Tactics Ogre: Reborn Review (2024)

Final Fantasy Tactics has a well-deserved reputation for being one of the best games released on the Sony PlayStation, standing alongside Final Fantasy VII as seminal works in their respective genres. FFT didn’t appear out of thin air, though. It was developed at SquareSoft by the director and artists who made Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together on the Super Famicom just two years prior, so the games' stories, art styles, and mechanics are so similar that Tactics Ogre can be seen as FFT’s older sibling.

Tactics Ogre received a Game Boy Advance spin-off in 2001 and a PlayStation Portable remake in 2010, but has seen little attention since then. Fortunately, this is a console generation where many publishers, especially Square Enix, are reaching into their back catalog (and the back catalogs of the companies they’ve absorbed in the last three decades) for remasters. We saw it with the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters and Live A Live, and now we see it with Tactics Ogre: Reborn. This remake of Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together updates the PSP version for the Nintendo Switch, Sony PlayStation 4 and 5, and PC with upconverted graphics and gameplay tweaks. Priced at $49.99, Tactics Ogre: Reborn is relatively expensive for a port of a 12-year-old remake of a 27-year-old game, but it holds up as a timeless classic, much like Final Fantasy Tactics.

(Credit: Square Enix)

Strife in Valeria

Tactics Ogre: Reborn takes place on the war-torn continent of Valeria, where local and distant factions are vying for control. Battle rages everywhere, and refugees aligned with the Walister faction are escaping oppression by the Galgastani faction. You play as a refugee, Denam, who raises and leads an army that will determine Valeria's future.

If you’ve played Final Fantasy Tactics and this sounds familiar, remember that both games were designed by the same people, and that Tactics Ogre came first. Several beats are similar between the two games, but Tactics Ogre is a bit simpler and features fewer supernatural elements (though both games have plenty of magic users and monsters). It’s still a more subtle, pathos-laden story than most other RPGs from the same era. In addition, Tactics Ogre: Reborn has branching paths that are based on a few key decisions you make through the game, and they significantly change how events unfold (unlike Final Fantasy Tactics).

Turn-Based Action

Tactics Ogre: Reborn is a turn-based strategy-RPG that's presented in an isometric view. The game feels similar to the recent Fire Emblem titles, but with a Final Fantasy Tactics-like focus on individual unit abilities and skills.

Each unit’s turn includes being able to move a certain number of tiles based on their movement stats and using standard attacks, spells, and equipped items. You can also buff a unit or attempt to recruit an enemy unit. Each character can equip up to four active abilities or skills based on their current class, up to four passive skills that either provide constant benefits or randomly activate each turn, and up to four consumable items. Whatever your units can do, the enemy units can do, too.

(Credit: Square Enix)

Considering each unit’s abilities and stats is as important as maneuvering through the different battlefields. Plains, villages, mountains, and fortresses all feature terrain variation, including narrow alleys with rooftops that only flying characters can reach and rivers that slow movement. The first turn or two almost never sees action, as they involve jockeying units to the best positions.

Victory isn't certain, even if you’ve done everything you can to get the upper hand. As a strategy-RPG, Tactics Ogre: Reborn's combat is beholden to stats, and there’s always the chance of an attack being dodged, parried, or simply missing the target. There is also the nature of certain skills that activate and provide significant boons on random turns. Buff Cards that appear on the battlefield add to the combat's chaotic nature, and merge it with strategy. They give a unit improved physical or magical power, restore magic points, boost the chance to land a critical hit, or increase the probability of a skill activating in the next turn. Of course, Buff Cards don’t always appear near enemies, so you must decide if you want to strengthen your unit from a distance or move in for an attack (but leave the buff open for an enemy unit to snatch up).

(Credit: Square Enix)

Classic Gameplay With Contemporary Tweaks

Tactics Ogre: Reborn is a challenging game, and the difficulty ramps up the further you venture into the game as the units become more varied and powerful. Fortunately, you can rewind time in turn-by-turn fashion, so you can undo a big mistake without penalty.

Don’t plan to boost your units to steamroll the enemy by grinding levels. The game has level caps, and gaining experience points past those caps won’t strengthen your forces (but they give you experience charms that boost units later when the cap increases). The good news is that experience points are shared between every unit engaged in a battle, regardless of what they do. As a result, you can easily boost your lesser-used units just by having them stay in the background. It’s a big improvement from both Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics’ early iterations where experience points were doled out solely on a unit-by-unit basis, with every individual action.

Numerous gameplay improvements make playing Tactics Ogre: Reborn so much better than its earlier versions, though you might not notice the upgrades if you hadn’t previously played Tactics Ogre on the PlayStation or PSP. You can scout battlefields ahead of time to better plan out your squads, save five different squads at a time, and quickly switch between those squads before battles. New charm items let you tweak individual units’ elements and stats, offering more development options. Spells and projectiles that arc now show trajectory in blue and red lines before you fire them, letting you know if you’ll hit a teammate or the terrain instead of your target.

Tactics Ogre: Reborn takes a direct cue from Final Fantasy Tactics with units that become incapacitated instead of immediately dying when they run out of HP. Each turn, when the fallen units would have otherwise moved, a number counts down from three. The units only die after that third turn. Until that happens, you can bring them back with magic and items. It’s more forgiving than both the game's original version and all the Fire Emblem games’ “Classic” modes.

(Credit: Square Enix)

1995 Graphics Through a 2010 Lens in 2022

Tactics Ogre: Reborn looks good, but it’s definitely a product of its time, even with the upconversion to a high-definition resolution. The isometric landscapes are 3D, with fairly detailed textures despite still looking a bit pixelated. The 2D units look fine, but they take a bit of a hit against the environments' sharp-but-slightly-jagged textures due to a smoothing filter that rounds out the sprites' contours. They don’t look splotchy, but it would have been nice to have the option of the crisp original pixel sprites instead of the smoothing. Individual character portraits upscaled from the PSP version of the game look sharp, though.

A full playthrough of a single, branching story takes approximately 20 hours. After that, you can go back and redo your older decisions at a few key points to try the other paths, along with postgame content. The game lacks a multiplayer mode of any kind.

One of the All-Time Strategy Classics

Tactics Ogre: Reborn is a faithful, upgraded port of a genre-defining game that’s just as deep and satisfying to play as it was when it first came out in the 1990s. Its graphics don’t impress and there’s no multiplayer mode, but there are still dozens of hours of army-building and strategic planning to enjoy. Although $50 for a port of a decades-old game is a bit steep, Tactics Ogre stands alongside Final Fantasy Tactics as a defining title in the strategy-RPG genre, and any fan of this type of game should give it a shot.

For more, check out The Best Nintendo Switch Games. For more in-depth video game talk, visitPCMag's Pop-Off YouTube channel.