It's a game of such depth and scope that I always have questions about it. I know magic radius is mostly Men/Int threshhold plus terrain you're standing on, have not experimented to findout which terrain stats (the ground has stats) affect it.

But also, who should wear what armour? Since luct.tacticsogre.com only says that 'if its not a warrior class you may not want full body armour', well wtf? Should archers wear Balder robes? Should ninjas? Valkyries???? Fucked if I know.

Also I can't really figure out how to raise(or lower) Loyalty reliably. Leveling up your guys in real battles is meant to do it, but my knight Isetan keeps spamming the "I dont have the confidence to follow u........" message that displays at 5 Loyalty, every battle. That means his Loyalty is going up and then down every battle, why? What affects that? He even say this when I don't bring him?? Also the game has crashed on the Disaffection message a few times so that's unhelpful.

Friendly fire is really unpredictable, is it literally RNG? Sometimes it seems like archers or hawk men will make really tight shots past several allies densely packed, and sometimes it seems like they should cleanly arc their arrows over one buddy but thwap 70 damage. Is it height related??

Sometimes whenever I'm throwing rocks to powerlevel a new soldier or amazon in training, that unit will just lose health, appropos of nothing. Wtf is that about, does throwing rocks really hurt for 1/4 of your HP???

Why are the Tactics Ogre soundtracks not stored as Compact Disc Digital Audio? Like 99% of Playstation games have CDDA you can rip, but Tactics Ogre (on both PS1 and Saturn) seems to play its music in realtime with low-sampling-rate PCM samples, a la the Past tracks in Sonic CD. Literally why.

You're all gonna have to tolerate this Ogre posting until I find somewhere or someone to talk about TO with. Also if anyone has the Prima guide for the Playstation game please hit me up, cannot find a scan ❤

  • ashinadash [she/her]
    hexagon
    ·
    6 months ago

    IGN lt-dbyf-dubois wrote a First Look article about Tactics Ogre: Wheel of Fortune for PSP before its release, and in said they refer to that as the "first western release" of the game. This seems completely ridiculous initially, since Atlus is meant to have published the game on Playstation on May 6, 1998 but it makes sense if you think about it.

    Think about it: I am either extremely high off tramadol(somehow) and hallucinating or standing at the crossroads of two realities. It's simple: Tactics Ogre never actually released in English on the Playstation. There is less on the internet about Playstation/SuperFamicom/Saturn Tactics Ogre than the fan-translated Front Mission SFC, so this must be the case. The release did not happen.

    The ~16,300 copies the US release is meant to have sold was just the size of the cancelled print run Atlus was planning, the release never happened; the precious few period-reviews are all faked, the ISO image of the Playstation game is either a leaked prototype or has always been a fan translation by Aeon Genesis, the copies on Ebay are all reproductions from recent years, and the LUCT website is just a timestream aberration which comes to us from a different reality, or else an inexplicable English-language guide by someone who played the game in Japan. Further evidence for this obviously-correct-not-cooked-up-at-3am-theory is that confusingly, much of the english-language coverage of the ALLEGED Playstation version is from the year 2000, two years after the ALLEGED release date.

    OG Tactics Ogre is a ridiculously specific psyop some fed cooked up to annoy me. Bravo, CIA man, objectively better waste of your time than getting executed in China xi-clap

  • dumpster_dove [he/him]
    ·
    6 months ago

    I hate when games give descriptions that are too vague to plan around. Like the ARPG thing where they don't really tell the player what the mechanics are (is the increased damage % additive or multiplicative?) oh and you gotta level up for 10 hours before you can use the skill with the cool sounding but somewhat vague description, only to find out that it was really mediocre. Fuck you Torchlight 2

    I've only played the SNES Tactics Ogre: Let us Cling Together (what even is that title) and didn't find it as much fun as FF Tactics. Maybe I'm not enough of a hardcore strategy gamer.

    • ashinadash [she/her]
      hexagon
      ·
      6 months ago

      I hate that too, fwiw Tactics Ogre has a very detailed ingame infobook that explains things like what weather conditions affect which elemented caster's magic accuracy, terrain and height influence on attacks, it's pretty good. A lot of the stuff I'm asking is pretty nittygritty.

      I did see someone on sloptube describe Tactics Ogre as "unseasoned Final Fantasy Tactics", and FFT is way more popular so shrug-outta-hecks

    • ashinadash [she/her]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      6 months ago

      Also the title is, Idk the 'Tactics Ogre' part, it doesn't read that well, but Let Us Cling Together is a translated reference to the Queen song Teo Toriatte :)

      I actually think the subtitle game for this series fucks, like "March of the Black Queen" and "Person of Lordly Caliber" go hard.

  • D61 [any]
    ·
    6 months ago

    Friendly fire is really unpredictable, is it literally RNG? Sometimes it seems like archers or hawk men will make really tight shots past several allies densely packed, and sometimes it seems like they should cleanly arc their arrows over one buddy but thwap 70 damage. Is it height related??

    I have vague memories of trying to play a few version of Tactics Ogre, too involved for me to really stick with. I do however, remember terrain height played a factor in "unfriendly fire" incidents in the GBA Tactics Ogre game. Your ranged units will have a high chance of hitting any unit that is at a higher elevation between the shooter and their target than the actual chosen target. It wouldnt surprise me if that mechanic was kept through the other, later sequels.

    • ashinadash [she/her]
      hexagon
      ·
      6 months ago

      This is useful info to me! Let Us Cling Together came before the GBA Knight of Lodis, but I cannot imagine it doesn't use similar mechanics. Shooting more than one elevation level up is basically a crapshoot anyway. Ty!

  • SpiderFarmer [he/him]
    ·
    6 months ago

    Sounds cool. The music storage makes me think of Unreal Tournament and how it was also just a bunch of soundsamples played in realtime.

    • ashinadash [she/her]
      hexagon
      ·
      6 months ago

      Huh really? That's not uncommon on PC generally but for a 1998 windoze game I'd have expected CDDA, again...

  • Tom742 [they/them, any]
    ·
    6 months ago

    https://annas-archive.org/search?index=meta&page=1&q=9780761513308&sort=

    I’m not sure that there are online scans for the prima guide. The PSP ones are easily findable though.

    I distinctly remember that guide being extra terrible. Not on the level of the FFIX official guide, more you could tell the person writing the guide had a blast but no real clue what they were doing.

    • ashinadash [she/her]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      6 months ago

      Of course the PSP Brady guide is easily findable, PSP Ogre stuff is always easily findable! boohoo

      Tbf Ogre is an extremely dense game, the Prima guide also apparently sucks, lol.

    • ashinadash [she/her]
      hexagon
      ·
      6 months ago

      Never played Person of Lordly Caliber but given how good Tactics Ogre is I can't imagine it or March of the Black Queen aren't rad as well. Lordly Caliber used to be spoken of in hushed tones as one of the rare goats.

  • Thallo [love/loves]
    ·
    6 months ago

    I have no idea about the complexities of the systems, but keep posting because I love this game.

    Also, it's not unseasoned FFT. There's fewer customization options, but, in my opinion, this restriction leads to better decision making experiences and tighter (and more difficult) gameplay.

    FFT is really easy to break and be OP. Tactics ogre requires more if you want to break it.

    • ashinadash [she/her]
      hexagon
      ·
      6 months ago

      Yeah I haven't played FFT yet but I love Tactics Ogre too lol. Was fighting through the Wyoburi mountains and holy shit if archers have the high ground, everyone else may as well give up :D Also they're called "terrorknights" cause I shit myself when they do 180 damage lol

      I kinda like the idea of FFT not being a ballbuster, like FFT is small squad action and TO is larger scale, and FFT is easier and more customisable where TO is more restrictive and difficult. Sounds like a good pairing.

      • Thallo [love/loves]
        ·
        6 months ago

        The prerequisite for terror knight is so metal. Swordmasters are cool, too.

        And yeah, I love FFT. But, despite the fact that I grew up playing FFT and have nostalgia for it, and I didn't play TO until my 20's some time, TO still left a greater impact on me

        Also, FFT's story borrows very heavily from TO, so that makes it kind of weaker to me in retrospect.

        • ashinadash [she/her]
          hexagon
          ·
          6 months ago

          Okay can swordmasters not suck though??? I went thru all the fuss to get Harborym and brought him to Rime, man took like 140 damage from one crossbow bolt and almost died. He also couldn't do much more than 11 damage per hit to dragons of the same level. Mans's bad desolate

          Oh no that's gonna suck, maybe I shoulda played FFT first? I desire to enjoy "Animals have no god!" to the fullest...

          • Thallo [love/loves]
            ·
            6 months ago

            Hm, I don't remember the exact mechanics, but I feel like my swordmaster kicked ass. As I recall, their debuff/CC spells have a very high accuracy because of their high dex.

            FFT is still definitely worth playing. The story beats are very similar, but it could be argued the characterization is better.

            • ashinadash [she/her]
              hexagon
              ·
              6 months ago

              Petrify and Charm do go hard but I'm like, could I run a witch for those instead? Being made of glass doesn't go hard, also I manage to miss 70% chance Petrify spells kiryu-pain

              I'm lookin forward to it and Knight of Lodis and both Orge Battle games, Matsuno gang.