Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis first impressions & yapping
Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis first impressions & yapping
Cannot sleep to save myself so-
WHAT'S UP EVERYBODY, Wii U gang here again 
I put some mGBA on my Wii U so I could try Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis on it. If you haven't read my Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together post, go make a meal and spend a few hours, y'know just for context. Lmao.
Easily the single biggest disappointment with the game is the Disappearance of Wait Turn. WT is easily one of the coolest things about Ogre Tactics and the rolling turn order is super fucking awesome, hardcore as shit, it's punches you gotta roll with but you can also influence it. Knight of Lodis just kinda gives up... it has Fire Emblem style PLAYERPHASE/ENEMYPHASE alternating turns where you can move any unit in whatever order. This is lame but not a dealbreaker.
The UI and interactions/controls have also been necessarily crunched in the move from Super Famicom to GBA. Some of it is beneficial, like just A/B is easier than the original game's mix of A to select and B/X to cancel... but also movement is a little clunky now, and you cannot attack then move, only move then attack.
Surprisingly enough though basically everything else has been retained. It's still the same type of turn-based tactical, unit-positioning-critical, height-advantage-heavy, physics-inflected battles from Let Us Cling Together, with none of the ugly messy changes the remakes made. The four "freely customisable" equip slots are still there, so you can load down a unit with whatever, hawkmen are still beloved, you can still do automated Training to assuage any grinding, there are "emblems" in place of the later Classmarks, but not all classes require them so there is still some degree of free switching. There is an entirely new set of magic but it works more like LUCT than the remakes' magic. It is cast in a very similar mold to LUCT.
The game is gorgeous; it reuses some assets from (the village houses) and has similar looking sprites to the Super Famicom game, (comically the main guy's overworld/combat sprite looks like Dark Knight Lans) but the 240×160 resolution hasn't caused any damage to Quest's superb sense of visual design. All the art is beautiful, the character sprites still have exactly as much animation and expression complexity as in Let Us Cling Together, and the cutscenes are pretty much on par. It's technically very close to LUCT.
That also (I guess) means it kinda runs like shit; I think Quest Corp was not very good at coding (or bug testing? optimisation?) because it seems like most of their games have bugs or technical problems. Knight of Lodis mostly has obnoxiously long 'CPU IS THINKING...' wait hangs before enemy movement, and animations that refresh at inconsistent speeds. Not very performant.
The story also isn't up to much: it's kinda like the Korean War if Worst Korea hated the US. You play as a USMC recruit (Knight of Lodis) sent to the island of Ovis, long an imperial Lodis "protectorate", to "peace-keep" in a brewing conflict where the northern half of the island (sovereign, indepentent, ostensibly bad) seems to be agitating and skirmishing. Allegedly. I wonder how long it will take the protagonist to merc his commanding officer. The writing is a bit more obvious than LUCT but oh well honestly.
I was really incredibly buttmad at almost every gameplay change they made to Wheel of Fortune and Reborn, but that's mostly because they were mucking around with an objectively perfect and completely flawless game. When it comes to a different game though, I think it's fine to play with the mechanice somewhat. While the omission of Wait Turn sucks, I'm honestly pretty pleased with how much of LUCT is retained within The Knight of Lodis. Given the limitations of the GBA, it's a pretty darn good rendition. Kinda cute. Playing Ogre makes me happy as fuck, I was getting my ass beat by the enemy's archers and having to fight my way uphill and levelling my lil dudes up a bunch, oh man I just fuckin love Tactics Ogre so much. How wonderful of Yasumi Matsuno and the game to make two of them!!! Literal Tactics Ogre 2: The Pre-Squeakwuel!!!!!
Sorry Thracia 776, you got mogged by Ogre Tactics' little bro. Next time, promise.
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What do you recommend between the original and Reborn? What does Reborn do differently?
So much is different in Reborn.
Aside from the massive presentational overhaul and script rewrite/expansion, (which are pretty good and very faithful to the original) Reborn has more fixed classes that are harder to swap between, with classmarks required for switching, equipment has been changed to two hand slots, a body slot, a gear slot and a head slot, more forgiving permadeath, there's no training battles anymore, there's a level cap, recruitment is now really annoying, there are Skills characters need to learn like in FF Tactics which can include recruitment, counterattacks, finishers and more. All of the magic has been torn out and replaced, damage calculation is different, blocking/guarding/accuracy is different, arrow trajectory is different, magic range and trajectory is way different, movement values are different, all the gear is new, all the items are new, classes have been totally revised, they basically took the entire guts out of the original Tactics Ogre and built an entirely different, more FFT-like game in its stead.
It's not awful, and Reborn in particular makes some choice cuts that make it objectively superior to the PSP Wheel of Fortune version, but both remakes narrow Tactics Ogre into a more standard game, even for adding so much to it. Tactics Ogre, the original, is a shockingly free-form and varied game, especially given the hardware it's on, and the class experimentation and cool stuff you can do is so cool and the remakes are just like "nah. what if it was Final Fantasy Tictacs tho"
I've been half-cooking a post about all this but Idk. Tactics Ogre LUCT, The Original, can be a viciously difficult and hard to approach game but it's also fun and a great challenge for anyone with even moderate tactics game experience tbh. My beloved.
Aah, well, that sucks... it's not really a remaster then or even a remake, it's more of a reimagining. I doubt I have the patience to play through the original as it was envisioned back then though lol, I can get why they simplified it for the new generation of gamers.
Pretty much, it follows the broad framework but the game plays way different.
Removing training battles is probably the most destructive change, I got literally stonewalled in Chapter 2 on PSP cause my guys sucked too much.
Also the PSP version complicated things DRAMATICALLY by introducing like five times the gear and about 200 skills per unit or something, it's absurd and sucks. It's such a mess that it's actually MORE complex than the original, the amount of time spent micromanaging in menus is tripled basically.