid joins? It should just say “you win” at that point. TO doesn’t seem to have such luxuries. But of course, I’m still only a few fights into Chapter 2, so there’s plenty of room left for game-breaking. And that’s what I want, deep down inside. As much as I enjoy the feeling of winning a hard-fought battle by the skin of my teeth (more on that in a second), I truly love marching into battle with unstoppable, dual-wielding demigods. With the skill system here though… I don’t see it happening. At least not if there’s a slot cap. That would be tragic.
As far as winning a battle by a hair, I got into this one random fight yesterday against a bunch of zombified people and skeletons. Such units are all classified as undead, and undead units will come back to life (with full HP!) three turns after they’ve been killed. The only way (currently available) to stop this is with the Exorcism spell. I did not have this spell at the time. Now, felling seven or eight units within three “rounds” of combat isn’t exactly easy, but somehow I managed to make it through and you bet your ass the first thing I did afterward was pick up a few copies of the scroll that teaches Exorcism.
The one thing I really like about the game though, is that you level up classes instead of individual units. Which sucks if you change one of your dudes to a new class and he has to start at Lv1 again, but as long as you bring a good mix of classes to each battle, it should be more beneficial than anything. At least it seems that way for now. Changing classes is a bitch anyway, because unlike FTT where you get new classes by leveling other ones, here you need a special ticket (One for every job class! Collect them all!) every time you want to do a class change. So you can’t just go and change your main dude between black mage and knight every fight. I mean, you can, but it’ll cost you. Not that there’s any reason to do that anyway.
I still love the meat of the game, but there are a few freedoms taken away here that I miss. Not that they’re important of useful freedoms, but if I want to make a paladin that can chuck fireballs, I think I should be able to. Actually, I haven’t seen a paladin class yet, so maybe they can chuck fireballs. A knight that chucks fireballs then. No, spell fencers are not good enough for me!