Ogre Battle 64

[Sullla]

Yeah, it's probably unlikely we'll see this game appear on the Virtual Console, due to confusion over who owns the rights. My best guess is that Square currently controls the Ogre Battle franchise, and we all know how many games they aren't releasing on the VC (DS and GBA remakes, um, yay).

Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen on the SNES is one of my favorite games of all time. I had never heard of the series before my friend bought the game, but I played through the campaign over and over again. It's one of the few games I've ever tried that made me feel like an actual military strategist, and I eventually became very, very good at manuevering the little icons around on the map. Baiting enemy units one way, feinting from another direction, pulling off flanking maneuvers - there was a lot of tactical goodness to be had. Best of all, the game played FAST: I'd always crank up the game speed to the highest setting, and zip around the HUGE maps in no time. Heck, that was almost a necessity, since the later maps took 2 hours to play and there was no in-map save feature!

Needless to say, I was heavily anticipating Ogre Battle 64 (I hated the fact that Tactics Ogre was never brought to America until the Playstation arrived years later). Imagine my disappointment with the N64 sequel - this game was NOTHING like the SNES one that I had loved so much. The game was SLOOOOOOW as dirt, the units moved like they were walking in quicksand, and the maps were TINY! Ogre Battle 64 further seemed to love micromanagement; rather than having one item you could use to boost stats in the original game, you now had to equip each unit with a half dozen articles of clothing, and these were also needed for class changing. Frankly, it was just tedious.

Still, I could have overlooked those facts, but there was one total gamebreaker for me: the units didn't follow orders! In the SNES Ogre Battle, you had total control over what your units were doing. While there were only four "tactics" settings (Strong, Best, Leader, Weak), a skilled player could control all of the action by flipping back and forth. "Strong" had units attack the enemy with the most hit points, "Weak" the one with the least, "Best" the enemy that they could do the most damage against, and "Leader" to go after the enemy commander. I would often change tactics a half dozen times in a 30 second battle, targeting the most serious threats. Then in Ogre Battle 64, suddenly the units no longer paid any attention to your choices. They just went off and did whatever the hell they felt like - argh! This is supposed to be a STRATEGY game, goddarnit! As I said, it was a gamebreaker for me. I tried to play through the game three different times, never finishing it. For a series that had so much potential, what happened...?

I've also tried Knight of Lodis on the GBA, but nothing since the original Ogre Battle has ever captured the same magic of the original game.