Finally finished what is apparently the “Law” route.

I had a bad feeling! This is not the way!

I started out liking Tactics Ogre, but now I’m just glad it’s over. By the end of the game everything was tedious beyond belief. I finally got a few challenging story battles where I was supposed to wipe out all the enemies or where the enemy commander hung back like he was supposed to, but those were few and far between.

– Angelo had the personality of a wet sack of sand till the end. Except it’s not just him, everyone else in the game is wooden and stoic. Their motivations frequently make no sense. Catiua is shrill and crazy about her brother, but why? Evil Lanselot wants to conquer the world, but why? MC is going along with everything, but why? He doesn’t think about his family unless anyone reminds him. In Chapter 3 he finds out his father is still alive, but in Chapter 4 he’s more concerned with rescuing Good Lanselot. At some point someone mentioned his dad was there and his reaction was close to, “Who? My father? O-oh, right, that guy!”

– Anyone with a personality who joins your party will immediately lose any and all of it. During one battle Vyce piped up, “That guy killed my dad!” and I was like, “WTH, you’re still here?”

– The story is a rather trivial tale of continent liberation which is meant to be grand and interesting, but is instead bogged down by the flat, emotionless characters with their static portraits and highfalutin’ fancy speeches. Of course the few times Angelo tried to show emotion, I laughed so hard I nearly peed myself, so it’s just as well. Come to think of it, most SRPG stories boil down to one form of liberation or another, so maybe I shouldn’t come down too hard on TOLUCT for that. But they could at least have made it a little more interesting.

– Half the story is told through the Warren Report. Whatever happened to Show, Don’t Tell? I appreciate a bit of extra information but it’s far more interesting to let me discover things for myself as I play the game than to just tell me. And yet the WR still failed to explain to me exactly what all the factions are and what they represent. What’s Lodis? Where’s Xenobia? Where’d the Dark Knight organization come from?

– Ah, Square-Enix and their ridiculous “When we were kids we all played together but then you forgot but now you magically remember” plot twists.

– Ah, Square-Enix and their final bosses that come out of nowhere. Tactics Ogre is a little better in that there’s some foreshadowing done through flashbacks and the Warren Report, but if I hadn’t read the Warren Report it would have been like huh, what? Ogre? Huh? Btw, what did Martym and Barbas want to do with Dorgalua anyway?

– Every battle has you climbing up- or downhill. I know Japan is mountainous. I know it makes tactical sense. I also know it makes for boring one-pattern gameplay. In most battles the real enemy is the terrain, not the people on it.

– The class system making leveling up new classes a pain. Characters don’t level up in TOLUCT, classes do. If you get a new archer when your other archers are level 20, he’ll be level 20 automatically. But if you switch him to, say, dragoon, and you have no other dragoons, he’ll be level 1. And he’ll grow so slowly that after 10 battles or so, he’ll probably be only level 11. I’m saying this from experience, after trying to level up Hobyrim and Vyce, and after foolishly switching Angelo’s class to Lord near the end of the game. You spend 30 minutes in a battle with LV.22 mobs, finish it, and your LV.4 Lord goes up to LV.5. Rrrggghhh… And how come my level 12 Ranger gets more EXP than my level 7 Lord in the screenshot on the right?

– That final dungeon. I lost track of how many consecutive battles I had to fight, what a fricking pain.

– That ending. Well, I should have expected that I’d be assassinated after all the bad things I did…n’t even do. See, that’s why I wanted to do all the murdering and looting myself, but the game wouldn’t let me!

– Non-story battles near the end of the game take forever. It’s a shame because a lot of interesting-sounding sidequests opened up near the end, but each fight was taking upwards of 30 minutes each. I didn’t have that much patience left by Chapter 4.

– Speaking of chapters, were 4 really necessary? Quite a number of the battles in this game were filler battles against unimportant mooks that could have been taken out with ease. They could have done it in 3 short chapters; one to free Walister from the Galgastani, one to take over Galgastan and one to finally turn your claws on the Bakram and the Black Knights, which is what the story was about from the beginning.

– Too many items. I always groan when I have to use anything more than healing items in a battle.

– Too many worthless skills. You’ve only got 10 slots to spare. Every time I save up enough SP to learn something I have to scroll through a ton of dross to get to the few good ones. All the Resist, Augment, Attenuate, Damage and Recruitment skills could have and should have been pared down to one each for greater efficiency.

– Too many specialized skills. If you want to do proper damage you have to equip the right skill for it. Draconology for Dragons, Herpetology for reptiles, Anatomy for humans, etc.

– At the same time, the game doesn’t tell you which enemies you’ll be facing or how they’ll be placed until after you start the battle. If you get to the field and find it’s full of golems, your only choice is to retreat, reload or try to tough it out. Proper preparation is part of strategy too, Squeenix!

– Crafting in this game is, to put it nicely, a piece of crap. This isn’t Atelier Tactics, why do you have to start from scratch when you’re just modifying standard items? And why can’t you synthesize in bulk? Wouldn’t any sensible storekeeper just pre-make the ingots and sell them to you at premium? Why do you have to watch the little animation every single time? And what’s with the cheering audience, is making an iron ingot really that wonderful? And the whole point of having success rates so that they can be modified or improved with experience or with items. Here they can’t be changed, so obviously their only purpose to make you save and reload and save and reload just for kicks.

– When buying equipment I can’t tell whether one item is better than another or not. I can’t even know without memorizing or without leaving the store what my characters are currently wearing. I can’t tell whether the character I’m buying the armor for can even wear it or not. It’s like Tactical Guild all over again, except Tactical Guild didn’t pretend to be a good game.

– Crafting complicates things because while I can compare a Buckler to a Pelta shield, I have no way of telling whether a Buckler+1 shield is better than a Pelta or whether an Aspis+1 shield is better than a Tower Shield+1.

– You can’t equip certain items till you get to certain levels. When you buy, you’re told this upfront. When you craft, you’re on your own. You might spend 10 minutes improving your Wakizashi only to find that you can’t use it any more. The crafting system just sucks, period.

– The user interface relies too heavily on icons. It’s hard to figure out what does what at a glance.

– Etc, etc, etc.

I don’t usually come down this harshly on SRPGs. Even when the story and characters are lacking I still find a way to enjoy it (Tactics Layer, Tactical Guild, Jeanne d’Arc, Rondo of Swords, heck most SRPGS), and if the gameplay is that terrible I simply stop playing (Hoshigami Remix). Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together had the distinct position of being bad and yet not quite bad enough to give up. The music was okay, the sprites were cute even when they were killing each other, and the pace of battle was much faster than in other S-E offerings like FFT, TA and TA2. As a result I probably played more than I should have, and now I’m madder than I should be. I have only myself to blame.

Anyway, it’s over. I’m not going to spend even one more minute dwelling on it. On to the next game!

21:39 hours in and no end in sight. I just started Chapter 4, “Let Us Cling Together,” so that’s probably the last one. I’m tired.

I’m going to say this as gently as I can: This game is a massive joke.

After my last post, I got tired of killing all my enemies just to hear them scream and started aiming for the leader instead. I never noticed until I started gunning for them just how weak, incompetent and STUPID the leaders are.

Call me crazy, but if their death would mean an automatic loss for their side, wouldn’t any sensible leader try to hide or cower a bit to make my task harder? Or hang out at the back and let their troops wear my side down first? Or at the very least, if they had to come out fighting, shouldn’t they’d have higher defense and HP to make them harder to bump off?

None of these things happen. For knights and other fighting types it might make a liiiiittle bit of sense for them to move. But you’re a wizard. Or a cleric. Or a bowman. Why would you want to saunter down in front in Canopus singing “Hit me with your Rhythm Stick”?

Still, that makes the story move that much faster. I have no idea which path I’m going down, but Galgastan is no more now, so I must be doing something right. Only the strong survive. The choices in this game are kinda weird: they all look the same but produce very different results. For example I conquered this castle place and they asked me if I thought they were enemies. Choice A: “Of course not.” Choice B: “How could you be?” Hang on, what’s the difference? They’re almost the same thing. But I chose A, went on my way, and next thing I knew the guy in the castle had committed suicide. Wait, what? But I just said you weren’t– Sheesh.

By the way, even at this late point of the game, my MC (default name Denam, but renamed ‘Angelo’ to suit his pansy nature) STILL has no policy or ideology of his own. He just parrots what others tell him or reacts to what others say, but from the start he never had a clear vision of what he wanted to achieve. And he probably doesn’t have the faintest idea of how to rule a country. Which is fine enough since there are almost no peasants to rule anywhere. The only people you ever get to see are your allies and your enemies, and the occasional dead body when a town is torched, so I don’t even know who I’m doing all this for. Until an enemy mentioned him, Angelo had even forgotten all about his dad he was supposed to be getting revenge for. Sheesh.

For all that, I’m still enjoying mowing down troops with my party and staying alive against fields of dragons. The random battles and sidequests are the best part of the game IMHO. I should be done fairly soon, and then I can decide whether to try and get another ending or to just call it a day.

On a final, happy note, my sister Catiua has parted ways with my company to become the princess of another country. I wish her all the best in her future endeavors. If I get the chance to face her in battle I will not immediately shoot her in the face. I will let a few turns pass first.

Ah, I love a good SRPG. Heck, I even love a bad one, but Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together is definitely one of the good ones. It can cling to me any day!

Beyond “it’s good,” though, there’s not much to say about it. It doesn’t do anything too different from other games in the genre, and it looks, feels and plays a lot like the original Final Fantasy Tactics. So it’s fun, but not particularly world-changing. And that’s just fine with me.

I’ve played for 14 hours, a few battles into Chapter 3. It is really easy so far, but then again I thought FFT was easy too, until I met Wiegraf and he… he… *snf* N-no, it’s okay. I’m over that now. It…it’s all in the past.

So maybe the real battles are yet to come, and maybe TOLUCT has some funky special battle mechanics I haven’t explored yet because I haven’t been forced to. Otherwise the only really “new” thing about it is that you can learn magic by using scrolls in battle. And that when enemies die and drop loot, other enemies can take them instead. I used to try and scurry ahead and grab them for myself, but now it doesn’t matter. I’m going to kill them anyway, they might as well have one last moment of pleasure.

I’m used to doing sick amounts of damage with mages, so I’m a little bummed at how useless they are here. Archers are easily the most useful class in this game, as was also the case in Jeanne d’Arc, Stella Deus and Path of Radiance to name a few, so it must be an SRPG thing. I’ve got three of them, Canopus, Sara and Asha, and I never leave home without them. In fact, my other units just get in the way, because most of the time they don’t even get to see any action.

Battle starts, C S and A smack everything within reach while heading for higher ground, supported by the rest of the troops. If I already occupy higher ground, I just wait for the enemies to come in range and smack them to the ground. Once they get a hit or two in, they’re able to fire critical hits with a skill called Tremendous Shot, which usually OHKOs enemy wizards, clerics and bowmen and does serious damage to everything except monsters. I hate monsters. I went into a random battle in the woods with nothing but dragons in it, and I just turned around and backed away slooowly.

Random battles are where the real challenge is at, seriously. In the story, most battles can be ended early by vanquishing your objective. If your Victory Condition is “Vanquish Wynoa”, you can end the battle in a turn or two by marching straight up to her and shooting her in the face. On the (very) few occasions that I have dutifully obliged them, I seem (?) to have gotten the same EXP I would have earned otherwise, so this is probably the “ideal” way to play the game. In fact the game is keeping a running tally of all the people I’ve killed and where they came from, so my Kill Everything approach might just come bite me in the gluteus maximus one of these days. Heh, bring it on.

So in short, fighting is so straightforward I haven’t had to bring out my full power yet. There’s things like Recruitment where you can get enemies to join your side, and a “Chariot” system where you can rewind turns (basically cheating. No true SRPG fan would ever touch such a thing), but when the game is this simple, what’s the point?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining at all. I like a good easy game, and if a game comes pre-broken like TOLUCT does, all the better. It’s just that it makes all other features of the game next to useless because you don’t need them to survive. Storyline-wise my resistance is allegedly at a major disadvantage, but you’d never know it by the way I crush my enemies and ravish their womenfolk.

Come to think of it, maybe the game is that easy because Square-Enix wants you to focus on the story instead. Well, if that’s the case then that’s too bad, because the story is the part I’m enjoying the least. First off, I don’t like intricate political intrigue storylines to begin with. The game starts out with so many different terms and factions it just makes my head spin. There’s these kids, and these knights torch their village, so instead of getting revenge on those knights, they start fighting this other kingdom, and at some point they even toady up to the same village-toasting baddies, and then to get back at the other kingdom who didn’t burn their village, they burn another village and…Huh?

Secondly, I don’t like the language. It’s a little too “I spent a lot of money on this English major dammit, and I’m going to prove it!” It does a good job of setting the mood, if the mood you’re looking for is Washed Up Shakespearan Actor. Thirdly, and this is really petty, I don’t like the uppercase font they use. All-Caps flies in the face of every readability guide known to man. In short, the story’s hard to follow, hard to understand and hard to read. It’s only now in Chapter 3 that I’m kiiiiiinda getting an idea of who all the different factions represent and who belongs to what, where, why. Kiiiiinda.

Worse than the story, though, is the main character. He hasn’t made a single real decision in the whole game. He’s always just going along with someone else’s plan, whether it’s Vyce’s or the Duke’s or Leonar’s, he doesn’t have a single original idea. Then to make things even more pathetic, he manages to convince himself and tries to convince others that he thinks it’s a good idea and it’s what he would have done anyway, even though he knows, and we know, that whatever it is is a stupid plan. He’s like the middle manager that gets all his ideas from the higher ups then tries to pass them off as his own. Dude we know you’re just a lackey, so do us a favor cut the BS.

… All right fine, you got me. That’s not what I’m really mad about at all. A little self-delusion never hurt anyone, anyway. And I’m sure the rest of the game will be about him growing a pair and learning to take charge of his own destiny. No, what’s really getting my goat is that I haven’t been allowed to actually carry out any of those tremendously bad ideas myself.

For example, I choose a massacre at the end of Chapter 1 just for poops and giggles. Imagine my shock when I was denied the chance to slaughter civilians myself and instead forced to watch it in a cutscene. And then I got blamed for it anyway! All the pain and none of the enjoyment, WTH? Again there was an assassination plot in Chapter 2 and again I had to watch, even though I was itching to do it myself. Tch. “There is Blood on my Hands” my bottom, this is a scam! I long for a character like Serdic in Rondo of Swords Path B, who can do the nasty deed himself and then go on to say, “Yeah I killed her, so what?” Massive props. Too bad they softened him up after a bit, I was loving that Cold Emperor gimmick.

Aaaaaannyyyywaaaaaaay. The game isn’t over yet. Still plenty of time to commit more atrocities and make more bad decisions. I hear there are 3 different routes in this game, so depending on how things go, I might play the game again and take the road not taken. Good game so far, though.