Tactics Ogre: Reborn review: Classic tactical RPG is showing its age

There’s no doubting the historical importance of The Tactics Ogre: We Can Cling Together. It’s a keystone game — perhaps The keystone game — in a particularAnd demanding genre, the tactical role-playing game. It’s also the cornerstone of a remarkable, yet sadly not fully realized, career: that of its writer-director, Yasumi Matsuno, who went on to make cult classics Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant StoryThe tortured, grueling process was completed before I escaped. Final Fantasy 12He seems to never have recovered fully from this personal and professional setback.

Reborn: Tactics Ogre, this 1995 game — which often ranks highly in polls of the best games of all time in Japan — receives its second major overhaul. Reborn is, nominally, an updated port of 2010’s PlayStation Portable remake (this time for PC, PlayStation 4 and 5, and Nintendo Switch). However, it makes extensive and meticulous revisions to this one as well, changing essential design elements and adding features. It even restores the artwork. It says a lot about the game’s revered status that it has received more loving care from Square Enix — which bought The Tactics Ogre’s publisher Quest in 2002, after hiring Matsuno away from them in ’95 — than Final Fantasy Tactics, a game in Square’s flagship franchise, whose PSP and mobile versions aren’t nearly as well made.

The new players need to be approached The Tactics OgreBe cautious. (I’m one; I knew the game well by reputation, but had never played it before I started this review.) Despite the many thoughtful revisions and quality-of-life improvements, this is still a daunting game that’s slow to reveal itself. This is a classic in a niche that’s seen much innovation, and it can sometimes feel outdated. Sometimes it can feel like a boring game.

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There’s both a simple reason for this, and a less straightforward one. One simple reason is party size. It is a turn-based strategy game where you control an AI to direct your enemy forces and move the characters on a grid. A typical party of eight to 12 units is required for an encounter. Turns take a long time to execute; the opening movement round, when engaging the enemy is usually impossible and you’re simply moving each unit into striking distance, feels interminable. Complete battles often take upward of half an hour, and foregone conclusions (which, to be fair, aren’t too common — this is a well-balanced game) are excruciating.

Furthermore, the number of units makes it hard to keep the status of your forces, and overall shape of the battlefield, in your mind’s eye. Though it’s hardly grand strategy, it’s not an easy game to parse, and fights can feel scrappy and piecemeal. It’s notable that Final Fantasy TacticsThis partnership, Matsuno and Hiroyuki Ito from Square, saw the units reduced to just four-to-six. It gained much attention.

For fairness, RebornThere are many tweaks that can be made to make things easier and faster. You can assign AI to take over party members’ actions; there’s a turn-speed button; the skill and spell systems have been redesigned to provide access to better skills earlier in the game; random encounters have been removed from the world map (and replaced with optional training battles if you feel the need to grind), and so on. Yet despite all this — and despite the 3D map design, which uses verticality to create some interesting spatial challenges — the game struggles to stage the sort of clean, intricate logic puzzles that represent the tactics genre at its best.

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The Tactics OgreIts design clearly dates back to earlier times. Advance Wars — a game in a parallel but very closely related genre — had done so much to clarify the rock-paper-scissors balance and problem-solving joy of tactical combat. These days, indie games like Breach into the BreachOder Invisible, Inc. You can find faster ways to solve complex strategic issues. The Tactics OgreWhile you can do a lot, paradoxically it is much easier to manage. But perhaps this isn’t just about age. Perhaps The Tactics Ogre is also, by its nature, less of a tactics game and more of an RPG — and what I like to call a backroom RPG at that.

Backroom RPGs are games where combat is not the main focus. They take place deep in the menus. (Final Fantasy 12One of the most notable examples is, which has a Gambit program system and a game-like License Board. This is why: The Tactics Ogre is a theorycrafter’s dream, with enormous customizability and depth, which Reborn It does not intend to simplify. It even removes class-wide levels in the PSP version so that individual unit leveling can be resumed. It is possible to recruit party members anywhere, their classes, elemental alignment and even their class can all be reassigned. Each character is assigned skills, spells and equipment. There are also ways to create and combine stronger equipment to increase stats.

There’s a vast amount of inventory and unit management to be done here as you develop and refine your favored squad — as well as satisfaction to be had when that squad works effectively in battle. This will make a special kind of player happy. I’ve been known to love that kind of thing myself. However, in The Tactics OgreIt feels as though all that menu-bumping is distracting from an already strained battle system. The combat is inevitably the centerpiece of a game like this, and if it doesn’t sing, all that work in support of it can feel like wasted effort.

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But there’s a whole other grand design at work in Tactical OgreOne that will outlive you and return your money in spades. It’s the story. Matsuno is undoubtedly a more influential and talented writer than he’s a designer. Despite their fantasy settings, his games tend to be grounded, humanist works that lay out intricate maps of political intrigue — which, loaded with filigree naming and fanciful jargon, can seem dry and hard to follow at first. They become personal and intimate, with a connection to the world. The Tactics OgreThis is not an exception.

Matsuno has said that the game’s devastating branching storyline was inspired by the early-’90s wars in Yugoslavia as that country broke apart in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Tactics OgreImagine The Valerian Isles as an archipelago divided by class and ethnic strife among its three major constituencies, The Bakram, The Galgastani and The Walister. Following the demise of an unifying king civil war has broken out. During a period uneasy peace we joined a group oppressed Walister revolutionaries under Denam Pavel’s sister Catiua and his childhood friend Vyce. They’re soon joined by a team of friendly mercenaries as the resistance leader, Duke Ronwey, leads them deeper into a conflict of shifting factions, complex allegiances, and dirty tricks.

This is a branching storyline where the choices — judged on a scale of lawful to chaotic, rather than good to evil — can be agonizing in their moral ambiguity, and the outcomes can be painfully bleak. Denam’s willingness to follow the Duke, and his level of commitment to the Walister cause, are sorely tested. This is a look at the political and moral quagmires of war. Reborn is pretty sophisticated, and Matsuno’s refusal to describe it in black-and-white terms makes the branching outcomes illuminating rather than reductive. The World Tarot feature allows for all branches to be explored simultaneously without losing any progress. (There’s a similar rewind function in battle that allows you to redo your choices and switch between different tactical outcomes without overwriting them — a brilliant feature.)

There’s genius and sincerity at work here. Dig deep. The Tactics OgreIts title, and its entreaty. Let Us Cling TogetherThis sounds a lot less silly and urgent, and more sad. How deep you will get into the game depends on your appetite for micromanagement and your patience with gameplay systems that, 27 years later, are starting to creak, despite all the judicious tinkering that’s been done to them. Reborn: Tactics Ogre is a welcome, polished, and thoughtful update to a game that defined a genre — a genre that has now left it behind.

Reborn: Tactics Ogre The game will be available on November 11 for Windows PC, Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4. Square Enix provided a prerelease code for the game. The Switch review was conducted using this code. Vox Media also has affiliate relationships. Although these partnerships do not impact editorial content, Vox Media could earn commissions on products sold via affiliate links. Find out more. additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.