Tactics Ogre: Reborn

I'm probably 40+ hours into this... I leave it on and do other stuff so my in-game timer is crap.

Now, take this from someone with 3 tactical RPGs on his top 10 RPGs game... this just isn't that good. I hate to be the one to burst everyone's bubble, but if you ask "Should I play Tactics Ogre or Final Fantasy Tactics" it's not even close.

FFT has so much better quality of life _in the original version_ than this 2022 HD remaster. It really is basically just a remaster, there's a few changes I'm told, but not significant.

Compared to FFT you have: absolutely HORRIBLE inventory management (you can only see what you have by going to equip a character and THEN looking at what you have that goes in that slot), 3x as many classes which you might think is a pro except you can't do the cool thing like "My Ninja knows White Magic" (and you need to buy items to let you change into the class, if those items can even be bought; some are rare drops or plot-limited), and then there's the actual combat.

First, you have basically infinite rewinds (think like recent fire emblems where you can back up; there is a 20-turns-back counter that goes up as the game goes on) so on the one hand, you can MAKE it easy. But the difficulty is designed with this; so if you aren't going to min/max and rewind frequently to take a different approach, you're going to have multiple units on the ground every mission. Like FFT you have a 3-round countdown; I frequently found it easier to leave units down than pick them back up, especially because you can only revive if you're carrying in one of your 4 item slots per character, a revival item. I equip one on everyone at the start of the mission but save the other slots for heals and such. I would be OK with having to equip items to use them if the damage numbers were even remotely fair. Bosses can and will one-shot most of your party.

Unlike FFT, where AOE magic is available from pretty much the beginning and you can feel pretty smart about trying to lure the enemy into a setup for that sweet "cross" formation where you can hit 2-3 of them, you aren't getting AOE magic until halfway through this game. Oh and AOE heals? FORGET IT. The only class (through at least 75% of the game) that can equip AOE heals is the Cleric. You know what else the Cleric can do besides heal? Be the target of focus-fire. My Cleric spends 75% of his turns healing himself. Oh, and healing magic? It doesn't scale with your stats, at all. My melee characters have 800-900 HP and my only AOE heal can do 120ish in a size "2" (one square plus the 4 adjacent squares). Oh, and that's IF the cleric has MP. Because your units START WITH ZERO MP at the beginning of battle. Magic classes can learn an innate ability that has a % chance each turn of restoring a higher-than-normal amount of MP; else you're just getting like 10-12 MP naturally and you'll need 30 to cast that spell. Can't buy magic-restoring items either (you can get one that restores 10% max HP and 10% max MP, which is not NOTHING but that is your whole turn, so maybe you can cast next turn, if you're not dead).

I know, we can just grind somewhere, maybe we're underleveled? NOPE, there's a hard level cap that guarantees you won't outpace the plot missions, and all the non-plot battles are scaled to your level, so that plan is no good.

I really wanted to like this. I 100% RPGs frequently, sinking hundreds of hours into them. I might go do one more battle tonight, but tomorrow is the release for both Persona 5 Tactica and Super Mario RPG (2023) both of which look to be significantly better games.