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.

That one failed hard as well. Let's take the great Ogre Battle system and replace it with a Tactics system but keep the Ogre Battle name.  No thanks.

This is the one game that makes me regret selling my N64 and all its games years ago. I wish all the backdoor politics would just stop and Nintendo and third parties would release the games we really want on the VC

Eh, the original Tactics Ogre game was great.  Knight of Lodis just fell through hard.

In my opinion anyway.

Oh, and Sulla. The reason your units didn't listen to you is because it had an even more complicated version of what sometimes happened in the SNES Ogre Battle.

Like for example how swordsmen on the right flank, would never hit people way on the other side until the enemy in front of them were dead.

Ranged characters have their own "maps" that often started with the back and worked foward.

At least... i'm about 70% sure that's how it went. Ogre 64 was give and take for me. The extra management was annoying, the loss of a popularity bar with a vague chaos frame situation kinda bugged me. The Items seemed less cool and the taking out of the Tarot cards kinda bummed me out.

On the other hand, the Combo attacks were great, and I didn't feel as constrained in alignment and stat needs to boost my characters up to their third level and the story... well you actually had a more coherent grip on what the story was.

Overall i liked March of the Black Queen better though i'd say.

Is that true? Well, that would make sense, I guess. I could never figure out who was going to attack what, no matter how many times I ran battles, and that just ruined things for me. Of course, I was only about 16 at the time, maybe that played a part in it. Still, a far cry from the SNES Ogre Battle, where those wonderful wizards/mages/liches in the back row would target any unit on the screen that you told them to!

Hey sulla, did you ever play Romance of the Three Kingdoms (any game in the series on SNES)? I think those games were better than Oger Battle: March of the Black Queen.

But then again, I am not a mark for that game so...

I remember trading in three games to EG for my copy of Ogre Battle 64.
(Two copies of Foresaken and something else that I got cheap. I made a good deal there).

I put in over 70 hours on Ogre Battle 64. I loved it. Unfortunately, I didn't heed my advisors and ended up being a tyrant.

There is no monitor to tell you that you are going down the dark path. The gague that evidently was present in the SNES version was not included in the N64 sequel.

But I loved playing it.

Mike from Morgantown

love the game. Except it moved a little slow. I wish there was a speed bar. Those stupid units took their sweet time.

Given Square Enix's stance on VC games, I wouldn't count on it. I wish Square Enix would stop pimping Final Fantasy long enough to give us quality sequels to Quest and Game Arts franchises. I mean they bought them, they could at least make use of their IPs.